About
Named “Best Female Poet” at her first national poetry competition, Carrie Rudzinski is a performance poet, published author, and teacher who has performed her work for audiences across New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and almost all 50 of the United States. Ranked 4th in the world at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam, Carrie represented Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles over the course of 11 international poetry competitions. Her performances have been featured on Tedx, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, and Bustle.
In 2014, Carrie taught Poetry and Performance at California State University Northridge and from 2016 to 2020 taught performing arts and creative writing at Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, creating the only tertiary level Spoken Word course in Oceania. From 2020-2021 she lectured at Unitec in Auckland.
Carrie has been a featured performer at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Tedx Christchurch, India’s Poetry with Praktiki Festival, the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival, the Nelson Arts Festival, the Ruapehu Writers Festival, LitCrawl, WORD Christchurch and the Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival. In 2019, Carrie was awarded The Pussy Riot Award for her performance at the Auckland Fringe Festival and received a standing ovation at the 10th annual Tedx Christchurch. She has co-created, written, performed, and produced three poetry theatre shows: How We Survive (2019), The Bitching Hour (2023), and Hysterical (2022), the latter of which won Best New Play at the Wellington Theatre Awards and Outstanding Performance Poetry at the Auckland Fringe Festival.
Her work has been published in many publications, including Landfall, The Spinoff, Stasis Journal, University of California Press, The Legendary, Catalyst, Muzzle, We Will Be Shelter, and Learn Then Burn Vol. 2. She has released six collections of poetry and five spoken word albums. She is the co-editor of Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Auckland University Press (2023).
She is a co-founder and curator of Auckland’s only monthly poetry competition, The JAFA Poetry Slam, which won the 2021 Auckland Fringe Festival Best Performance Poetry Award. Carrie currently resides in Auckland, New Zealand with her partner and her kitten.