Janis Freegard was born in South Shields, England, and spent part of her childhood in South Africa and Australia before her family settled in New Zealand when she was 12.

Her poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus, was published by Auckland University Press in 2011.  She is also a co-author of AUP New Poets 3 and is widely published in journals and anthologies (see the Bibliography section of the blog for a full list).  Janis also writes fiction and is a past winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award.  She lives in Wellington with an historian and a cat.

You can read one of her short stories here:

http://www.anomalouspress.org/current/12.freegard.tattooed.php

and some of her poems here: http://www.nzetc.org/iiml/turbine/Turbi05/poetry/freegard1.html

and here: http://www.blackmailpress.com/JFgard13.html

and here: http://www.poetrynz.net/archives/issue-27/#poem2

and, more recently, here: http://www.sixbrickspress.com/issue_14/page05.html

and here: http://nzpoetsonline.homestead.com/JF25.html