Contributors

Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer and interviewer, and is Managing Editor of Compulsive Reader (compulsivereader.com).  She has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies and is the author of several published books of poetry and fiction, including, most recently, Unmaking Atoms (Ginninderra Press).  Find out more at http://www.magdalenaball.com

Vivek Narayanan -- who appears here under his old blogger tag, equivocal, is the author of Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr S.  He was born in India, grew up in Zambia and currently lives in Northern Virginia--teaching at George Mason University.  He is Co-editor of the journal Almost Island ( almostisland.com )

Kevin Brophy writes fiction, poetry and essays. His latest book is This is What Gives Us Time (Gloria SMH 2016). He is patron of Melbourne Poets Union and a life member of Writers Victoria. From 1980 to 1994 he was founding co-editor of Going Down Swinging. He is a Professor at the University of Melbourne.

Ali Jane Smith is the author of the chapbook Gala, published as part of the Five Islands Press New Poets Program 2006. Since then, her poetry has been widely published in literary journals. Ali Jane Smith has also written reviews and essays for The Australian, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Mascara Literary Review, Southerly, and Sydney Review of Books. She is currently working on a series of poems commissioned by Wollongong Art Gallery and has been commissioned as co-writer, with Barbara Nicholson, for a piece of theatre being developed by producer/director Anne-Louise Rendell. In 2016, she received funding from CultureBank to write a series of poems about Illawarra bus routes, and was selected in the inaugural Copyright Agency-Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Program. For links to other projects and critical writing, please visit https://alijanesmith.

Greg McLaren is an Australian poet and critic. His books include Australian ravens (Puncher & Wattmann, 2016), After Han Shan (Flying Islands, 2012), and The Kurri Kurri Book of the Dead (Puncher & Wattmann, 2007). His work has been anthologised almost widely and can be found in Contemporary Australian Poetry (eds, Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson and David Musgrave), A Slow Combusting Hymn (eds, KIt Kelen and Jean Kent) and Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry (Eds Noel Rowe and Vivian Smith).

Béatrice Machet is the author of 14 poetry books in French, and two in English. She is used to collaborating with artists from all kinds of disciplines such as painters, sculptors, musicians, composers, video-makers, dancers and choreographers, and with whom she performs her poetry. She has had writer residences, leads creative writing workshops, is called for teaching and performing in schools and colleges. She translates many Native American contemporary poets into French and managed to gather and get anthologies of Native authors published in France.  She is part of a text/sound composers group in France, Ecrits/Studio, based in Lyon. Her work appears in many poetry magazines in France and abroad, is translated into Dutch, Romanian, Bulgarian, Spanish, English, Albanian, Russian and even got some pieces into Chinese. She taught at the University of Macao, as she was granted a two year visiting fellowship position in 2013.  She lives between France and the United States.

Anne Kellas is a poet who has lived in Tasmania for the past 30 years. She has also lived in South Africa, England and Swaziland. In 2017, her third book, The White Room Poems, was shortlisted for the Margaret Scott Prize in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards. She recently completed a Master’s by research, using autoethnography, on the topic of youth mental health, having worked in youth studies for many years. She sometimes holds poetry workshops, edits and reviews books, and mentors poets. In 2018 she will be featured in the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry showcase, and a small chapbook in the Picaro Poets series is due out soon.

Melinda Smith is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Goodbye, Cruel (Pitt St Poetry, 2017), and the poetry and art chapbook Members Only (Recent Work Press, 2017), with artist Caren Florance. Her work has been anthologised widely and translated into multiple languages. She received the 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Award for poetry. She is based in the ACT and is a former poetry editor of The Canberra Times.'

Jean Kent has published eight books of poetry.  The most recent are Paris in my Pocket (Pitt Street Poetry, 2016) and The Hour of Silvered Mullet (PSP, 2015).  With Kit Kelen, she was co-editor of A Slow Combusting Hymn: Poetry from and about Newcastle and the Hunter Region. Jean lives at Lake Macquarie, NSW.  She posts poems and occasional Jottings at http://jeankent.net/

Adam Aitken is a teacher of English and creative writing, as well as a poet and non-fiction writer. He was born in London and spent his early childhood in Thailand and Malaysia, before settling in Sydney.  He was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, and Poet in Residence at the Keesing Studio in Paris. He co-edited  Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann) in 2013. His memoir One Hundred Letters Home (Vagabond Press) was published in 2016, and his fifth poetry collection is Archipelago (Vagabond Press).   

