Kauraka Kauraka was a Cook Islands writer. He was born in Avatiu on Rarotonga, the main island of the Cooks, and educated at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He published six collections of poems in the English and Rarotongan languages. When Kauraka died in 1997, he was buried on the atoll of Manihiki, northern Cooks. He was the brother of artist and writer Tepaeru Tereora.
Papalii Sia Figiel is an American contemporary Samoan novelist, poet, and painter.
John Puhiatau Pule is a Niuean artist, novelist and poet. The Queensland Art Gallery describes him as "one of the Pacific's most significant artists".
Samoan literature can be divided into oral and written literatures, in the Samoan language and in English or English translation, and is from the Samoa Islands of independent Samoa and American Samoa, and Samoan writers in diaspora. Samoan as a written language emerged after 1830 when Tahitian and English missionaries from the London Missionary Society, working with Samoan chiefly orators, developed a Latin script–based Samoan written language. Before this, there were logologo and tatau but no phonetic written form.
Shigeyuki "Yuki" Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent. In 2008, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; it was the first time a New Zealander and the first time a Pacific Islander had a solo show at the institution. Titled Shigeyuki Kihara: Living Photographs, the exhibition opened from 7 October 2008 to 1 February 2009. Kihara's self-portrait photographs in the exhibitions included nudes in poses that portrayed colonial images of Polynesian people as sexual objects. Her exhibition was followed by an acquisition of Kihara's work for the museum's collection.
Karlo Estelle Mila is a New Zealand writer and poet of Tongan, Pālagi and Samoan descent. Her first collection, Dream Fish Floating, received the NZSA Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 2006 at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. She has subsequently published two further poetry collections, A Well Written Body (2008) and Goddess Muscle (2020), the latter of which was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry.
Robert Sullivan is a Māori poet, academic and editor. His published poetry collections include Jazz Waiata (1990), Star Waka (1999) and Shout Ha! to the Sky (2010). His books have a postmodern quality and "explore social and racial subjects, and aspects of Māori tradition and history."
Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan was a New Zealand poet. Her only published poetry collection, Opening Doors (1979), made her the third Māori woman writer to publish a book.
Kimo Armitage is a poet, children's book author, playwright and videographer from Hale'iwa, O'ahu, where his maternal grandparents raised him. Kimo apprenticed with poet and novelist Albert Wendt. He is an assistant professor at Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He won the 2016 Maureen Egan Writers Exchange Award for Poetry. His first novel, The Healer, was published in 2016.
Serie Barford is a performance poet from Auckland, New Zealand.
Noeline Edith "Bub" Bridger was a New Zealand poet and short story writer and actor, who often performed her own work and drew inspiration from her Māori, Irish and English ancestry.
Audrey Teuki Teupuariki Tuioti Brown-Pereira is a Cook Islands diplomat, public servant, and poet, of Cook Islands, Maori and Samoan descent.
Selina Tusitala Marsh is a New Zealand poet, academic and illustrator, and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2017–2019.
Momoe Malietoa Von Reiche is a Samoan poet, artist, sculptor, photographer.
Kelly Ana Morey is a novelist and poet from New Zealand.
Lani Wendt Young is a Samoan–New Zealand writer, editor, publisher and journalist. She is the author of 15 books including the bestselling young adult series Telesa.
Alice Te Punga Somerville is a poet, scholar and irredentist. Dr Te Punga Somerville is the author of Once were Pacific: Māori connections to Oceania which provides the first critical analysis of the disconnections and connections between 'Māori' and 'Pacific'. Her research work delves into texts by Māori, Pacific and Indigenous peoples that tell Indigenous stories in order to go beyond the constraints of the limited stories told about them. In 2023 she won New Zealand's top award for poetry, the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, for her collection Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised.
Vernice Wineera Pere was a New Zealand Hawaiian poet, editor and educator. Wineera lived in Hawaii from 1960, and served as vice-president of the Polynesian Cultural Center from 1980 to 1992 and as director of the Pacific Institute at Brigham Young University–Hawaii from 1992 to 2008. In 1978 she was the first Māori woman to publish a poetry collection.
Reina Ann Whaitiri is a New Zealand scholar, poet, essayist, editor and researcher. She taught English literature at the University of Auckland and at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for many years, and has co-edited several notable anthologies of Polynesian writing, including Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (2003), which received the Reference and Anthology award in the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
Phillip 'Phil' Graham Kawana is a New Zealand poet and short story writer. His writing primarily depicts Māori characters and their struggles, and concerns ideas of race, social class, colonial legacies, identity and youth culture.
