Notes on Contributors

THE EDITOR

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, critic, editor and academic. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, an Asialink Literature Residency, and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. She was educated at the University of Queensland and New York University, where she was the 2010 W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar. Her most recent book of poems, The Hazards (UQP), was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, the AFAL John Bray Memorial Poetry Award, the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She presently lives in Brisbane, where she works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at QUT, and the poetry editor of Island.

POETS

Martin Harrison was an Australian poet and essayist. He worked at the ABC as a producer and broadcaster. For many years Martin taught writing and sound studies at the University of Technology in Sydney. The hundreds of students he mentored into successful writing careers constitute part of his legacy. Martin died in September 2014.

Robert Adamson’s latest collection, Net Needle (Black Inc., 2015), was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. The Golden Bird (Black Inc., 2009) won the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The Goldfinches of Baghdad (Flood, 2006) won the Age Book of the Year Award for poetry and was shortlisted for the NSW and Queensland premiers’ awards.

Adam Aitken is the author of four full-length collections of poetry and co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013). His most recent poetry and essays have appeared in Southerly, Axon and Transnational Literature. His memoir, One Hundred Letters Home (Vagabond Press), was published in 2016.

Jordie Albiston has published nine poetry collections and a handbook on poetic form. Jordie possesses an ongoing preoccupation with mathematical constructs and constraints, and the possibilities offered in terms of poetic structure. Her work has won many awards, including the Mary Gilmore Award and the 2010 NSW Premier’s Award. She lives in Melbourne.

Chris Andrews teaches at Western Sydney University. He has published two collections of poems: Cut Lunch (Indigo, 2002) and Lime Green Chair (Waywiser, 2012). He has also translated books of Latin American fiction, including Ema: César Aira the Captive (New Directions, 2016).

Evelyn Araluen is a PhD candidate and educator working with Indigenous literatures at the University of Sydney, and a founding member of Students Support Aboriginal Communities, a NSW grassroots activist network. Her father’s ancestors are Bundjalung, and her mother’s Wiradjuri. She lives between Dharug and Eora country.

Judith Beveridge is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Devadatta’s Poems (Giramondo, 2014), which was shortlisted for the NSW and Queensland premiers’ poetry prizes and the Prime Minister’s Poetry Award. Her new and selected poems will appear in 2017.

Ken Bolton is a poet, art critic, editor and publisher. Originally from Sydney, he has lived in Adelaide since 1982. ‘Dark Heart’ was the name of a not very good exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, in 2014. The version of ‘You’re My Thrill’ is by Pepper Adams.

Peter Boyle was born in Melbourne but has lived most of his life in Sydney. He has seven collections of poetry, most recently Ghostspeaking (Vagabond Press, 2016), Towns in the Great Desert (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013) and Apocrypha (Vagabond Press, 2009). He has translated poetry extensively from French and Spanish.

Michael Brennan is an Australian writer based in Tokyo, Japan. His books include The Imageless World (Salt Publishing, 2003), Unanimous Night (Salt Publishing, 2008) and Autoethnographic (Giramondo, 2012). Since 1999, he has run Vagabond Press (www.vagabondpress.net).

Lisa Brockwell lives on a rural property near Byron Bay, Australia, with her husband and young son. She was runner-up in the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize in 2015. Her first collection, Earth Girls, was published in 2016 by Pitt Street Poetry.

David Brooks’ most recent publications are Open House (poetry: UQP, 2015), Napoleon’s Roads (short fiction: UQP, 2015) and Derrida’s Breakfast (essays: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2016). An Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, he is co-editor of Southerly and the 2015/16 Australia Council Fellow in Fiction.

Kevin Brophy is the author of fourteen books of fiction, poetry and essays, including This is What Gives Us Time (Gloria SMH Press, 2016). In 2015 he was poet in residence at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Lachlan Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields, Sydney. He currently teaches and researches at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga. Lachlan’s first book of poetry, Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2012), was highly commended for the Mary Gilmore Award. His second volume of poetry (forthcoming in 2017) explores aspects of his Chinese/Australian heritage.

