Angela Gardner lived in Melbourne as a child, when her father worked for the Mission to Seaman. After studying art at the Cardiff College of Art, and living in London for a decade, she migrated to Australia in 1988. She has lived in Sydney, Brisbane, and the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast. She received a Master of Arts in Visual Arts from Griffith University's Queensland College of Art in 2002. Gardner is a visual artist and poet and founding editor of the poetry journal foam:e. She is a principal of the small fine press light-trap press and occasionally blogs at: http://light-trap.blogspot.com/
Among a number of residencies, awards, and prizes, Gardner has received a Churchill Fellowship (2007) to investigate collaborations between poets and visual artists in the US and the UK. In 2008 she was awarded a Visual Arts and Crafts Strategy (VACS) grant, an initiative of the State and Federal governments, administered by Arts Queensland, to create two limited edition artists books. Working with Brisbane-based printmakers, Gwenn Tasker and Lisa Pullen, etchings and lino-cut prints were produced that respond to her poetry series, 'The Twelve Labours' and 'The Night Ladder'. These works were published in limited edition fine press books. Her artist books have been finalists in The Libris Awards in 2010, 2018 and 2022. She was awarded a residency to Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium) in 2020 to work on a printmaking project "Orbis Imago, system and chance" resulting in a solo exhibition at the Brisbane Institute of Art 2021 and a print from the series The Weight of Clouds was Highly Commended in the Milburn National Landscape Art Prize 2021. Some images of her artworks can be seen at the Jacket 2 website, 2012. A folio of prints including letterpress, The Sorry Tale, is in the collection of The State Library of New South Wales other visual work is in the collection of The Victoria & Albert Museum and The National Library of Wales amongst other public collections.
In 2008, Gardner won an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Ireland, which she undertook in mid 2009. While in Ireland, Gardner met G C Waldrep, a renowned American poet, and Cherry Smyth a highly awarded London-based Irish poet. Both poets have become important colleagues and early readers for many of her poems. In 2018 she was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Literature grant and in 2019 a Published Author residency at the Katherine Suzanna Pritchard Centre in Western Australia.
Gardner's poetry has been well reviewed and she has read at the Queensland Poetry Festival a number of times and has acted as a judge for the inaugural Philip Bacon Ekphrasis Award (2015), The Val Vallis Award (2018) and The State Library of Queensland Poetry Collection (2018, 2019). She has been included in Best Australian Poems 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2017 and numerous anthologies including Out of the Box, Puncher & Wattman 2009; Notes for the Translators ASM 2012; Australian Love Poetry Inkerman & Blunt 2013; Writing to the Wire UWA Press 2016; To End All Wars Puncher & Wattman 2018; The Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2016, Aquifer Books; Ashbery Mode, Tinfish 2019; Gothic Poems, Emma Press, 2019 and The Australian Prose Poetry Anthology, MUP, 2020. She was co-editor with Leah Muddle of Rabbit Poetry Journal, ART issue 2022.
In 2017, the judges of the 2018 Dorothy Hewett Award described her manuscript Some Sketchy Notes on Matter as 'With a hovering intelligence and a laudable lack of ego, the beautifully controlled poems of ‘Some Sketchy Notes on Matter’ investigate the world with an ecstatic’s eye.' (Press release). This was subsequently published by Recent work Press 2020. Another manuscript, an early draft of The Sorry tale of the Mignonette was also shortlisted in 2020. This book was subsequently published by Shearsman Books, UK in 2021. The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette was a National Poetry Day selection UK 2021, a Poetry Book Society recommendation UK 2021 and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2022. The Telegraph (London) in July 2021 described The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette as one of "The Best Poetry Books of 2021 so far', describing the poem My Mignonette within the collection "turns into a gorgeous, almost incomprehensible tumult. Punctuation and grammar come unmoored in a Gerard Manley Hopkins-ish ecstasy that feels at once Victorian and avant-garde".
In 2019, Gardner was ACT Writer-in-Residence, a joint initiative of the ACT Writers Centre and UNSW Canberra, with further funding support from Copyright Agency. While there she lectured at UNSW Canberra and the University of Canberra and was visiting artist at ANU School of Art. Also in 2019 she had poems shortlisted in the Aesthetica International Creative Writing Prize and longlisted in the Live Canon International Poetry Prize. In 202 a poem was highly commended in The Forward Prize and included in the The Forward Book of Poetry 2022. Recent readings have included Poetry on the Move, Canberra; Fingal Poetry Festival, Dublin, Ireland and StAnza Poetry festival St Andrews, Scotland.
