Tusiata Avia is the author of five poetry collections: Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged as a theatre show), Bloodclot (2009), Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), the Mary and Peter Biggs Poetry Award–winning The Savage Coloniser Book (2020) and Big Fat Brown Bitch (2023). She has held the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts, and in 2023 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.