Pam Brown has been active in many ventures in the multitudinous and continually shifting zone of Australian poetry and in other cultural scenes for over four decades. She is a contributing editor for several magazines and independent publishers. Her eighteenth book, Missing up, was published by Vagabond Press in 2015.

Joanne Burns’ most recent poetry collection is brush (Giramondo, 2014), the winner of the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. She is currently assembling a selected volume of her work called real land, spanning over four decades of book and journal publication. She lives in Sydney.

Michelle Cahill is an award-winning poet and fiction author. Her recent books are Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo, 2016), Night Birds (Vagabond Press, 2014) and Vishvarupa (Five Islands Press, 2011), which was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in Island, the Weekend Australian and Sydney Review of Books.

Elizabeth Campbell was born in Melbourne in 1980. She has been the recipient of many prizes, including the Vincent Buckley Prize, the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship and an Australia Council residency in Rome. Her books, Letters To The Tremulous Hand (2007) and Error (2011), are published by John Leonard Press.

Bonny Cassidy’s most recent book is Final Theory (Giramondo, 2014). She is Feature Reviews Editor for Cordite Poetry Review, and, with Jessica L. Wilkinson, co-edited Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers, 2016). Bonny lectures in Creative Writing at RMIT University.

Julie Chevalier writes poetry and short fiction in Sydney. Her second poetry collection, Darger: his girls (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012), was awarded the Alec Bolton Prize for an Unpublished Poetry Manuscript, and shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Poetry Prize. Permission to Lie, a short story collection, was published by Spineless Wonders in 2011.

Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. Her books are Burning Rice (2012), Peony (2014) and Painting Red Orchids (2016), all from Pitt Street Poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, the Anne Elder Award and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, amongst others. Another Language is forthcoming with George Braziller in New York City in Spring 2017.

Aidan Coleman lives in Adelaide. His two collections of poetry have been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. He also writes reviews, speeches and Shakespeare textbooks.

Stuart Cooke is a poet and critic based on the Gold Coast, where he lectures at Griffith University. His books include Opera (Five Islands Press, 2016), George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle (Puncher & Wattman, 2014) and Edge Music (Vagabond Press, 2011).

MTC Cronin has published twenty books (poetry, prose poems and essays). Recent collections include In Possession of Loss (Shearsman Books, 2014) and The Law of Poetry (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), the latter of which was written over two decades.

Nathan Curnow is a past editor of Going Down Swinging. His previous books include The Ghost Poetry Project (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009), RADAR (Walleah Press, 2012) and The Right Wrong Notes (Macau ASM, 2015). His most recent collection, The Apocalypse Awards (ASP, 2016), is inspired by the absurdity of the modern world and charts our collective obsession with the end times.

Luke Davies is a poet, novelist and screenwriter. His Interferon Psalms (Allen & Unwin, 2011) won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry. His other books include Running With Light (Allen & Unwin, 1999) and Totem (Allen & Unwin, 2004). The film of his novel Candy (Ballantine Books, 1997), from which Davies adapted his own screenplay, starred the late Heath Ledger. His film Lion premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.

Sarah Day’s most recent book is Tempo (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013), which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and won the University of Melbourne Wesley Michel Wright Prize. She lives in Hobart where she teaches Year 12 Creative Writing. Her poems have been widely anthologised in Australia and overseas.

Joel Deane is a poet, novelist, journalist and speechwriter. His most recent collection of poetry, Year of the Wasp (Hunter Publishers), was published in May 2016.

Jelena Dinic arrived in Australia in 1993, during the collapse of Yugoslavia. She writes in Serbian and in English. Her poems and short stories have appeared in the Australian Poetry Journal, Australian Book Review, Going Down Swinging and many anthologies. Her chapbook Buttons on my Dress was published by Garron Publishing in 2015.

Dan Disney’s most recent publications include either, Orpheus (UWAP, 2016) and Report from a border (with John Warwicker; Light-Trap Press, 2016). He currently teaches with the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul.