Cui Yuwei, born in 1983, is a bi-lingual poet and translator in China. Her works have been widely disseminated through literary journals in Australasia, India, North America, and Indo-China. She published her first poetry collection, Fish Bones (Macau: Flying Island Books) in April 2017. Currently, she works as an English lecturer in Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai.

David McAleavey was born in Wichita, Kansas and received his higher education from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (and briefly at the University of California, Berkeley). His sixth and most recent book is ROCK TAUGHT (Broadkill River Press, 2016); the one before that was HUGE HAIKU (Chax, 2005). Since 2010 his work has appeared in more than 80 journals, including Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, diode poetry journal, Epoch, and Poetry East. Since 1974 he has taught literature, composition, and creative writing at George Washington University, though he taught at the University of Macau in Fall 2016, and lived in London for part of 2017. He has also enjoyed writers’ residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Schloss Wiepersdorf in Germany, and El Gouna, Egypt. Early in 2018, his seventh book, Talk Music, will appear (with facing-page Chinese translations) from Flying Islands Press of Macau.

Susan Fealy is a Melbourne-based poet, reviewer and clinical psychologist. Her poems have been published in Australian journals and anthologies including Best Australian Poems 2009, 2010, 2013 and 2017. Others appear in the United States, India and Sweden. Among awards for her poetry are the NSW Society of Women Writers National Poetry Prize and the Henry Kendall Poetry Award. Her first collection, Flute of Milk (UWAP) won the 2017 Wesley Michel Wright Prize.

The visual arts have often inspired her to write poems. Her review, ‘O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism’ appears in Art + Australia Online. 

DAVID McCOOEY is a prize-winning poet, critic, and editor. His latest book of poems, Star Struck, was published by UWA Publishing in 2016. His debut poetry collection, Blister Pack (2005) won the Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for four other major national literary awards. His second full-length collection, Outside (2011), was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards and was a finalist for the 2012 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s ‘Best Writing Award’. His work has appeared for ten out of the last eleven years in Black Inc’s annual anthology, The Best Australian Poems, and it has appeared in various anthologies, such as Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016). McCooey is the deputy general editor of the prize-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009), published internationally as The Literature of Australia (2009), and he is the author of a critical study on Australian autobiography, Artful Histories, (1996/2009), which won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous books, journals, and newspapers. McCooey is also a musician and composer. His second album, The Double, was released as a digital download in 2017. He is a professor of writing and literature at Deakin University in Geelong, where he lives.

Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She read Germanic Philology at the University of Liège and then flew over to Australia where she completed a PhD on exile in Australian Literature. She also holds an MA in Literary Translation. Dominique is the author of a novel, three collections of short fiction, five books of poetry, two plays and numerous scholarly publications. Her work has been awarded a variety of prizes, including The Melbourne Fringe Festival Award for Outstanding Writing and Spoken Word Performance (1998), The New England Review Prize for Poetry (2005), The Martha Richardson Medal for Poetry (2006) and the inaugural AALITRA Prize for Literary Translation in poetry from Spanish into English (2014). Her poems and stories have been published in anthologies, journals and on websites in Australia and overseas. Hush: A Fugue (2017) is her latest book of poetry. 

Ian Humphreys lives in West Yorkshire. His work has been published in magazines including Ambit, Magma, The Rialto and The Poetry Review. Ian won the Hamish Canham Prize 2016 and is a fellow of The Complete Works. In 2017, his poems were showcased in Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe). 

Sarah Rice is a Canberra-based art theorist, poet and visual artist. She won the 2014 Ron Pretty and Bruce Dawe poetry prizes, co-won the 2013 Writing Ventures, and 2011 Gwen Harwood awards, and has been shortlisted in numerous others. Her art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (prints Patsy Payne) is held in the NGA and her collection Fingertip of the Tongue was published with UWAP this year.

Jenny Blackford's poems and stories have appeared in Australian Poetry Journal, Westerly, Going Down Swinging and Cosmos magazine. She also writes for children; her work is regularly published in the School Magazine. Her poetry prizes include first place in the Thunderbolt Prize for Crime Poetry 2017, the Connemara Mussel Festival Poetry Competition 2016, the Humorous Verse section of the  Henry Lawson awards in 2014 and 2017, and third in the ACU Prize for Literature 2014. Pitt Street Poetry published an illustrated pamphlet of her cat poems, The Duties of a Cat, in 2013, and her first full-length book of poetry, The Loyalty of Chickens, in 2017.

