Terry Jaensch

About Terry Jaensch

Terry Jaensch is an Australian poet/actor and monologist. His first book, Buoy, was published in 2001 (FIP) and shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award by the Fellowship of Australian Writers. He has worked as Writer-in-Community, Poetry Editor (Cordite) Artist-in-Residence, Dramaturge, Artistic Director of the 2005 Emerging Writers’ Festival, poetry teacher and in a variety of arts/community and local government programming positions. In 2004 he wrote and recorded 15 monologues based on his childhood in a Ballarat orphanage for ‘Life Matters’ ABC Radio – since reworked and performed for theatre as ‘Orphan’s Own Project’. He was awarded an Asialink residency in Singapore where he worked collaboratively with poet Cyril Wong. The resulting work, Excess Baggage & Claim (transitlounge publishing), was launched in 2007. He has won awards including the Melbourne Poet’s Union International Poetry Prize, the Victorian Writers’ Centre Poetry Slam and was on the winning team of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival Poetry Slam. His work has been anthologized, most recently in Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann) and published in journals nationally and in the US, Germany, Japan, Singapore and India. His poems have been translated into Bengali and interpreted through classical Indian dance. He has a background in acting, having studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio and Stella Adler conservatory in New York.