Lucy Dougan’s books include White Clay (Giramondo, 2008) and Meanderthals (Web del Sol, 2012). Her latest book, The Guardians (Giramondo, 2015), was shortlisted for the 2015 Queensland premier’s award for poetry and the 2016 Victorian and Western Australian premiers’ awards for poetry. She lectures in Creative Writing at Curtin University and works for Westerly.

Laurie Duggan, born in Melbourne in 1949 and later a resident of Sydney and Brisbane, moved to Faversham, Kent, in 2006. His most recent books are Allotments (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2014) and a reissue of his first two books as East and Under the Weather (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014).

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a poet and memoirist. Her collections of verse include little bit long time (Australian Poetry Centre, 2010), Kami (Vagabond Press, 2010) and Love dreaming & other poems (Vagabond Press, 2012). Her two verse novels are His Father’s Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Ruby Moonlight (Magabala Books, 2012).

Stephen Edgar has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent being Exhibits of the Sun (Black Pepper, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, as was his previous book, Eldershaw (Black Pepper, 2013). A new collection, Transparencies, is forthcoming.

Anne Elvey is the managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, and holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity, Melbourne. Her recent publications include Kin (Five Islands, 2014), shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2015, and This Flesh That You Know (Leaf Press, 2015).

Michael Farrell is from Bombala, NSW and lives in Fitzroy, Melbourne. In 2015 he published Cocky’s Joy (Giramondo) and Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan). Other books include Open Sesame (Giramondo, 2012), A Raiders Guide (Giramondo, 2008), Break Me Ouch (3deep Publishing, 2006) and ode ode (Salt Publishing, 2002), as well as several chapbooks. ‘Death of a Year’ is for Martin, and for the Slovene poet Tomaž Šalamun, both of whom died in 2014.

Liam Ferney’s most recent collection is Content (Hunter Publishing, 2016). His second collection, Boom (Grand Parade Poets, 2013), was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Poetry Prize and the Queensland Poetry Prize. He is a media manager, poet and aspiring left back living in Brisbane, Australia.

Toby Fitch is the poetry editor of Overland. His books include Rawshock (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry 2012, Jerilderies (Vagabond Press, 2014) and, most recently, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond Press, 2016). His poem ‘Janus’ is an inversion of Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Jeunesse’.

Lionel G. Fogarty is a Yugambeh man, born on Wakka Wakka land in South Western Queensland near Murgon on a ‘punishment reserve’. Throughout the 1970s, he worked as an activist for Aboriginal Land Rights and protesting Aboriginal deaths in custody. He has published numerous collections of poetry, including most recently the award-winning Connection Requital (Vagabond Press, 2010) and Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the land (Vagabond Press, 2014).

Tina Giannoukos is a poet, writer, and reviewer. She has held a Varuna Fellowship, has lived and worked in Beijing, and has read her poetry in Greece and China. Her most recent collection is Bull Days (ASP/Arcadia, 2016).

Lisa Gorton lives in Melbourne and writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her two most recent publications, both with Giramondo, are the poetry collection Hotel Hyperion (2013) and a novel, The Life of Houses (2015). Her awards include the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the NSW Premier’s People’s Choice Award for The Life of Houses.

Robert Gray was born in 1945 and lives in Sydney. His most recent books are Coast Road: Selected Poems (Black Inc., 2014), Cumulus: Collected Poems (John Leonard Press, 2013), and The Land I Came Through Last (Giramondo, 2008), a memoir.

Phillip Hall lives in Melbourne’s Sunshine (western suburbs) where he works as a poet and reviewer. He is a very passionate member of the Western Bulldogs Football Club. He also continues, through his writing, to honour First Nations in the Northern Territory’s Gulf of Carpentaria where he has family and friends.

Natalie Harkin is a Narungga woman, a member of the Chester family in South Australia. Her work is an archival-poetic journey that weaves a love of storytelling, activism and resistance-poetics through art and literature, to critically engage with the state’s colonial archives. Her first collection is Dirty Words (Cordite Books, 2015).

