About

Dr Willo Drummond is a Sydney poet, researcher, sessional lecturer and supervisor in creative writing. With interests spanning the ecological and cognitive humanities, she writes about creativity, human and non-human animals, gender, disenfranchised grief, and the fragile landscapes of identity.

Willo’s critically acclaimed debut collection Moon Wrasse (Puncher & Wattmann, 2023) was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and commended in the Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry. In 2024, Moon Wrasse was selected as one of 6 Australian poetry titles to feature in the annual Aesop Queer Library. Willo has been the recipient of a Career Development Grant (poetry) from the Australia Council for the Arts (2020), shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award (2022), the ACU Prize for Poetry (2024), the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award (2024) and the Poetry d’Amour Prize (2025),  runner up in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize (2021) and long-listed for the Liquid Amber Poetry Prize (2024) and the Grieve Writing Awards (2021). Her work has been anthologised in Best of Australian Poems, 100 Poets and elsewhere. Willo’s doctoral research in creative writing (2019) was awarded a Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence and included a volume of original poetry in dialogue with the poetry of Denise Levertov and with Levertov’s personal index to the Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1946, trans., R.F.C. Hull). In 2023-24 she co-edited, with poet Stuart Barnes, ‘Queering Ecopoet(h)ics’, a queer themed issue of Plumwood Mountain, an Australian and International Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics.

Previously a poetry reader for Overland Literary Journal and an executive committee member for the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, Willo’s literary and scholarly writing is published in Australia and the United States. She teaches  creative writing at Macquarie University.