Rebecca Hawkes is a poet and painter.
Rebecca's first chapbook of poems Softcore coldsores launched in 2019 in the reignition of the AUP New Poets series. Her debut collection, Meat Lovers, is due from AUP in 2022.
She edits the poetry journal Sweet Mammalian with Nikki-Lee Birdsey, and is has co-edited an anthology of poetry on climate change, No Other Place To Stand, which will be published by Auckland University Press later in 2022.
Raised on a Mid-Canterbury sheep and beef farm, Rebecca now lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington. She is a founding member of popstar poets' posse Show Ponies and holds a Masters' in nonfiction creative writing with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters.
An unschooled visual artist, Rebecca mostly paints in oils. She has played across varied media to craft polymer clay sculptures, digital illustration, tiny zines, and looming murals. Her visual artwork reflects the terrible beauty of the natural world, monstrosities and the occult, sumptuous banquets and feminine queerness. The sublimities and discomforts of bodies and ecosystems in the anthropocene also emerge in her poetry as a writer of flesh industries, human beastliness, and adorable weeds.
She spoils her nepenthes pitcher plants and won the 2021 Philip Booth Poetry Prize with a gory ode to their gluttony.