Selina Tusitala Marsh
Professor Selina Tusitala Marsh is the inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate, a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Auckland, and the author and illustrator of the bestselling Mophead series (published in French as La Tignasse). Of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French heritage, she is an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and the Pacific community, and a Fellow of Royal Society Te Apārangi. She co-directs the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the university.
In March 2026, she made history as the first poet to perform for two reigning British monarchs at Westminster Abbey, presenting Commonwealth Quilt—a poetic sequence weaving all 56 Commonwealth nations—before King Charles III and Queen Camilla at the Commonwealth Day Service, a decade after her 2016 performance for Queen Elizabeth II.
Research and Creative Practice
Marsh’s cross-disciplinary work engages literary and Pacific studies, recovering lost Pacific voices and contributing to the growing field of Pacific Literary Studies. Her feminist scholarship develops indigenous research frameworks and adapts western literary theories for a critical-creative Pacific literary criticism she has conceived of as ‘The Tusitala Way,’ published with Bloomsbury Academic. She also formulates Pacific pedagogies in the teaching of literature.
Her graphic memoir Mophead (AUP 2019) won the 2020 Margaret Mahy Supreme Book of the Year for New Zealand Children and Young Adults, the Elsie Locke Award for best Non-Fiction, the Publishing Association of New Zealand’s Supreme Book Design, the Scholastic Best Children’s Book Design, and the People’s Choice Award. It was selected for the 2020 White Raven Top 200 Books in the world. The Mophead series—recently launched in French translation as La Tignasse—has been adapted into MITEY: Building the mightiest kids in the world, a mental health and wellbeing curriculum developed with the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation and the Sir John Kirwan Foundation, now being taught in New Zealand primary schools with Ministry of Education support.
She has published three acclaimed collections of poetry (including a London reprint and Ukrainian translation), 8 critical book chapters with major academic presses (Cambridge, Bloomsbury Academic, and Hawai’i), 7 journal articles, and numerous commentaries and reviews. Her poetry has appeared in over 70 anthologies, academic texts, and literary journals, and on notable sites including The Poetry Archive (UK) and The Literary Hub (US). For 6 years she edited the regional literary journal SPAN.
Honours and Appointments
Inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate (2025–present); New Zealand Poet Laureate (2017–2019); Commonwealth Poet (2016); Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for services to poetry, literature and the Pacific community (2019); Fellow of Royal Society Te Apārangi; NZ Society of Authors Waitangi Honorary Literary Fellow (2017); recipient of the Royal Society Aronui Medal for Services to Humanities.