Hazel Smith (Writer/performer)

A terrific new piece by Torbjörn Hultmark(2022) Listening, can be viewed and heard here. It uses elements of five poems from Ecliptical, and receives a briliant musical and theatrical performance by Emily Hultmark (bassoon), recorded in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Hazel Smith's full CV, including her publication list is here . Many of her works (intermedia, multimedia, text performance, and violin performance) are available in the HearSeeRead section of this site (in addition to their availability via the original publication links given here). 

Hazel is active in the areas of poetry, performance and new media. Her work has appeared in numerous international literary magazines and in literary, musical and multimedia anthologies. She has published five volumes of poetry: Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90, Butterfly Books, 1991; Keys Round her Tongue: short prose, poetry and performance texts Soma, 2000; The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, 2008 (accompanied by a CD-Rom of new media and performance works with Roger Dean);  Word Migrants, Giramondo Publishing, 2016,; and ecliptical, Spineless Wonders, 2022. An electronic chapbook of poems, Learning to be Human, was published by SOd Press in 2020.

Word Migrants, Giramondo, 2016, Cover illustration by Sieglinde Karl-Spence.

Hazel is interviewed on Word Migrants and related topics by Magdalena Ball in her excellent Listen Notes podcast series on literary matters

Hazel has also, with Roger Dean, made three CDs of her performance work, Poet Without Language, Rufus Records 1994; Nuraghic Echoes, Rufus Records, 1996 and Returning the Angles, Soma Recording and Publishing 2001. She has collaborated with Roger Dean on many ABC radio commissions including Poet Without Language, 1991, Nuraghic Echoes, 1994, Returning the Angles, 1998, The Erotics of Gossip, 2001 for The Listening Room, and The Afterlives of Betsy Scott, 2007, for Airplay. Other performance collaborations, such as the writer the performer the program the madwoman 2004, the space of history (with Greg White) 2006, Mid-Air Conversations 2006, Minimal 2007, Speak Far and Wide 2009, Speaking Straight 2010, Ubasuteyama 2010, Hanging Betsy 2010, Toy Language 1 and 2 (written for the vocal ensemble Halcyon), Snowtalking 2011, Live Music, Dead Bodies 2012, Disappearing(with Greg White) 2013, Bird Migrants (an ABC commission in 2014) and and Scaling the Voices, 2016, are showcased on many poetics websites such as PennSound (US), and in internet journals. One of her collaborations with Roger Dean, Poet without Language, was nominated by the ABC for the Prix Italia in 1992. 

Hazel is co-author with Roger Dean of numerous new media works, such as Wordstuffs: the city and the body, 1998, Intertwingling, 1999, the egg the cart the horse the chicken 2004, soundAFFECTs 2003 (with Anne Brewster), Time the Magician 2007, Prosethetic Memories (with Anne Brewster) 2009, Instabilities 2 2009, Clay Conversations with Joanna Still 2010,  Film of Sound (with Will Luers) 2013, motions (with Will Luers and Roger Dean) published in the Electronic Literature Organisation Collection 3, the international reference series for the field, and novelling with Will Luers and Roger Dean 2016. In 2017-8, she collaborated with Dean on The Character Thinks Ahead and in 2019 on The Lips are Different. Her latest intermedia collaboration is Dolphins in the Reservoir (2022) with Will Luers and Roger Dean, which was short-listed for the international 2023 New Media Writing Prize.

Hazel has also collaborated on several occasions with visual artist Sieglinde Karl-Spence and their joint work has been exhibited in many art galleries in Australia and overseas. Documentation of their collaborations TranceFIGUREd Spirit and Secret Places is available on Sieglinde Karl-Spence's website. Secret Places (hear at the top of this page), was originally published in the journal How2. Their most recent collaboration is Heimlich Unheimlich, currently featured on the homepage of this website. This was exhibited in 2020 at the Broadhurst Gallery, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre (Sydney, NSW) and was shown again in May 2021 at the Edith Cowan University Gallery 25 (Perth, Western Australia). It was shown in regional Queensland, at the Dogwood Arts Centre, Miles, Feb-March 2023. Its video, included in the installation can be viewed on this website within HearSeeRead and was featured in un(continuity): the Electronic Literature Organisation’s 2020 Virtual Exhibition.

In 2018 Hazel wrote a poetic voice-track for a short fim by Ettore Siracusa, Hem of Memory which was exhibited at the Museo Italiano in Melbourne and is available here.

Hazel has performed her own work extensively nationally and internationally in Europe, USA and Australasia. Her work has been chosen for display at international festivals and exhibitions such as File in Brazil; the Electronic Literature Organisation in Portugal, Canada and Norway; Rutgers University; The Kitchen New York; the Salts Gallery in Switzerland; and the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol. Hazel has been co-recipient of numerous grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, The Australian Film Commission and Arts Tasmania, including a Digital and New Media Writing Grant from the Australia Council in 2012. In  2018, her collaboration novelling, with Will Luers and Roger Dean, was shortlisted for the 2017 Turn On Literature prize. In 2018 novelling received the Electronic Literature Organisation’s annual international prize for a new work of electronic literature, The Robert Coover Award.

From 2007-2017 Hazel was a Research Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University, where she is now an Emeritus Professor. From 2002-2007 she was a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra, and a member of the Sonic Communications Research Group. Before that she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales where she founded the Creative Writing program. She is author of The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: intermedia, voice, technology,cross-cultural exchange, Routledge, 2016, The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, 2005 (now published by Routledge), which was shortlisted for the Australian Publishing Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing, and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000. She is co-author, with Roger Dean, of Improvisation, Hypermedia And The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997 (now also published by Routledge). She is also co-editor with Roger Dean of Practice-led Research/Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2009.