Rebecca Hawkes is a poet and painter.
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.
Rebecca's debut book, Meat Lovers, was released by AUP in 2022, winning Best international First Collection in the UK Poet Laureate's ecopoetry award - the Laurel Prize - and shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award for bisexual poetry. Her chapbooks include Softcore coldsores, featured in the reignition of the AUP New Poets series, and Hardcore Pastorals published in 2021 by Cordite.
Rebecca edits the poetry journal Sweet Mammalian with Nikki-Lee Birdsey. She co-edited an anthology of poetry on climate change from Aotearoa and the Pacific, No Other Place To Stand, published by Auckland University Press in 2022.
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 Salt Hill's 2021 Philip Booth Poetry Prize with a gory ode to their gluttony.