Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon

Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon is from Walyalup/Fremantle and spent over a decade living and working in the US, where she gave birth to her son, inspiring her recent collection on motherhood in the wake of the Trump presidency, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears (Life Before Man/Gazebo Books). Her writing has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, Australian Book Review and alongside the US poet laureate Ada Limón in the anthology, Dear Human. She has won the Bruce Dawe and KSP Poetry Prizes; and has been shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection First Blood was released in 2019 with the title poem appearing in Red Room Poetry’s In Your Hands. In 2024 she completed a Creative Writing PhD on erasure poetry and the forgotten histories of Croatian Australians. Through her work she explores the construction and deconstruction of form, writing in erasure, free-verse and formal styles.