Interior Anxious by Evelyn Araluen | The Big Anxiety Festival 2019

A poem about anxiety and haunting claustrophobic. Evelyn Araluen is a poet, researcher and educator working with Indigenous literatures at the University of Sydney. Her writing has been widely published internationally and in Australia, in journals such as Overland, Sydney Review of Books, Cordite, and the Western Humanities Review. She is a co-coordinator of Black Rhymes Aboriginal Poetry Night, and has spoken at over a dozen literary festivals across the East Coast. Her writing has been awarded by the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter fellowship to develop her debut poetry collection Dropbear, to be published next year. Her work mediates on the pride, poetics and play of Aboriginal culture and identity. Born, raised and writing on Dharug country, she is a descendent of the Bundjalung nation. Evelyn writes openly about anxiety, isolation, and the complexities of Aboriginal identity in her work. As an Ambassador for The Big Anxiety, Evelyn hopes to bring language and poetry to the messy and at times overwhelming task of articulating the self in a world that seeks to silence the visceral realities of mental health. The commissioned poem and film is supported by The Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund.