Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon is an award-winning poet and singer-songwriter who was raised on a farm by her Croatian-immigrant parents.
She spent the last decade in the United States where she played music, gave birth to her son, then worked as a Coordinator at a City College Writing Centre. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, Found Poetry Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal and Writer’s Digest (US). Natalie’s work has been widely anthologised in both the United States and Australia, and she helped run the Voicebox poetry reading series in Fremantle.
Her poem ‘First Blood: A Sestina’ won the prestigious Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Following this, her debut poetry book First Blood (Ginninderra Press) was released. In 2019, she won the KSP Poetry Prize. Currently, Natalie is teaching writing and ESL while completing a PhD on erasure poetry and historic amnesia. The recently released If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears (Gazebo/Life Before Man Books) is her second poetry collection and explores immigrant motherhood in the wake of the Trump presidency.
Natalie currently lives in Walyalup/Fremantle with her husband, son and rescue cat Sylvia.
