Rebecca Hawkes is a poet and painter.
Raised on a Mid-Canterbury sheep and beef farm, Rebecca found her city-home in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington. She is a founding member of popstar poets' posse Show Ponies and an organiser/emcee of lively poetry events like the Pegasus Books Poetry Reading series. Rebecca holds a Master of Arts in nonfiction creative writing with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and an MFA in poetry from the Helen Zell Writers' Program.
Rebecca's first book, Meat Lovers, was released by AUP in 2022, winning Best International First Collection in the Laurel Prize (the UK Poet Laureate's ecopoetry award) and shortlisted in the US for the 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 has edited the poetry journal Sweet Mammalian with Nikki-Lee Birdsey since 2019. 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.
A self-trained visual artist, Rebecca mostly paints in oils. She has played across varied media - with 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 singular bodies and intertwined ecosystems in the anthropocene also emerge in her poetry as a writer of flesh industries, human beastliness, and adorable weeds.
In life outside of art, she spoils her carnivorous nepenthes pitcher plants and pays tribute to her geologist parents with a glittering mineral collection, wading through Canterbury's braided rivers in search of agates.
Selected Awards & Fellowships
2025
Academy of American Poets Award (1st)
Hopwood Award: Graduate Poetry (2nd)
Alice James Award (Finalist for FALSE SPRING)
Green Linden Chapbook Contest (Finalist for HIDE)
2024
Sappho Prize (Palette Poetry, 1st for Phyllodes Reveries)
Vinyl45 Chapbook Contest (YesYes Books, 2nd for FULL BUSH)
Rackham International Research Award (University of Michigan)
Best New Zealand Poems
Gigantic Sequins Prize (Finalist)
2023
Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry (Finalist)
Best Professional Artwork, Sir Julius Vogel Awards, SFFANZ (1st)
2022
Fulbright Graduate Award
Best First International Collection: The Laurel Prize (UK) 2022
Spirit of Service Award for Māori-Crown Relations, Public Service Commission
2021
Philip Booth Poetry Prize (Salt Hill, 1st)
Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award (Finalist)
Newsroom/Surrey Writer’s Residency
Poetry NZ Yearbook Prize (2nd)
2020 and earlier
National Young Writers’ Festival Writer in Residence, Robert Lord Cottage, 2020
Ema Saiko Poetry Fellowship, NZ Pacific Studios, 2019
Verb/Starling Writers’ Residency with City Gallery Wellington, 2018
Summer Research Scholarship, VUW, 2017
Victoria Master’s Scholarship, VUW, 2016
Top Scholar in Painting, NZQA, 2013