Rebecca Hawkes is a poet and painter from Aotearoa.
Rebecca holds a Masters' in nonfiction creative writing with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters. Since then she has exclusively written poetry, which is splashed lacross the pages of NZ journals. Rebecca's first chapbook of poems launched in 2019 in the reignition of the AUP New Poets series. She edits the poetry journal Sweet Mammalian and is currently co-editing an anthology of poetry on climate change to be published by Auckland University Press.
An unschooled visual artist, Rebecca primarily paints in oils and has also experimented across media to craft polymer clay sculptures, digital illustration, tiny zines, and 8-foot murals. Her visual artwork reflects the terrible beauty of the natural world; monstrosities, mythic symbolism and the occult; sumptuous banquets with grim memento mori elements; and feminine queerness. The sublimity and discomfort of bodies and ecosystems in the anthropocene also emerges in her poetry as a writer of flesh industries, human beastliness, and adorable weeds.
Raised on a Canterbury high-country sheep and beef farm, she now lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington. She is a founding member of popstar poets' posse Show Ponies and has performed poems in a range of venues from dog parks to defunct bowling greens, on cliff edges and at literary festivals, in underground bars and striding on stage with a smoke machine and hot pink spotlight.