Alicia Sometimes
Alicia Sometimes is a poet, director and broadcaster.
Alicia has had her poetry published in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems, Westerly, Southerly, Meanjin, The Age, The Australian, The Griffith Review, Overland, ABR, The Big Issue etc. She has performed her spoken word at many venues, festivals and events around the world—including the Melbourne and Sydney Writers’ Festivals, Auckland Readers and Writers Festival, Quantum Words Festival (Sydney and Perth), Big Day Out (Melbourne), Festival Voix d'Amériques (Canada), Ubud Writers Festival (Indonesia), Queensland Poetry Festival, National Young Writers Festival, Next Wave Festival, Bloomsbury Festival (UK), the ANZ Festival (UK) and Tasmanian Poetry Festival. Alicia has produced and toured spoken word shows to the UK, Canada, India and New Zealand.
She is director and co-writer of the science-poetry planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave. Particle/Wave had sell-out shows as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, World Science Festival Brisbane and toured in 2019 and early 2020 (National Science Week in Adelaide, Melbourne and Wollongong and New Scientist Live in the UK and The Dome Festival in Tokyo). For Particle/Wave she spoke with many scientists at CERN (Geneva), OzGrav and CoEPP and conducted research with many more in the field of gravitational wave astronomy. She has combined poetry, music and video to take poetry to larger audience in many site-specific works.
She is a regular guest on ABC 774 and Radio National talking arts and culture and has produced creative segments for JJJ, RN, 774 and RRR. She was a member of the Breakfasters (3RRR) in 2015 and her spoken word and arts show, Aural Text ran on 3RRR for 13 years. She has appeared in ABC TV's Sunday Arts with a month-long poetry residency and ABC News Breakfast talking about books and writing. In 2020 she won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize.
In 2020 her story ‘The Pool’ featured in Camilla Hannan’s Oz Gothic series on Radio National. For Radio National’s Soundproof, she co-produced ‘Chaos to Calm’ creatively interrogating scientific processes. She also created an audio documentary on dark matter for Radio National’s Science Friction featuring many of her poems: ‘How do you solve a problem like Dark Matter?’; and in 2022 year made two poetic-documentaries for Science Friction: ‘What came before the Big Bang?’ and ‘The End of the Universe’. Alicia was a guest speaker at Deakin University’s ‘Art, visualisation and the cosmos in education’ symposium in 2019.
Alicia organized many literary events at festivals such as The Big Day Out and the Melbourne and Sydney Writers Festivals. She has been awarded residencies at Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre, Varuna and the Melbourne Aquarium. She was a 2014 Fellow at the State Library of Victoria and was director of Capital: The Beginning of the Word. In 2021 she completed the Boyd Garret residency for the City of Melbourne and a Virtual Writer in Residency for Manchester City of Literature and Manchester Literature Festival.
Alicia has two poetry collections, kissing the curve and Soundtrack. She has had poetry commissioned by the Melbourne Museum, SBS online and the Art Gallery of Victoria and upcoming work for Science Gallery Melbourne. She is currently a Science Gallery Melbourne ‘Leonardo’ (creative advisor). Alicia gave a TEDx UQ talk in National Science Week 2019 about the importance of combining science and poetry.