Isabella G. Mead

About

Isabella G. Mead is a poet from Naarm/Melbourne. Her debut poetry collection, The Infant Vine, was published by University of Western Australia Publishing in 2024. The book was a finalist in the 2025 Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection and commended in the Five Islands Prize for a first book of poetry.

Her poems have appeared in local and international journals, including Meanjin, Island, Griffith Review, Rabbit, Westerly, Southerly, Best of Australian Poems, Cordite Poetry Review, Anthropocene, The Marrow, Going Down Swinging, Pamenar Press, Plumwood Mountain Journal, Strange Horizons, and The Interpreter’s House.

Isabella recently completed a PhD (Creative Writing) examining the intersection of ekphrasis, digital mediation, and museum studies.

You can listen to an interview with Isabella on 3CR here. You can read interviews online here and in HOWL Magazine.

Isabella also reads a selection of her poems on the ‘Eat the Storms’ poetry podcast (episode 9, season 12) and her shortlisted poem for South Coast Writers Centre here.

The Infant Vine (2024)

Published by University of Western Australia Publishing

Lyrical and narrative-driven with playful and fantastical elements woven throughout, the poems in The Infant Vine reflect on how ordinary moments become charged with significance and strangeness when disaster strikes. Such moments make imaginary worlds possible: sleep deprivation transfigures a new mother into a leafy seadragon; a novel virus gives women the power to reproduce via parthenogenesis like the bonnethead shark. 

Themes of transformation, metamorphosis and preservation—of life, of memory and the environment—permeate Isabella G. Mead’s debut collection. This is a rich and compelling exploration on caregiving and creativity in the context of global crises.

“Isabella G. Mead’s The Infant Vine abounds with unsettling encounters within and beyond the body’s boundaries. The collection grapples with experiences of transformation and (re)birth: child-bearing and raising, climate disaster and seasonal change, and the capacity of visual art to revivify the familiar world. Abundance and devastation coexist, and ‘the direction never changes: / begin again.’”
— Judges’ comments, Queensland Literary Awards

Reviews of The Infant Vine

You can read reviews of The Infant Vine in:
Books+Publishing
ArtsHub
Compulsive Reader
Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Society
Eureka Street

The Infant Vine is also discussed in ‘The Singing Flower is Crying: Poesies of Early Parenthood’ by Jo Langdon, published in the Sydney Review of Books.