Carrie Rudzinski
Carrie’s books (2)
Rudzinski, Carrie (1987 - ) is a poet, performance artist, filmmaker, teacher and feminist. Born in Illinois, USA, Rudzinski attended Emerson College to complete a degree in film production. Since graduating in 2009 she has travelled to over 17 countries as a performance poet and teacher. She currently lives in Auckland.
In 2016 Rudzinski was the performance director for Rising Voices of Youth Poetry Trust, a spoken word poetry development programme for youth in New Zealand. She currently works as the programme co-ordinator for ‘The Poetry Project’ at the Michael King Writer’s Centre, and is also a Creative Writing and Performance Lecturer at the Manukau Institute of Technology.
A writer from a young age, Rudzinski started writing poetry aged 11, but it was ‘Poetry As Performance,’ an interdisciplinary course she took during her first semester at Emerson College, that introduced her to the spoken word art form. Her passionate pursuit of poetry during her university years led her to co-found the Emerson Poetry Project in 2008. A regular poetry slam competitor, Rudzinski has represented Boston, Denver and Los Angeles over the course of 11 national poetry competitions. In 2008 she received the Best Female Poet at the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational and in 2009 was awarded Best of the Rest. In 2013 Rudzinski came 7th at the Individual World Poetry Slam. Rudzinski currently ranks 4th best spoken-word artist in the world after her placing at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam.
In a 2014 interview Rudzinski explains her love of expressing her honest truth in poetry, with truth being ‘the most powerful opportunity [that] we are given as human beings.’ In an apt metaphor Rudzinski describes poetry as ‘running towards the edge of the cliff’ with performance ‘the jump into the waterfall, the release’ (Rudzinski, 2014).
Rudzinski has published four collections of poetry. A History of Silence (Bicycle Comics, 2010);The Endless Return Home (self-published, 2012); The Shotgun Speaks (self-published, 2013) and The Blood Mouth (self-published, 2014). A History of Silence was also published as an e-bookby Bicycle Comics in 2014.
As well as publishing her own collections, Rudzinski’s poetry has been published in numerous anthologies, including Learn Then Burn (Write Bloody Press, 2010), Muzzle Magazine (Winter 2010), Muzzle Magazine (Spring 2011), Alight The Best Poems of WOWPS 2013 (Bicycle Comics), Alight The Best Poems of WOWPS 2014 (Bicycle Comics), We Will Be Shelter (Write Bloody Press, 2014), OnMag, Drunk in a Midnight Choir (2015), Suspect Press and Catalyst (2016).
Rudzinski also has two spoken word albums available on iTunes and Spotify: Barefoot Whale Riders and Live at the Boston Poetry Slam. Multiple video and sound recordings of Rudzinski’s poetry can be found on Youtube, including ‘Dreams,’ ‘Sober Girl,’ ‘Survival’ and ‘Open Letter to the Last Person I will Ever Love.’
