Jane Alger is the Director of Dublin UNESCO City of Literature. The office was set up in September 2010 following Dublin’s designation in July 2010. She was the main researcher and coordinator for the Dublin application and was also instrumental in Dublin’s previous application to UNESCO for World Book Capital status. Formerly a Divisional Librarian and chief stock buyer with Dublin City Libraries, her previous brief was to promote reading and the reading experience in Dublin. She nurtured the growth of book clubs in Dublin City Libraries with the result that the branch libraries’ network currently supports 145 clubs. The first Readers’ Day in Ireland was started by Jane in Dublin in 2002. She also introduced the Reader Development concept to Ireland. Dublin: One City One Book, the multi-award winning annual celebration of a book with Dublin connections, was started by Jane in 2006. Promoting international links through writing and writers as well as nurturing emerging writers are two of her priorities in her new post.
Su Baker is Director of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She has degrees from Curtin University and Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and holds a Doctorate of Creative Arts from Curtin University of Technology. In March 2000 Su moved from Sydney, where she worked for 20 years, including at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and took up the position she held until 2010 as Head of the School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her current work explores the shift in contemporary painting practices from the critique of representation, prevalent in the latter part of the 20th century, to one more akin to participation in an event. Through specific installation strategies in the exhibition of paintings and critical writing her research presents the critical tension between humanist values and associated critical debates on modernism and the discursive field collected under the term ‘posthumanisim’. This research calls for a rethinking of current modes of art criticism in relation to contemporary painting and identified a significant shift from acts of representation to the staging of ‘painting events’. It is the intention of this research to promote a reinvestment in the silent, visual, libidinal economy of painting with an intellectual gravitas and an underlying seriousness, invoking the ‘voice’ of serious pleasure. Su Baker has exhibited nationally over the last 20 years in public and commercial galleries, including numerous solo and selected group exhibitions and national survey shows. She has received Australia Council for the Arts grants and awards. Her work has been collected by private and public collections.
Michael Biggs MA PhD FRSA FHEA is Professor of Aesthetics at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is also Visiting Professor in Arts-based Research in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden; and Visiting Research Professor at Presbyterian University Mackenzie, São Paulo. He was Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Bergen in 1994, and has degrees in both Fine Art and Philosophy. He was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1989, and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2007. Michael was Associate Dean and led Faculty research during the UK RAE period 2002-08. He has been involved in the development of doctoral programs in Art and Design in the UK, and has advised national and international research development. He is the principal organiser of the internationally renowned biennial Research into Practice conference at the University of Hertfordshire. He has experience as a supervisor of traditional and practice-based PhDs in the UK and Europe, and of PhD by published works, and as a PhD examiner. He is a member of the College of Peers of the Arts and Humanities Research Council <http://www.ahrc.ac.uk>, and the Visual Arts advisory panel for the Arts and Humanities Data Service. He is a reviewer for MIT Press, Blackwell Publishing, and other international presses, and EU registered expert for FP7. He is widely published in the field of practice-led research including his most recent work The Routledge companion to research in the arts which he co-edited with H Karlsson.
Donna Lee Brien is Professor, Creative Industries and Director, Research, in the School of Creative and Performing Arts, CQUniversity, Australia. Widely published on writing pedagogy and praxis, creative non-fiction and related areas, Donna has an MA and PhD in creative writing. Her biography John Power 1881-1943 is the standard work on this expatriate artist. Founding Editor, dotlit: the online journal of creative writing, Donna is currently Special Issues Editor, TEXT: The Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. She is also Foundation Editorial Board member, Locale: The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies, and Past President, Australasian Association of Writing Programs. Her current research includes projects on creative arts’ doctoral examination standards, and Australian food writers.
Kevin Brophy is author of eleven books, including the poetry collection, Mr Wittgenstein’s lion and new essays, Patterns of creativity. He is Professor of Creative Writing in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He was 2009 co-winner of the Australian Book Review/Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay. His collection of short fiction, What men and women do, was runner-up for the Christina Stead Award.
