For 10 years the Illawarra has been celebrating successful women and bringing to light gender issues still faced in the community.

On Sunday, the world celebrates International Women's Day (IWD), and Wollongong will celebrate with a day of festivities on Friday at WIN Entertainment Centre.

One precursor to the event was the annual power voice competition, held on Thursday at Wollongong Art Gallery.

The prose and poetry competition was a collaboration between Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District (ISLHD) Women's Health, South Coast Writers Centre and Illawarra and Shoalhaven Women's Health Centre.

"Slammin' Stigma" was this year's theme, with many readers sharing work based on race and domestic violence.

ISLHD's Emma Rodrigues was MC of the event and wanted to highlight the significance of the day.

"Power Voice provides a vehicle and a forum for women in the area; we look at issues such as gender, religion, sexuality, culture and relationships," she said."Stigma is a really challenging subject to talk about or to externalise on paper and I think it is something that women often struggle to articulate.

"We do events like this for the progression of human rights, to improve women's health and wellbeing. "We stand strong against misogyny and we look at equality and equity as our end goal."

This year more professional writers took to the podium and there were more prose entries than last year's poetry-dominated event.

South Coast Writers Centre director Friederike Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis, was responsible for picking the winning entrants.

"It is important to have these events on a regular basis, to cut out a space for women to go public about their issues," she said. "Some of the stories in the open mike section are very personal and I am sure they have been written under a lot of pain and consideration."