Name: Monica Brewster Evening: Tusiata Avia
Start: 2026-04-14T08:00:00+12:00
End: 2026-04-14T09:30:00+12:00
Location: 42 Queen Street, New Plymouth, New Zealand 4310

Tuesday 14 April | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
General: $17:50, Friends of the Gallery: $13, Students: Free
How do we speak our own truths? How can public discourse, poetry, and performance unsettle power and reshape what we think we know?
Join celebrated poet, performer, and children’s book author Tusiata Avia for an intimate and illuminating conversation. Known for her electrifying stage presence and her fearless dismantling of colonial narratives, Avia is one of Aotearoa’s most influential literary voices. If you missed the global tour of her acclaimed theatre work Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, this is a special chance to hear directly from the artist herself.
Avia will introduce her recently published poetry collection Giving Birth to My Father (2025) a book she describes as the most demanding and vulnerable she has ever written. These new poems chart her grief following the passing of her father, Namu-lau’ulu Mikaio Avia, and navigate the complexities of family, identity, and belonging between Sāmoa and 1970s–80s Aotearoa. She will also speak candidly about writing in the aftermath of the harassment and death threats she received in response to The Savage Coloniser Book (2020) a collection that confronts colonial histories head-on and refuses to soften its truth-telling. Her poem marking the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in Aotearoa sparked both acclaim and controversy, becoming a pivotal work sparking national discussions about racism, power, and who gets to speak.
This conversation invites us into the heart of her practice—bold, unflinching, tender—and asks us to consider what it means to create in turbulent times, and why telling the truth still matters.
Tusiata is the author of many acclaimed poetry collections including Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged as a theatre show), Bloodclot (2009), the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), the Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book (2020), and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). Tusiata has held a number of residencies including the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at University of Hawaii. In 2020 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen's Birthday Honours and made an Arts Foundation Laureate, and was recently named the 2026 International Institute of Modern Letters Writer in Residence. Avia is the first Pasifika woman to receive the Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement, much to the consternation of the ACT party.
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Welcome to the 2026 Monica Brewster Evening Speaker Series — a year shaped by visionaries who remind us that dreaming is both a personal act and a collective experience.
This year, we’re thinking about visionary dreams not as distant ideals, but as layered conversations: shaped by place, ancestry, lived experience, and the work of imagining otherwise.

Each speaker brings a distinct perspective on what emerges when communities, artists, thinkers, and leaders choose to dream with clarity, courage, and care. Maria Lind invites us to consider what it means to ‘dig where we stand’ and to understand creative practice through the ground it grows from; Tusiata Avia shows us how truth-telling, poetry, and performance can unsettle power and carve space for vulnerability; Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa opens a window onto the Moana as a site of deep history and visionary future-making; Vince Ropitini demonstrates how design guided by mātauranga Māori can carry ancestral narratives into global contexts and Leki Jackson-Bourke with the Lalaga Youth Ambassadors reveal how rangatahi dreams can reshape regional, cultural, and artistic imaginaries.
Across the series, audiences are invited to consider how dreaming can be relational, grounded, and deeply local — as well as expansive enough to hold global entanglements.
As we gather for conversations that illuminate what becomes possible when we listen to where we stand, and to one another - Join us!