Mophead Tu: The Queen's Poem

Description

Follows on from Mophead; Winner of the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction, and Supreme Winner at the 2020 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

An inspirational graphic memoir written and illustrated by fast-talking PI Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh.

The journey of Mophead continues! Our best-selling children’s book by poet laureate and fast talking P.I. Selina Tusitala Marsh recounted her experience growing up Pasifika with ‘BIG hair. Not just curly hair but wild Afakasi hair’. Selina’s Mophead showed how her (and your) difference can make a difference.

Mophead Meets the Queen tells the story of Selina’s visit to Westminster Abbey to perform for the Queen. Aimed at young readers and adults, Selina tells a story about a Pasifika women conquering her fears on one of the biggest stages one can occupy – and thinking through the role of Empire and the Crown in New Zealand and Samoa. Featuring Megan and Harry, Prince Philip and Lockwood Smith, Mophead Meets the Queen will make you laugh, make you cringe and make you think.

Reviews

Praise for Mophead: 'funny and empowering with magnificent illustrations' - Hera Lindsay Bird, Newsroom. 'a truly encouraging and rousing story of her extraordinary life' - Dionne Christian, NZ Herald. 'I was immediately obsessed, completely and utterly infatuated. Mophead is an absolute treasure of a book' - Briar Lawry, The Sapling.

Author description

Selina Tusitala Marsh is an Auckland-based Pasifika poet of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French descent. She was the first Pacific Islander to graduate with a PhD in English from the University of Auckland where she is now an associate professor in the English Department, specialising in Pasifika literature. Her first collection, the bestselling Fast Talking PI, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 2010. Marsh represented Tuvalu at the London Olympics Poetry Parnassus event in 2012; her work has been translated into Ukrainian and Spanish and has appeared in numerous forms live in schools, museums, parks, billboards, as well as print and online literary journals. As Commonwealth Poet (2016), she composed and performed for the Queen at Westminster Abbey. She was New Zealand's Poet Laureate from 2017-2019. In 2019 she was awarded a Humanities Aronui Medal and was elected a Nga Ahurei a Te Aparangi Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.