Alice Te Punga Somerville

Alice Te Punga Somerville is a Māori poet, scholar, and irredentist. Her primary tribal affiliation is Te Ātiawa but she also acknowledges her links to Taranaki iwi. Her relatives were in the Wellington region before the city of Wellington was there, and she was raised in Auckland; she believes this makes her "urban Māori" both ways. She was raised in Aotearoa, studied in Aotearoa and the US, and taught in Aotearoa before moving recently to take up a position as Associate Professor of Pacific Literatures at the University of Hawai’i – Mānoa.