Join us at the Younger Sun to celebrate The Launch of Maxine Beneba Clarke's new children's poetry book Stuff I'm Not Sorry For. We will have games, snacks and loads of fun with Maxine.

The unbearable itch of chicken pox. The annoyance of sharing a Spotify account with your parents. The delight of smearing tomato sauce over everything you eat.

The bright rainbow lights of the roller derby. The glorious sticky sweetness of fairy floss. The rebellion of the fake tattoo you know your nan will hate. The satisfaction of turning your childhood Barbie into a punk-novelist.

The shock of accidentally smashing a neighbour’s window with a cricket ball. The shame of cheating on a test. The feeling of wearing your afro high and proud. The anxiety of reading text messages before school. The joy in Mum’s solo standing ovation on concert night. The blowfly in the school toilets that none of the boys can catch …

Maxine Beneba Clarke is back with 99 new poems for young people, following on from her multi-award-winning collection, It’s the Sound of the Thing. In sonnets, pantoums, narrative verse, free verse, blackout poems, tongue-twisters, limericks, found poems, concrete poems, rhyming couplets, haiku and more, Stuff I’m (Not) Sorry For makes magic from the ordinary.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of over fourteen books for adults and children, including the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the critically acclaimed bestselling memoir The Hate Race, the self-illustrated picture book When We Say Black Lives Matter, which was longlisted for the UK’s Kate Greenaway medal, and the CBCA Honour Book The Patchwork Bike (illustrated by Van T Rudd), which won the 2019 Boston Globe Horn Prize for Best Picture Book. Her poetry collections include Carrying the World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, How Decent Folk Behave, and It’s the Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people, which won the 2024 ABIA for Book of the Year for Younger Readers. Maxine is the inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne.

Stuff I'm Not Sorry For: Maxine Beneba Clarke Book Launch