Michele Seminara is a poet and editor from Sydney. Her first poetry collection, Engraft, was published by Island Press (2016), and a collaborative chapbook, Scar to Scar, (written with Robbie Coburn) was published by PressPress (2016). Her latest publication is HUSH (Blank Rune Press, 2017). Michele is the managing editor of online creative arts journal Verity La. Find her on Twitter @SeminaraMichele and on her website at https://micheleseminara.. 

Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Devadatta’s Poems (Giramondo Publishing) which was short-listed for the NSW and Qld Premiers’ poetry prizes and the Prime Minister’s Poetry Award. Her next book, Sun Music: New and Selected Poems, will be published by Giramondo Publishing in 2018. She lives in Sydney and teaches in the Post Graduate writing program at the University of Sydney. Her work has been widely studied in schools and Universities. She was poetry editor for Meanjin from 2005-2016.

Ron Pretty’s most recent book of poetry, his eighth, The Left Hand Mirrir, was published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2017. The third edition of his Creating Poetry was published by PsP in 2015. He published 230 books by Australian poets between 1987and 2007 as publisher for Five Islands Press. He won the NSW Premier’s Special Prize for services to literature in 2001 and received an AM for services to Australian literature in 2002. He judged the Ron Pretty Poetry Prize (sponsored by Five Islands Press) in 2014 and 2016.


Dael Allison edits and writes poetry, fiction and essays. Currently she’s researching Newcastle region literature and writing a region-based short-story cycle through a Creative Writing Doctorate at UoN. Her Masters in Creative Arts at UTS (2012) researched the modernist painter Ian Fairweather and resulted in Fairweather’s Raft, (Walleah Press 2012): https://www.walleahpress.com.au/bookshop/product/allison-dael-fairweathers-raft/ Eleven of the Fairweather poems featured in a soundscape in the ABC’s Poetica program in 2014. Picaro Press published Shock Aftershock in 2010 and Wabi Sabi 2013. Prizes include the 2007 Wildcare International Essay prize and residency, the inaugural Varuna LitLink/NRWC Award for an unpublished novel 2009, the 2012 Henry Kendall Poetry Award and 2017 Phillip Bacon Ekphrasis Award (Queensland Poetry Festival). 

Ed Wright is a Newcastle based writer, editor and critic. His latest book of poetry was When Sky becomes the Space Inside Your Head (Puncher & Wattmann 2012). He is the founding director of the Creative Word Shop which teaches Creative Writing to adults and children across the Hunter and a Conjoint Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Since 2014 he has been the commission editor for Fiction at Puncher & Wattmann. He writes a review column on Australian Literature for The Australian and his work has been published in magazines, newspapers and journals in Australia and overseas. 

Judy Johnson has published six poetry books, several chapbooks and a novel.  Her latest collection ‘Dark Convicts’ concerns the life and times of her African American First Fleet ancestors.

Vahni Capildeo's newest work, Venus as a Bear, is forthcoming from Carcanet in spring 2018.  Previous books include Utter (Peepal Tree, 2013), Simple Complex Shapes (Shearsman, 2015), and Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet, 2016; Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection; T.S. Eliot Prize nomination). Her performances have engaged with Euripides, Shakespeare, and Martin Carter. She is currently collaborating with Sophie Seita on experimental feminist theatre, and with Chris McCabe for the AHRC-funded ‘Expanded Translation’ project (University of Bangor). Recent non-fiction appears in PN Review, adda (Commonwealth Writers) and Granta. She is a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at the University of Leeds.

Tricia Dearborn is a Sydney-based poet and editor. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals in Australia, overseas and online, and is represented in anthologies including Contemporary Australian Poetry, Australian Poetry since 1788 and The Best Australian Poems 2012 and 2010. She is on the editorial board of Plumwood Mountain, an online journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics, and was Guest Poetry Editor for the February 2016 issue. Her most recent collection of poetry is The Ringing World (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012). She was recently awarded an Australia Council grant to complete her third collection, Autobiochemistry.

Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s collections of poetry are The Bundanon Cantos (2003), What was Lost (2007), Possession (2010) and Everyday Epic (2015). In 2010, Possession won the Victorian Premier’s Prize and the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and in 2011 was shortlisted for the ACT and the NSW Premiers’ Prizes. A song cycle and orchestral pieces written on Anna’s poetry are in performance in Europe. For many years she served on the boards of the Poets Union and its national successor, Australian Poetry and she co-edited the literary journal, Five Bells. Born in Yorkshire, she now lives in the NSW Southern Highlands.

Felicity Plunkett is a Sydney poet and critic. Her first collection, Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009), won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and was short-listed for several other awards. Seastrands (2011) was published in Vagabond Press’ Rare Objects series. She is the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011) and her new collection is forthcoming with Pitt St Poetry in 2018.

Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and program director for the Australian Poets Festival and the Sappho Books Poetry Reading Series. His books include Rawshock, which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry 2012, Jerilderies and, most recently, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond 2016). He lives in Sydney with his girlfriend and two daughters while also working as a researcher, a teacher of creative writer, a copyeditor, & etc.

Phyllis Perlstone has been published in many Australian journals with poetry, poetry reviews and articles. She has been a member of Roundtable Poetry workshop and treasurer for Youngstreet poetry Workshop. She has published three books: You Chase After Your Likeness (Roundtable Press 2002), and The Edge of Everything (short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Award 2008,and winner of the NSW Women Writers’ Biennial Poetry Award 2009) and Thick and Thin Lines, 2012 (both the latter books with Puncher and Wattmann). She is represented in Contemporary Australian Poetry 2016 eds Martin Langford, Judy Beveridge, Judy Johnson and David Musgrave (Puncher and Wattmann). Her most recent publication is an excerpt from this submitted manuscript called `John Monash in Gallipoli and France’ (Newcastle poetry prize anthology 2016).

Nathan Curnow is an award-winning poet, spoken word performer and past editor of Going Down Swinging. His previous books include The Ghost Poetry Project, RADAR and The Right Wrong Notes. His most recent collection is The Apocalypse Awards (Australian Scholarly Publishing). His work is published widely in Australia and overseas, and features in numerous issues of Best Australian Poems (Black Inc).  


Giles Hugo is a photographer, writer and journalist who first wielded a 35mm camera with intent in late 1968 in his native South Africa. Working in newspapers there and in Swaziland taught him a range of photographic skills —shooting, developing and printing a photo in under 45 minutes, or less, and tackling any subject from portraits to beauty pageants, soccer, motor sport, boxing, ghetto jazz and rock musicians, and street life. Most of that was black and white work, with an occasional roll of slide film for special projects and artistic exploration. He upgraded through 35mm SLRs to Leica rangefinders and various lenses. He still enjoys using older lenses, mostly Leica and Canon, to explore subjects and qualities of light.


Harry Spitz Born in Brooklyn raised in the Bronx. My father worked on developing missiles for Curtis Write, medicine for Squibs and then Chemicals for Cyanimid. My Mother painted wonderful Expressionist paintings I spent my childhood in the woods of New Jersey, bringing home frogs, turtles and fish from a local pond. I spent a great deal of time staring at microbes through a cheap litle microscope. I went to The Philadelphia College of Art (now known as The University of the Arts) where I Studied with Rafael Ferrer and Robert Keyser. After college I moved to San Francisco Where I showed my paintings in The Dada Postcard Mostly Flowers Gallery, The Lawson Gallery and the Nanny Goat Hill Gallery. At this time my work was influenced by Leger, Dubuffet, Garcia Torres and Matisse (artists that still hold a powerful place in my mind) Then in 1976 I moved to NYC Where I worked with the Multi media Artist Gh Hovagimyan and for Gordan Matta Clarke (best known for his carving old buildings into powerful sculptures) I helped to organize a show and performance event space called Salute to Creative Youth (a show that included several Artist who became notable. I won a National Endowment for the Arts in 1978. I organized and participated in a Brooklyn open studio show in Dumbo, Brooklyn . I was one of the founding Members of ABC No Rio , a Lower East Side of Manhattan alternative space. I showed my Metallic Relief Wave works in The Ezair Gallery in 2008. Since then I have decided to make works that can be stored digitally so I don't have to take up any more real estate to keep my Art. In Recent times I've been showing In Pop up shows with John Kuchera who has organized the gallery Art Collection NYC .

