Pam Brown

Born in Victoria, growing up mainly in Queensland, Pam Brown has lived in Sydney since 1968. She has made her living variously and has taught writing, multi-media studies and filmmaking. Until 2007 she spent sixteen years engaging in the pleasures of classification as an employee in the life sciences library at the University of Sydney. She has been a poetry editor for various publications and is currently associate editor for Jacket2 magazine. Since 1971, Pam Brown has published fourteen books and four chapbooks of poetry and prose, including This World. This Place, 50-50, Text thing and most recently Dear Deliria, which won the 2004 NSW Premier s Award for Poetry. She has also written reviews, articles, film scripts and performance texts. Brown was the poetry editor of the national literary quarterly Overland magazine from 1997 to 2002. She is currently a contributing editor for the US-based literary annual Fulcrum and the online journal HOW. She has been a guest of the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie in Paris, France and the Berlin International Literature Festival in Germany. In 2003 she lived for six months in the Australia Council poets flat in Rome, Italy. During that time she was also a guest at the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona in Spain. Pam Brown s work reads like a particle map, a range of trajectories arcing off into open space, determining that space through movement, velocity and the inertia created, at times shocking associated bodies (poetic, politic, cultural, critical) into action and reaction. Her voice has maintained a consistent edge and vitality, and perhaps peculiarly enough for one often at odds with the lyric, or at least the lyrical, it has remained her voice. There is a distinctive intimacy to Brown s work; a familiar persona at play, not just tinkering with the engine of language but opening the throttle and reving it with glee, skill and a wry look at the road – language, poetry – ahead and behind ( those aft