In celebration of WA’s Pride Month and Trans Awareness Week, Mandurah Libraries will be hosting an author’s panel.
We are Here’ Author Panel
In celebration of WA’s Pride Month and Trans Awareness Week, Mandurah Libraries will be hosting an author’s panel following PrideFest’s 2025 theme ‘We are Here’. The event will take place at The Brighton’s Velour Lounge. Our panellists will be invited to discuss their experiences as LGBTQIA+ authors, the role of writers and writing in the ongoing fight for equity, and to discuss what remains to be won for LGBTQIA+ people.
About the Authors
Andrea Thompson – Chairperson
Andrea Thompson is a writer, music journalist and artist manager. She is the author of Geraldine, a novel that charts the ordinary life of an ordinary woman or the extraordinary life of an extraordinary woman, depending on your perspective. She also is a contributor to Spinning Around the Kylie Playlist and Women Of A Certain Courage. As well as a writer and arts worker, Andrea is a thorn-in-the-side activist, making herself equally unpopular with governments and LGBTQIA+ advocacy organisations by challenging their respective prejudice and timidity. The secret police dossier on her activities grows thicker by the day.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Scott-Patrick Mitchell is a queer non-binary poet living on Whadjuk Noongar Country. They were the recipient of 2022’s Red Room Poetry Fellowship, Westerly’s 2022 Mid-Career Fellowship and the 2023 winner of The XYZ Prize for Innovation in Spoken Word. Their debut poetry collection Clean (Upswell Publishing, 2022) was shortlisted for The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, The WA Premier’s Book Awards, The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and internationally in The Read Rainbow’s Best LGBTIQA+ Books of 2022 Awards. SPM recently completed a Creative Fellowship in Writing at the National Library of Australia where they explored queer archives and oral histories around The First Mardi Gras and The Australian Response to HIV / AIDS in the 90’s.
Kaya Ortiz
Kaya Ortiz is a queer Filipino poet of in/articulate identities and record-keeper of ancient histories. Kaya hails from the southern islands of Mindanao and lutruwita/Tasmania and is obsessed with the fluidity of borders, memory and time. Their writing has appeared in Portside Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Best of Australian Poems 2021 and After Australia (Affirm Press 2020), among others. Their debut poetry collection Past & Parallel Lives won the 2024 Dorothy Hewett Award and was published by UWAP in 2025. Kaya lives and writes on unceded Whadjuk Noongar country.
Francis Raven
Francis Raven (she/they) is a youth worker and craftsperson living in Nollamara, WA. She's the founder and lead of the Perth Pride Shed, Perth’s first LGBTQIA+ community shed. She's passionate about protecting queer kids and, through their work with The Freedom Centre, have met many brilliant young minds who give them endless hope for the future. Francis writes stories they wished they’d had growing up. Their debut novel Glimmers in the Sea Glass is born out of their own queer experience and their family’s experience of living in WA’s Southwest.
What to expect:
6.30pm – Guests arrive – The venue is licensed; food and drink is available for purchase.
7.30pm – Panel Discussion
8.30pm – Q&A
9pm– Book Signing
9.30pm – Finish
Please Note: The event is held in the Velour lounge at The Brighton and access is upstairs, the building does not have an elevator.