CONTRIBUTORS

Duc Dau

Duc Dau is an award-winning writer and scholar from Boorloo (Perth). Recipient of the 2026 Jan Dean Members Prize of the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the 2025 Annette Cameron Award for an unpublished poet in WA, she has been shortlisted for the Dark Poets Prize (2026), Robert Gray (2026), Tom Collins (2025), and Poetry d’Amour (2025) poetry prizes, and received an honourable mention in the 2026 Clarion Poetry Prize. Duc has poems published in Island Online, Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2026, TEXT, Mascara Literary Review, and elsewhere. An Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at The University of Western Australia, her latest academic book is Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs (2024), while the topic of her PhD and first book is religious eroticism in Gerard Manley Hopkins. She also works in the research and evaluation team of an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation and has a long history in bi+/queer activism, community building, and research.

‘I am writing a lot of love poems’: Poetry and queer pleasure activism

After I won a poetry prize this year, a friend asked me how much prize money I would be receiving. Her response to my answer was, “That’s worth four vibrators!” My reply: “It’s more like three if we’re talking top-of-the-range Womanizers.” In this essay, I want to talk about queer activism (though only a little about orgasms and vibrators). Specifically, using myself as case study, I focus on pleasures, both sexual and non-sexual, that queer people have had to fight for.

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