Dennis Haskell is the author of eight collections of poetry, the most recent being Ahead of Us (Fremantle Press, 2016) and What Are You Doing Here? (University of The Philippines Press, 2015). He is a Member of the Order of Australia for ‘services to literature, particularly poetry, to education and to intercultural understanding’, and currently Chair of the Board of writingWA.

Dominique Hecq, born in the French-speaking part of Belgium, has spent most of her life in Australia. Her work crosses disciplines, genres and languages, resisting categorisation. She is the author of fifteen full-length works ranging from poetry, fiction and drama to books about creative writing informed by psychoanalysis. Having recently reconnected with her mother tongue, her works in progress include Duel (a bilingual collection) and Envol d’aube.

Paul Hetherington has published ten poetry collections, most recently Burnt Umber (UWAP, 2016), along with five chapbooks. He won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award (poetry) and was shortlisted for the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Recently he completed an Australia Council Residency in the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome.

Fiona Hile’s first full-length collection, Novelties (Hunter Publishers, 2013), was awarded the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She has been a recipient of the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize and was awarded second place in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Subtraction, will be published in 2016.

LK Holt lives in Melbourne. Her first collection of poems, Man Wolf Man (John Leonard Press, 2007), won the 2009 Kenneth Slessor Prize in the NSW Premier’s Awards. Patience, Mutiny shared the 2011 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. Her most recent collection is Keeps (John Leonard Press, 2014).

Andy Jackson’s most recent collections are Immune Systems (Transit Lounge, 2015) and That knocking (Little Windows, 2016). Music our bodies can’t hold, forthcoming from Hunter Publishers, consists of portrait poems of other people with Marfan Syndrome. He blogs about poetry and bodily otherness irregularly at amongtheregulars. wordpress.com.

Lisa Jacobson is the author of three books of poetry: Hair & Skin & Teeth (Five Islands Press, 1995); The Sunlit Zone (Five Islands Press, 2012), which won the Adelaide Festival John Bray Poetry Award and was shortlisted in four other national awards; and South in the World (UWAP, 2014). A new chapbook, The Asylum Poems, will be published in 2016.

Clive James, born and raised in Australia, has spent most of his career in England, but publishes prose and poetry all over the world. In the last few years he has been ill but continues to write, and among his publications in this later period have been a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, two books of criticism, Poetry Notebook (Picador, 2014) and Latest Readings (YUP, 2015), and a collection of poems, Sentenced to Life (Picador, 2015). His Collected Poems was released in 2016 (Picador).

Virginia Jealous’s travel journalism, essays and poems appear in publications in several countries. Her long-term obsession is with the extraordinary poet Laurence Hope – aka Violet Nicolson – who died in Madras in 1904. Virginia is based in Denmark, Western Australia.

A. Frances Johnson’s poetry collections include The Pallbearer’s Garden (Whitmore Press, 2008), and The Wind-up Birdman of Moorabool Street (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012), which received the 2012 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. In 2015 she was awarded the Griffith University Josephine Ulrick Prize. A third collection, Rendition for Harp and Kalashnikov, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann.

Jill Jones’ latest book, The Leaves are My Sisters, is part of a new chapbook series from Little Windows Press, Adelaide. Other recent books include The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013), which won the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, and Breaking the Days (Whitmore Press, 2015). She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide.

Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a poet, scholar and visual artist, and Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he has taught Creative Writing and Literature for the last sixteen years. His poetry has been published in Chinese, Portuguese, French, Italian, Swedish, Indonesian and Filipino languages. Japanese and Greek collections are forthcoming. The most recent of Kelen’s dozen English language books is Scavenger’s Season (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014).

Cate Kennedy writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction and lives in the town of Castlemaine in Central Victoria. Her most recent poetry collection, The Taste of River Water (Scribe, 2011), received the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. She works as a teacher and occasional editor, and is currently at work on an ambitious mutiple-viewpoint novel, which is proving a little troublesome.

John Kinsella is the author of many books of poetry, fiction and criticism. Recent poetry volumes are Firebreaks (WW Norton, 2016) and Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016). John is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University.

