Louise Wallace grew up in Gisborne and now lives in Wellington. Her poems have been published in literary journals in New Zealand, Australia and the U.S., translated into German and Spanish, and anthologized in Best of Best New Zealand Poems, Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page, and most recently Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems . In 2015 she was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin. She is the founder and editor of Starling , an online journal publishing the work of young New Zealand writers. Bad Things is her third poetry collection, following Since June (2009) and Enough (2013).