Toni j Spencer
Who is She?
Toni J Spencer wrote her first book by hand at the age of ten and has been writing ever since. She holds a degree in Communications and began her career in journalism before spending a decade as a video editor, a background that informs her cinematic approach to storytelling. Her work has been recognised with several awards, including the 2010 AUT Short Story Award, the 2012 BNZ Literary Award, and the 2014 Reading Room Prize for an unpublished manuscript. Her writing has appeared in Headland and other literary journals.
In 2022, her debut novel Origami War was published by NineStar Press. Her poetry collection fever dream will be released in 2026, and she is currently working on a new novel inspired by her time living in South Korea in the late 1990s, as well as a forthcoming collection of short stories.
Toni’s work is known for its emotional honesty, dark humour, and sharp observation of the human condition. Her stories move between tenderness and chaos, always grounded in a sense of place and in the experience of ‘girlhood’.
fever dream by Toni j Spencer
fever dream was written in a single day. A challenge that became a reckoning. What began as an experiment in endurance spiralled into something else entirely: a raw, unfiltered descent through love, loss, and death. Each poem collides into the next like waves in a storm, disorienting, intimate, and impossible to turn away from. Toni J Spencer writes with the urgency of someone trying to outrun their own heart, capturing what it means to be alive in the middle of chaos, the fever of heartbreak, the delirium of grief, and the strange beauty that flickers beneath it all.
How fever dream Came to Be
fever dream began over a glass of wine with a friend. Half joking and half serious, Toni bragged that she had so much unpacked trauma that she could write an entire book of poems in one day. Having her bluff called the next morning, she sat down to do it. What started as a joke turned into a kind of exorcism – 18 hours of writing without stopping, no editing, no filters, just a torrent of whatever surfaced. By midnight, she had a manuscript, wild, unpolished, a little unhinged, but honest in ways she hadn’t reached before. The poems came like fever dreams: flashes of memory, loss, love, and death, stitched together by exhaustion and clarity. What emerged wasn’t just a collection of poems, but a snapshot of what it feels like to finally open the floodgates and let everything spill out.