Owen Bullock has published a work of non-fiction, Making canons and finding flowers—a study of selected New Zealand poetry anthologies; a book of haiku, wild camomile; the novella A Cornish story; a collection of longer poems, sometimes the sky isn’t big enough; and a number of chapbooks of poetry and haiku. He has edited several poetry magazines, including Bravado, Kokako and Poetry NZ. He was recently appointed to the editorial board of Take five, an annual anthology of English-Language tanka poetry. He teaches creative writing for the Waiariki Institute of Technology and lives near Katikati in the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Owen has a website at: http://www.owenbullock.com/
Adrian Caesar was Associate Professor of English at University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy until 2004. More recently he has had spells teaching Creative Writing part-time at ANU while concentrating on his own writing. He is the author of several books of literary criticism including Dividing lines: poetry, class and ideology in the 1930s and Taking it like a man: suffering, sexuality and the war poets. His non-fiction novel, The white won the Victorian Premier’s Award for non-fiction and the ACT Book of the Year in 2000. He has also published four books of poetry, including his latest publication High wire.
Patricia Duncker is the author of five novels, Hallucinating Foucault, shortlisted for the IMPAC award and winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize, James Miranda Barry, The deadly space between, Miss Webster and Cherif, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2007, and The strange case of the composer and his judge, shortlisted for the 2010 Gold Dagger Award for the Best Crime Novel of the Year. She has also written two collections of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana's lemon trees, shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Seven tales of sex and death, all of which have been widely translated. Her critical work includes Sisters and strangers: an introduction to contemporary feminist fiction and a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature, Writing on the wall: selected essays. She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.
John Frow is Professor of English and an ARC Professorial Fellow at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Marxism and literary history (1986), Cultural studies and cultural value (1995), Time and commodity culture (1997), Accounting for tastes: Australian everyday cultures (with Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison, 1999), and Genre (2006). He has also published well over 100 articles and book chapters: a full list can be found at http://sydney.edu.au/arts/english/images/content/staff/profiles/frow/Frow_publications.pdf. A collection of essays, The practice of value, will be published by UWA Publishing later this year.
Ross Gibson is Professor of Contemporary Arts at the University of Sydney. As part of his research in this role, he makes books, films and art installations and he encourages postgraduate students in similar pursuits.
Lelia Green is Professor of Communications and a co-Chief Investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). Author of The internet: an introduction to new media and of Technoculture: from alphabet to cybersex, Lelia has also published more than 80 refereed papers and chapters and serves on the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Communication. She is an Associate Editor of Media International Australia. In addition to her work with the CCI, Lelia is (or has been) first Chief Investigator on three Discovery projects (looking at parents’ and peers’ impacts on young people’s internet use; the internet in Australian family life; and at Muslim and non-Muslim Australians’ constructions of fear and terror); and five ARC Linkage projects (three on online community, with the National Heart Foundation and Breast Cancer Care, Western Australia; another with a public transport provider examining safety communication culture; and the most recent project with Landgate’s FireWatch satellite system and remote and rural community engagement). As a former television researcher and director, Lelia has had a career-long commitment to applied research in media and the creative industries, including informal locales such as FanFiction and LAN/Gaming circles. She also investigates relationships which use media and communication technologies to connect individuals to each other and to their communities. Latterly, her involvement in creative and performing arts research has seen her contribute to critiques of practice-led methods that lead to non-traditional research outputs. She is an unpublished novelist and has significant progress towards an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia.
Graeme Harper, DCA, PhD is Director of the Oakland Honors College and Professor of English (Creative Writing) at Oakland University, Michigan. He has also worked in Texas, Alabama, Wales, England and Australia and is an Honorary Professor at Edge Hill University and the University of Bedfordshire. From 2008-2011, he was the inaugural Chair of the Higher Education Committee at the UK’s National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE). He is founding Editor-in-Chief of New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, co-editor (with O Evans) of Studies in European cinema and editor (with C Johnston and O Evans) of the Journal of European Popular Culture. Associate Editor of the Creative Industries Journal, he is also a peer board member of Writing Commons. Writing as himself or as Brooke Biaz, some of his works include On creative writing; Camera phone; Cinema and landscape (with J Rayner); The creative writing guidebook; Moon dance; Creative writing studies: Practice, research, pedagogy (with J Kroll); Teaching creative writing; The unsilvered screen: Surrealism on film (with R Stone); Small maps of the world; Signs of life: cinema and medicine (with A Moor); Comedy, fantasy and colonialism; Colonial and postcolonial incarceration; and Black cat, green field. Inside creative writing and The invention of medicine are forthcoming.
Jennifer Harrison is a Melbourne poet and child psychiatrist who runs the Neuropsychiatry Clinic and Developmental Assessment Program for youth and children at the Alfred Hospital. She has written five poetry collections, the most recent being Colombine: new and selected poems. Among other awards, she has won the Anne Elder Poetry Award and the Martha Richardson Poetry Medal. She recently co-edited Motherlode: Australian women’s poetry 1986-2008. She teaches in the Department of Psychological Medicine at Monash University and the University of Melbourne.