Andy Kissane’s books include Out to Lunch (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015) and Radiance (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Victorian and Western Australian premiers’ prizes and the Adelaide Festival Awards. He was the winner of Australian Poetry Journal’s 2015 Poem of the Year. His website is andykissane.com.

Shari Kocher is the author of The Non-Sequitur of Snow (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015). She holds a PhD from Melbourne University and currently works as a freelance editor, scholar and poet. See: carapacedreaming.wordpress.com.

Simeon Kronenberg has published poetry and essays in Australian poetry journals and anthologies, including Australian Love Poems 2013, Meanjin, Southerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Contrappasso and Cordite Poetry Review. In 2014 he won the Second Bite Poetry Prize. In 2015 he was shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize and in 2016 the Grieve Prize. He lives and works in Sydney.

Verity Laughton is a South Australian-based playwright and poet. She is currently undertaking a PhD in political theatre at Flinders University. Her most recent work was the verbatim theatre piece The Red Cross Letters in August, 2016.

Anthony Lawrence’s most recent book is Headwaters (Pitt Street Poetry, 2016). His many awards include The Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, the Blake Poetry Prize, the New South Wales Premier’s Award, the Newcastle Poetry prize and the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize. He teaches Writing Poetry at Griffith University, Gold Coast, and lives at Hastings Point, NSW.

Bronwyn Lea’s recent collections of poems include The Deep North: A Selection of Poems (Braziller 2013) and The Other Way Out (Giramondo 2008). She lives in Brisbane.

Emma Lew is from Melbourne. Her most recent publication is Luminous Alias (Vagabond Press, 2012).

Kate Lilley is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Versary (Salt Publishing, 2002) and Ladylike (UWAP, 2012). Versary won the Grace Leven Prize and both books were shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize. Her new book, Tilt, is forthcoming with Vagabond Press in 2017.

Debbie Lim was born in Sydney and currently lives in Germany. Her poems have regularly appeared in The Best Australian Poems. Her chapbook Beastly Eye was published in 2012 (Vagabond Press).

Kate Llewellyn is the author of twenty-four books comprising eight of poetry, nine of memoir and four of travel as well as essays, nature writing and autobiography. She is the co-editor of The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986) and the author of the bestseller The Waterlily: A Blue Mountains Journal (Hudson Publishing, 1993). Her two latest books are A Fig at the Gate (Allen & Unwin, 2014), a book of nature writing, and First Things First (Wakefield Press, 2015), an anthology of her letters to friends.

Cameron Lowe lives in Geelong. His two book-length collections of poetry are Porch Music (Whitmore Press, 2010) and Circle Work (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013).

Jennifer Maiden has published twenty-two books – twenty poetry collections and two novels – many of which have won major awards. Her early novel Play with Knives (Allen & Unwin, 1990) has recently been re-published in a free online revised edition by Quemar Press (quemarpress.weebly.com).

Caitlin Maling is a WA poet. Her first collection Conversations I’ve Never Had (Fremantle Press, 2015), was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Award and the WA Premier’s Awards. A second collection, Border Crossing, is scheduled for February 2017.

David Malouf is the author of poems, fiction, libretti and essays. In 1996, his novel Remembering Babylon was awarded the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1998 Boyer Lectures were published as A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness (ABC, 1998). In 2000 he was selected as the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. His most recent novel is Ransom (Chatto & Windus, 2009).

David McCooey’s latest collection of poems, Star Struck, was published in 2016 by UWA Publishing. His previous collection, Outside, (Salt Publishing, 2011), was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, and was a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s ‘Best Writing Award’. David is a Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University in Geelong.

Kate Middleton is an Australian writer. She is the author of the poetry collections Fire Season (Giramondo, 2009), which was awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, and Ephemeral Waters (Giramondo, 2013), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award in 2014.

Peter Minter is a poet, poetry editor and writer on poetry and poetics. He teaches Indigenous Studies, Creative Writing and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, and his most recent book, In The Serious Light of Nothing, was published by the Chinese University Press Hong Kong in 2013.

