Grace Iwashita-Taylor, the poet who never wants to stop becoming

Grace Iwashita-Taylor is an Aotearoa-based storyteller who has gafa to Samoa, Japan, and England. She has etched her voice into renowned stages and world-bending pages for over two decades. As the author of Afakasi Speaks (2013), Full Broken Bloom (2017), My Own Darling (2024), and salt: tasi (2025), Grace has made a significant imprint on local and international poetry and theatre spaces. 

Grace’s groundbreaking work gave me permission to tell my story long before our paths had ever crossed physically. Before I discovered her poems, I was unknowingly reciting lines about my Afakasi identity that she spoke first. When I read her writing, Grace reached into the vā, held my hand, and showed me that the creative ocean I was navigating had whakapapa and a future. Without finding Grace, I wouldn’t have known that my poetic dreams were written in the stars; that my broken Samoan sentences were destined to flow from my lips and land on paper. As an Afakasi artist of upu, I was grateful to Grace for mirroring my lived experience, and articulating it before I was sure that I was allowed to. In her stories, I found resonance. 

Meeting Grace was the opposite of what everyone tells you about meeting your heroes. She was every bit as powerful as her storytelling implies. Her voice was as commanding in conversation as it is in ink. While we nursed cups of Koko Sāmoa for a whole afternoon, this is what Grace told me. 

My name is Grace Iwashita-Taylor, and I’m a mum. I’m a māmā; a daughter. I am a lover of words; a storyteller. 

I was born and raised in South Auckland. My mum is from Maota’a and Apolima, Sāmoa, but we also have gafa to Kunomotu, Japan through my great grandfather, and my dad is from a place called Glastonbury, England. 

First and foremost, I am a writer, and I started off writing when I was in my teen years. I’d always loved stories, and I’d always loved lyrics of songs. I started writing what I didn’t know was poetry, and that’s when I fell in love with that. I got into the spoken word space for a couple of years. I was doing slams and I was involved in starting up a lot of stuff. I’m too old for that now. 

I used to love performing my poetry! I used to love it! I don’t like that anymore. I like reading my work but I love to see other people perform my work. 

I moved into the theatre space in 2014 through an internship that I did at Auckland Theatre Company, and that introduced me to this whole other world of theatre. It also made me a better writer because I was then pushed to write in character. That was one of the turning points in my writing. 

I came from the mentally of “if its not about you, if you’re not writing in first person, its not authentic”, which sounds so cocky when I think about it. Writing in character, I can be more honest. 

Do you think it was important to discover the uniqueness and strengths of your personal voice through your earlier work? Do you think that writing in first person was a stepping stone that naturally came before writing in character? 

Absolutely! Yeah, being able to find your voice. But I’ve found that I’ve found my voice more in exploring character. 

I’m still in the early stages, thankfully. Every character that I’ve ever written, part of me has been in that character for sure, which is really cool. There’s stuff that I’ve written in another character’s voice that even a year later, I’ll look back and go, “oh, that’s actually me”. 

Could you speak to your slam poetry journey and how you navigated that as an introduction to writing? 

I think what pulled me into spoken word poetry is that I love music! I can’t sing to save my life, but there’s that element to it. But the main thing was that, when I write, I hear my poetry as I’m writing it, and one of my editing tools is actually speaking my poetry. So, it felt like quite a natural thing that came into my life. 

It was also during a time when I was a youth worker full-time, and it was a really powerful tool when engaging with young people in a way that just was more relatable. So, I really came to it in that way. 

When you’ve got a slam coming up, and you have to prepare three poems, it gives you a framework; a very clear framework. You’ve got three minutes for each poem, you write the poem, you edit it, you memorise it. Then, you have to embody it and put in performance parts of it, because your body literally has to BE the poem. 

It sounds like a powerful tool for honing your craft! 

Yeah! It absolutely can be. 

I did ballet for quite a significant part of my life, so being on stage wasn’t a foreign concept to me; using my body and stuff. It all kind of just melded together I suppose. 

When I was mentoring young poets, and I started Rising Voices Poetry Slam and all that jazz, it was really amazing watching other people come into their body with their own voice and their poem, and seeing them being empowered and assert their own agency in those spaces. In my 20s, I loved being part of that. 

I think it was quite a big part of my becoming, which I am still becoming. I hope to never stop becoming. 

Could you tell me about establishing salt, your Substack publication? 

Starting up salt was for three things: 

1. To help me to be accountable to something, so that I had to reestablish my writing practice. 

2. To find a place to publish my work that wasn’t on Instagram and that wasn’t dependent on publishing houses. 

3. To try and start carving an income stream for me as a creative that was not dependent on funders or outside sources, that was from me to the audience and from the audience to me.  

How did you find the process of self-publishing your latest book, salt: tasi? 

salt: tasi is my first self-published book. Of course, there were extra jobs to do. There’s not someone there to do the book layout and all those things. So, I had to do it myself. I spent the evenings after the kids were asleep figuring things out on YouTube, looking at tutorials, making mistakes, going back. It’s very empowering because you know you’re creating it. 

This year – the hardest year of my life – spending my energy and time into making something tangible has been part of my grieving process. salt: tasi is a celebration of – not just my Substack and writing every week for a year – it is the fact that I am still fricken standing… 

I could’ve just published it for me. It would’ve satisfied me enough to just print it for me and a few friends, or just for my paid subscribers on salt, which I did consider. But, I’m selling the book for all the reasons that this publication represents, all the funds going towards my saufa’i at the end of November and receiving a matai title. It all just beautifully lines up. 

You know, you receive your matai title because you’re being called to it; the responsibility, and your family are asking you. And now, I’m able to do that because it’s been funded by my community and people that believe in me as a person and a writer. 

I am sure your community and your subscribers on Substack would’ve been yearning, and even asking you, for this book. 

It’s funny you say that, because I appreciate being able to access an artist’s work online, but I LOVE a tangible product, and I have had a few messages from people saying, “Oh, it’s so nice to touch your words.” 

Of the 20 poems that you published in salt: tasi, do you have any favourites? 

I think the one I made a little video for, Women Hold The Holding, is quite a special one to me. I also like A King, A Title. That one represents what one of my beliefs is about what my job is as a poet. My job is to be a reflection. I definitely believe it’s fun, I definitely believe its storytelling, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, and I definitely think it's about being able to be critical of spaces and communities and places that you love, and that you belong to. 

For me, that poem is about questioning a foreign colonial power coming to our island, and receiving a significant matai title – one of which is from my village, that’s why I wrote it. The heart of that poem is that we show our humility to people who do harm to us, and I think that that’s cooked. I think that there needs to be a point where we have to say, “No more!” Because, we are just constantly under the thumb of colonial powers that don’t know how to pronounce our names. They will never visit us more than once in their life. They don’t give a shit! They don’t give a shit about us. 

Malu Talks: Polytricks of my Malu is a playful one, which kinda mirrors a similar poem in My Own Darling, my theatre show, where you get to poke fun at being Afakasi, but, for ourselves, you know – the stuff that we laugh at ‘cause it’s so ridiculous. 

If you asked me the same question tomorrow, I would probably have different answers. 

What do you hope readers get out of salt: tasi? 

It’s always that someone feels resonance. The book is broken up into sections: salt for buoyancy; salt for healing, etc.  I hope that they find resonance, whether that’s the kick in the butt they need; whether it’s a reflection they need; whether it’s a balm. It could be just one line! If they pick it up and they just read one poem and it hits them and then that’s it, then the book has served its purpose for that one person.