Selina Tusitala Marsh is an award-winning poet and champion of Pasifika literature.
Selina Tusitala Marsh is an award-winning poet and champion of Pasifika literature.
Selina Tusitala MarshPoet1971
Award-winning poet and champion of Pasifika literature
In 2004, Selina Tusitala Marsh – of Samoan, Tuvaluan, Scottish and French ancestry – became the first person of Pacific descent to graduate with a PhD in English from the University of Auckland. In her doctoral thesis, Marshfocused on five Pacific women writers and argued that in post-colonial societies, literature was an important way that Pacific women and children found their voices and empowerment.
She described these women as "remarkable boundary breakers" – a description that could be applied to Marsh. Now lecturing at Auckland University, specialising in Māori and Pacific literary studies, Marsh last year became New Zealand's 11th poet laureate, charged with the task of promoting poetry everywhere.
She had a strong start on that even before being named poet laureate. In 2012, March represented Tuvalu in the Poetry Olympics, held during the London Olympic and Paralympic Games; in 2015, she attended the Australia and New Zealand Literary Festival in London where she won an amusing Literary Death Match for poets. She was dubbed Commonwealth Poet 2016 and commissioned to write and perform a poem before the Queen at the Commonwealth Day Observance in Westminster Abbey.
While Marsh is a strong advocate for spoken-word poetry, she is also an accomplished writer whose poems have been published in anthologies and literary journals – both print and online – while her books have been enthusiastically received.
Her first collection, Fast Talking PI, won the 2010 New Zealand Society of Authors Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for poetry, the Best First Book Award at the NZ Book Awards and made the bestsellers list. Three years later, Marsh released Dark Sparring, which, once again, was enthusiastically reviewed and received. As well as serving as poet laureate, she is now writing a book about "first-wave" (1974-2008) Pacific women poets.
