Maxine Beneba Clarke is the ABIA and Indie award-winning author of the short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the memoir The Hate Race, and the poetry collections Carrying the World, How Decent Folk Behave and It’s the Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people. Her books for young children include The Patchwork Bike, Fashionista, Wide Big World, We Know a Place, Meet Taj at the Lighthouse and When We Say Black Lives Matter. She is currently the Peter Steele Poet in Residence at the University of Melbourne.