Personal information
Biography
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon (D-Napoleon) is a writer, singer-songwriter, and educator from Fremantle/Walyalup, Australia. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edith Cowan University and spent the last decade in the United States where she worked as a Coordinator at the Santa Barbara City College Writing Centre. Her concrete poetry, erasure poetry, free verse and creative non-fiction has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, Entropy, Antipodes, Griffith Review, The Found Poetry Review, Westerly, Southerly, Australian Poetry Journal and Writer's Digest (US). Her work has been published widely in anthologies in the United States and Australia. Recently, she was a guest of the Newcastle Writers Festival and Clunes Booktown Festival. She is a volunteer committee member of WA Poets and was previously a member of the Voicebox poetry collective.
Natalie’s poem ‘First Blood: A Sestina’ won the prestigious Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize (2018) through the University of Southern Queensland. In 2019 Ginninderra Press released Natalie’s debut poetry collection First Blood, based on her girlhood experiences on a farm as a child of Croatian immigrants. She won the KSP Poetry Prize in 2019 for ‘If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears’ which has also been published in The Australian (Review). Natalie’s work continues to be shortlisted for major prizes in Australia and America, such as the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the AAALS prize. She has been awarded the Red Room Poetry Fellowship (2024) and KSP Emerging Writer-in-Residence Fellowship (2023). Natalie currently teaches writing and English as a foreign language having recently completed a PhD on erasure poetry and historic amnesia.
Her second poetry book, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears, is out now through Life Before Man/Gazebo Books. Through her academic and creative work she explores the intersection of feminist, post-colonial, and autoethnographic theories and methodologies with a focus on nonfiction storytelling, history and poetry as craft.