Les Murray lives in Bunyah, near Taree in New South Wales. He has published some thirty books. His work is studied in schools and universities around Australia and has been translated into several foreign languages. His collection Waiting for the Past (Black Inc., 2015) won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for poetry. His latest collection, On Bunyah, was published by Black Inc. in 2015.

π.o. Born: Katerini/Greece 1951. Came to Australia 1954. Raised: Fitzroy (inner suburb of Melbourne). Occupation: retired draughtsman i.e. now a Gentleman. By disposition and history is an Anarchist. Is currently editor of the experimental magazine UNUSUAL WORK. His latest book is Fitzroy the biography – an instant classic!

Ella O’Keefe is a poet and researcher living in Melbourne, Australia. She was the winner of the 2015 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Steamer, Text Journal and Plumwood Mountain. Her first chapbook, Rhinestone, was published by Stale Objects dePress in 2015. She has produced radio pieces for community and national broadcasters and is the Audio Producer for Cordite Poetry Review.

Meredi Ortega was born in Albany and grew up in Tom Price, WA. She won the Science Poetry Prize 2013 and came third in the Resurgence Poetry Prize 2015. She lives in Scotland.

Geoff Page has published twenty-two collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include 1953 (UQP, 2013), Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry, 2013), New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013), Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (Picaro Press, 2014), Gods and Uncles (Pitt Street Poetry, 2015), and PLEVNA: A Verse Biography (UWAP, 2016). He also edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and The Best Australian Poems 2015 (Black Inc.).

Charmaine Papertalk-Green grew up in Mullewa and lives in Geraldton. She won the 2006 National NAIDOC Poster Competition for her work entitled Life Circle.

Felicity Plunkett’s Vanishing Point (UQP, 2009) won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize and was shortlisted for several other awards. Seastrands (2011) was published by Vagabond Press. She is the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). Her poem ‘What the Sea Remembers’ was shortlisted in the 2015 Montreal International Poetry Prize.

Claire Potter is from Perth, Western Australia. She has published two chapbooks, In Front of a Comma (Poets Union, 2006), and N’ombre (Vagabond Press, 2007), and a full-length collection, Swallow (Five Islands, 2010). She lives in London.

Hessom Razavi is a doctor and writer who grew up in Tehran, Karachi, Manchester and Perth. His poetry has featured in Gargouille, Mascara Literary Review and the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. He is currently working on his first collection.

Peter Rose is the author of six poetry collections, the most recent being The Subject of Feeling (UWAP, 2015). His family memoir, Rose Boys (Allen & Unwin, 2001), has now been published as a Text Classic.

Robyn Rowland has nine books of poetry, including Line of Drift (Doire Press, Ireland, Irish Arts Council sponsored, 2015), and the bilingual This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915, Turkish translation by Mehmet Ali Çelikel (Five Islands Press, Australia; Bilge Kultur Sanat, Turkey, Municipality of Çanakkale sponsored, 2014).

Gig Ryan’s seventh book, New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2011; Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books, UK), was winner of the 2012 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the 2012 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. She has also written songs with Disband – ‘Six Goodbyes’ (1988) – and Driving Past – ‘Real Estate’ (1999) and ‘Travel’ (2006). She is Poetry Editor of the Age and a freelance reviewer, and is working on another book of poems.

Tracy Ryan is a Western Australian poet who has also lived for long periods overseas. Her latest book of poems is Hoard (Whitmore Press, 2015). Her most recent novel is Claustrophobia (Transit Lounge, 2014). She has a new novel forthcoming, also with Transit Lounge.

Omar Sakr is an Arab–Australian poet. His poetry has appeared most recently in Strange Horizons, Going Down Swinging, Overland, and Meanjin, among others. He was awarded the runner-up prize in this year’s Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and his debut collection, these wild houses, is forthcoming from Cordite Books (2017).

Jaya Savige grew up on Bribie Island, Queensland. He is the author of Latecomers (UQP, 2005), Surface to Air (UQP, 2011) and a chapbook, Maze Bright (Vagabond Press, 2014). He read for a PhD on James Joyce at the University of Cambridge, and currently lives in London.