K A Nelson is a Canberra poet.  She has lived and worked in NZ, PNG, Italy and in NT desert settlements and towns.   After winning the Overland's Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets in 2010, she began sending her poems out for publication.  Recent Work Press will publish her first collection this year 

Alejo Steimberg (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1974) has a PhD in Literary Theory (Universidad de Extremadura, Spain). He lives in Brussels since 2002. He writes mostly in Spanish, but he is getting less and less shy -or more and more reckless, who knows- about multilingual writing. His last publication on the Net is a short anthology in Revista Álastor. You can read some of his French poems here and here.

Odveig Klyve is a Norwegian writer and film director. She is the author of nine volumes of poetry, and eight children’s books (a.o.). Her poems are translated into several languages: She often performs her work together with musicians.

Klyve also has translated work of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, and the English poets. Sarah Maguire and Gerda Mayer into Norwegian.

Odveig Klyve has written and directed several short films, selected for international festivals in Europe, USA and India.

She lives in Stavanger at the west coast of Norway.

website: www.odveigklyve.no

 

Shubigi Rao (b. Bombay, India, lives and works in Singapore) is an artist and writer who makes layered installations of books, etchings, drawings, pseudo-scientific machines, metaphysical puzzles and video. Her interests include archaeology, neuroscience, libraries, archival systems, histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history. She is currently visiting libraries and archives globally for 'Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book', a decade-long film, book, and art project about the history of book destruction.

Publications include Written in the Margins (2017), Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, Vol. I of V (2016), and History’s Malcontents: The Life and Times of S. Raoul (2013). Notable exhibitions include solo shows Written in the Margins (2017), The Retrospectacle of S. Raoul (2013), Useful Fictions (2013), and group shows Dear Painter (2015), Shubigi Rao: Exquisite Corpse, (under Curating Lab, NUS Museum Singapore 2015), Modern Love (2014), Still Building (2012).

She was featured in 10^th Taipei Biennial (2016), 3^rd Pune Biennale (2017), 2^nd Singapore Biennale (2008), and Singapore Writers Festival (2013, 2016).

Her awards include a year-long residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany, (June 2016 – May 2017), residency at Khoj, India (Sept-Oct 2017), an artist residency at NTU CCA Singapore (Oct 2015 – Jan 2016), the Creation (2013) and Presentation (2013, 2012) grants from National Arts Council Singapore, and twice the Award for Excellence in the Arts for most outstanding student of the year (MFA First Class 2008, BFA First Class 2006).     www.shubigi.com

Elif Sezen is an Australian/Turkish multidisciplinary artist, bilingual poet/writer. Her collection of poems 'Universal Mother' was published by GloriaSMH Press in 2016; and her chapbook 'The Dervish with Wings' in 2017. She published her Turkish translation of Ilya Kaminsky’s 'Dancing in Odessa' in 2014; her own first work in Turkish Gece Düşüşü (Fall.Night.) was published by Hayal Press in 2012. She lives in Melbourne. www.elifsezen.com

Christopher (Kit) Kelen is an Australian poet, scholar and painter. The most recent of his dozen English-language volumes of poetry is Scavengers Season (Puncher and Wattmann). He has had ten painting exhibitions in the last decade – in China, Australia, Portugal and Sweden. Kelen has worked extensively with poetry translators in various parts of the world, but especially in China, where he has facilitated the translation of many young Chinese poets into English and of many Australian poets into Chinese. Volumes of Kelen’s own poetry have been published in Chinese, French, Indonesian, Portuguese, Filipino, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. Greek and Japanese collections are in preparation. A new (English-language) volume Poor Man’s Coat – Hardanger Poems is forthcoming from University of Western Australia Press in 2018. In 2017, Kelen had poems shortlisted for the Newcastle and Montreal Poetry Prizes. Kelen’s main scholarly interests have been in Children’s Literature, Poetry and Poetics and Creative Writing Pedagogy. He has published many articles and two monographs concerning national anthems and patriotic songs. With Prof Björn Sundmark, Kelen has edited two Routledge collections on Children’s Literature: The Nation in Children’s Literature (2013) and Child Autonomy and Child Governance in Children’s Literature (2017). Kelen is Emeritus Professor at the University of Macau, in south China, where he taught Literature and Creative Writing for many years, and continues to supervise PhD students. Kelen lives on a small rural holding between great forests in the Myall Lakes Region of New South Wales.