Pacific Arts Aotearoa tells the dynamic and powerful story of Pacific arts in Aotearoa New Zealand. This comprehensive account spans six decades of multidisciplinary Pacific creative genius, remembering the diverse, fresh and energetic contributions of Pacific artists to New Zealand, Oceania and the world. Edited by leading Pacific writer and scholar Lana Lopesi, this book includes over 300 images and contributions from more than 120 artists, curators and community voices, providing new and previously unheard perspectives on this vast and growing legacy, in one volume. Published in association with Pacific Arts, Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa as part of the Pacific Arts Legacy Project, an initiative under the Pacific Arts Strategy.

Bloody Woman is bloody good writing. It moves between academic, journalistic and personal essay. I love that Lana moves back and forward across these genres: weaving, weaving – spinning the web, weaving the sparkling threads under our hands, back and forward across a number of spaces, pulling and holding the tensions, holding up the baskets of knowledge. Tusiata Avia This wayfinding set of essays, by acclaimed writer and critic Lana Lopesi, explores the overlap of being a woman and Sāmoan. Writing on ancestral ideas of womanhood appears alongside contemporary reflections on women's experiences and the Pacific. These essays lead into the messy and the sticky, the whispered conversations and the unspoken. As Lopesi writes, 'Bloody Woman has been scary to write... In putting words to my years of thinking, following the blood and revealing the evidence board in my mind, I am breaking a silence to try to understand something. It feels terrifying, but right.' These acts of self-revelation ultimately seek to open up new spaces, to acknowledge the narratives not yet written, and the voices to come.

The Songmaker's Chair tells of a Samoan family, the Aiga Sa Peseola, who have been in Auckland since the 1950s. Over three generations the family have intermarried with M ori and Pakeha to develop what they refer to as the Peseola Way. Central to that Way is the magnificent Polynesian exploration and settlement of the Pacific, and a songmaking tradition which Peseola Olaga, the family patriarch has inherited from his father. At the heart of the play is the love between Peseola Olaga and Malaga, his wife, and how they've struggled to give their children a good life in Aotearoa. For theirs is the Peseola Way: defiant, honest and unflinching even in the face of death.

By his own reckoning, John Kneubuhl was "the world's greatest Swiss/Welsh/Samoan playwright." The son of a Samoan mother and an American father, Kneubuhl's multicultural heritage produced a distinctive artistic vision that formed the basis of his most powerful dramatic work. Born and raised in Samoa, Kneubuhl attended school in Honolulu and studied under Thornton Wilder at Yale. Returning to Hawai'i in the mid-1940s, Kneubuhl won acclaim as a playwright with the Honolulu Community Theater, then moved on to Los Angeles to write for television. Twenty years later he was back in Samoa, lecturing on Polynesian history and culture and writing plays, including the trilogy offered here. Unlike much of Kneubuhl's earlier work, these plays are touchingly personal in their exploration of alienation and cultural identity. Think of a Garden, the first play of the trilogy and the last written before the playwright's death in 1992, has been called the most Samoan of Kneubuhl's plays--a candid look at the writer's bicultural upbringing that artfully weaves together family memory, history, and mysticism. Think of a Garden makes the work of one of the Pacific's preeminent playwrights available for the first time to a wide audience of theatre enthusiasts, literature specialists, and others interested in Pacific themes.