Thomas Shapcott has published 15 collections of poems, as well as eight novels and over 20 libretti. Translations of his work in book form have been published in Hungary, Romania and the Republic of Macedonia. In 1989 he was awarded an Order of Australia for services to literature and in 2000 he won the Patrick White Award. The Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize was named in his honour. He lives in Melbourne.

Alex Skovron’s sixth and most recent collection, Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattman, 2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. A volume of short stories, The Man who Took to his Bed, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann. He lives in Melbourne and works as a freelance editor.

Maria Takolander’s most recent poetry collection is The End of the World (Giramondo, 2014). She is also the author of The Double (Text, 2013), which was shortlisted for the 2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature. She is an Associate Professor in Writing and Literature at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria.

Tim Thorne lives in Launceston, Tasmania. The latest of his fourteen collections of poetry is The Unspeak Poems and other verses (Walleah Press, 2014). He has twice been a finalist in the National Poetry Slam. In 2012 he won the Christopher Brennan Award and in 2014 the Gwen Harwood Prize.

John Tranter has won many Australian poetry prizes and has published over twenty books, including Starlight (UQP, and BlazeVox Books, Buffalo, USA, 2010), and Heart Starter (Puncher & Wattmann, and BlazeVox Books, Buffalo, USA, 2015). He is the founder of the Australian Poetry Library (poetrylibrary.edu.au), of Jacket magazine (jacketmagazine.com), and of Journal of Poetics Research (poeticsresearch.com). He has a WordPress journal at johntranter. net, and a static HTML homepage at johntranter.com.

Ellen van Neerven is a Yugambeh woman living in Brisbane. Her debut work of fiction, Heat and Light, has won several prestigious awards. Comfort Food, her first poetry collection, was published by UQP in 2016.

Ann Vickery is a Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She is the author of Devious Intimacy (Hunter Publishers, 2015), The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon (Vagabond Press, 2014), Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2007) and Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2000).

Chris Wallace-Crabbe lives in Brunswick. He taught literature for many years at Melbourne University, and also overseas. Mainly a poet, he also collaborates on artists’ books, most recently Imagined Cities (NGV, 2016) with Jan Senbergs. His latest books of poetry are My Feet Are Hungry (Pitt Street Poets, 2014) and Afternoon in the Central Nervous System (George Braziller, 2015).

Simon West is a poet and Italianist, and Honorary Fellow in the School of Languages at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Ladder (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), and a translation and critical edition of The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (Troubadour, 2009).

Petra White works as a policy adviser. Her fourth collection of poetry is forthcoming from Gloria SMH in 2017.

Jessica L. Wilkinson is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry. She has published two poetic biographies, marionette: notes toward the life and times of miss marion davies (Vagabond Press, 2012) and Suite for Percy Grainger (Vagabond Press, 2014). She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Fiona Wright’s book of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance (Giramondo, 2015), won the 2016 Kibble Award, and her poetry collection, Knuckled (Giramondo, 2011), won the 2012 Mary Gilmore Award. She has recently completed a PhD at Western Sydney University’s Writing & Society Research Centre.

Ouyang Yu, now Professor of English at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, has to date published 82 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, literary criticism and translation in English and Chinese. His latest book in Chinese is A History of Literary Exchange between Australia and China (Showwe Press, Taiwan, 2016).

Fay Zwicky began publishing poetry and short stories as an undergraduate at Melbourne University. She has been a concert pianist and was a Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Western Australia. She now devotes her time entirely to writing. Fay has received a number of awards for her writing. Her most recent publication with UQP is the collection Fay Zwicky: Poems 1970–1992 (1993).

Billy Marshall Stoneking’s first collection of poems, Ear Ink (Dead Center Vanity Press), appeared in 1979. A major collection, Singing the Snake: Poems from the Western Desert 1979–1988, was published by Angus & Robertson in 1990. With Eric Beach and others, he was involved in the foundation of the Poets Union of Australia. He was also involved in the performance poetry scene, and featured in the performance poetry anthology Off the Record, edited by π.o. (1985). Billy died in July 2016.