Creative Journey Across the Pacific: Seattle Visits Ōtepoti

By Ōtepoti He Puna Auaha | Dunedin UNESCO City Of Literature | Posted: Wednesday Mar 18, 2026

A recent visit to Te Whata o Kaituna – the South Dunedin Community Library– offered a meaningful opportunity to celebrate the connection between Ōtepoti and Seattle UNESCO Cities of Literature.

Dunedin Public Libraries welcomed a Study Abroad group from the University of Washington in Seattle, visiting Ōtepoti as part of a programme focused on librarianship, particularly youth services, and indigenous children’s literature of Aotearoa. Their visit to the South Dunedin Community Library reflected shared values: a commitment to indigenous knowledge, community storytelling, and the transformative power of books in young people’s lives.

Our City of Literature South D Poet Lorikeet, Jenny Powell, contributed a creative workshop, designed to introduce the students to the background and practice of the Poet Lorikeet programme. Her session offered both insight and hands-on experience, enabling students to engage directly with a model of community-embedded literary practice unique to Ōtepoti.

Students recorded key elements of the new Library that most impressed or affected them. They each selected one of their ideas to be incorporated into a group poem that will shortly be published in poster form by Ōtepoti City of Literature and gifted to the South Dunedin Community Library on their behalf.

The surprise guest of the afternoon was Teddy. Teddy has previously featured prominently in Jenny’s City of Literature South D Poet Lorikeet projects, but how would a group of adult students respond to the idea of Teddy visiting the South Dunedin Community Library? Teddy generated a variety of imaginative responses: he could be looking for a book about the teddy bears’ picnic. Does he have a Library card? He could be fishing for an eel in the Library or sleeping on the cushions at the back. If he were thirsty, how would he reach the water fountain? Perhaps he would be in the Library for bilingual story time in Te Reo Teddy.

The students combined their ideas of the Library space, and Teddy visiting it, to create their own Teddy poems as a written photograph or memento of their day at Te Whata o Kaituna. The tasks could become templates to be adapted for future use.

Jenny said:

Their exciting work in the morning with pupils from a local primary school, their friendliness, respect, and enthusiasm for all activities, left me with a feeling of positivity for the future promotion of literature in communities. It was a great privilege to meet the students and lecturers, and to share a small taste of literary and literacy projects in this part of the world.

This engagement between Ōtepoti and Seattle demonstrates how UNESCO Cities of Literature can connect through lived practice: through libraries, poems written together, stories imagined across cultures, friendships made, and gifts left behind for libraries that continue to nurture readers long after the visit ends.