Dennis Haskell is the author of six collections of poetry, and 13 volumes of literary scholarship and criticism. His All the time in the world won the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2007 and is being translated into French, Italian and Chinese. Haskell was Co-editor of the journal, Westerly from 1985-2009 and is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. He is also currently Chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. His Acts of defiance: new and selected poems was recently published.
Susan Hawthorne is the author of six collections of poetry, a novel, political theory and a quiz book. Her poetry collections include The language in my tongue, Bird, The butterfly effect, Unsettling the land (with Suzanne Bellamy), Earth’s breath and Cow. Her other titles include The falling woman, Wild politics and The spinifex quiz book. She has a BA (Hons) from La Trobe University in Philosophy, an MA (Prelim) in Ancient Greek language and a PhD in Political Science and Women’s Studies both from the University of Melbourne, and a post-graduate Diploma in Sanskrit from La Trobe. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Writing Program at James Cook University, Townsville. In 2009, Susan was an Asialink Literature Resident at the University of Madras, Chennai. She has lectured, spoken and performed at festivals and conferences around Australia and in New Zealand, USA, Canada, UK, India, France, Bangladesh, Netherlands, Germany, Korea, Spain, Fiji, South Africa, and Uganda. Susan is also an aerialist, a political activist and a publisher and as Director of Spinifex Press has played a leading role among independent Australian publishers in innovative and eBook publishing.
Janette Turner Hospital was educated at the University of Queensland, Australia and at Queen's University, Canada. Her first novel, The ivory swing, won Canada’s Seal Award in 1982 and was published internationally. She has published eight novels and three collections of short stories in multiple languages and has won numerous literary awards. A new story collection, Forecast: turbulence will be published by Harper Collins/Fourth Estate in November. Since 1999 she has been Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.
Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels Black mirror, Sixty lights, Dreams of speaking and Sorry. Shortlisted three times for the Miles Franklin Award, her prizes include the WA Premier's Award for Fiction, the Nita B. Kibble Award, the Steele Rudd Award, the Age Book of the Year Award, the Adelaide Festival Award for Fiction and the ASAL Gold Medal. She has also been shortlisted for international awards, including the IMPAC and the Prix Femina. Her fiction has been translated into nine languages. Before coming to the University of Western Sydney Gail worked in the Department of English at the University of Western Australia. In 2001 she received the Australian Universities Teaching Award for Humanities and the Arts. Her academic interests are in narrative, cinema, cultural studies, contemporary literature and Australian literature.
Paul Kane, poet, critic, and editor, has published five collections of poems: The farther shore, Drowned lands, Work life, A slant of light; and The scholar’s rock (a selected poems in Chinese translation); two editions with The Library of America, Ralph Waldo Emerson: collected poems and translations (co-edited with Harold Bloom) and Emerson: essays and poems; three anthologies, including Poetry of the American renaissance; a critical study, Australian poetry: Romanticism and negativity; and a collaboration with the photographer William Clift, A Hudson landscape. He has served as poetry editor of Antipodes since 1987 and is the Artistic Director of the Mildura Writers Festival in Australia. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at Yale University and Monash University and is currently Professor of English at Vassar College.
Nigel McLoughlin is Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire. His is a prize-winning poet with five full collections in print, the latest of which is Chora: new & selected poems. He has published widely in prestigious literary journals and has been invited to read his work at major literary festivals in the UK and abroad. He is Editor of Iota, a poetry journal of established national reputation and Editor of Creative Writing: Teaching Theory and Practice, a journal devoted to the theory and practice of Creative Writing pedagogy. He is Vice-Chair of the UK National Association of Writers in Education.
Bill Manhire directs the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. His Collected poems appeared in 2001, while more recent collections are the award-winning Lifted and Victims of Lightning; a ‘Selected poems’ will be published next year. With the physicist Paul Callaghan he led the sci-art project, Are angels ok? He has spent time in Antarctica, and edited the 2004 anthology of Antarctic poetry and fiction, The wide white page: writers imagine Antarctica. His collaborations with the jazz musician Norman Meehan are available on the CD Buddhist rain.
Andrew Melrose is Professor of Children’s Writing at the University of Winchester, UK. He has published widely in film, fiction, non-fiction, songs, poems and scholarly work; including The story keepers film series—a ‘textual intervention’ on the New Testament broadcast worldwide—and, most recently, Here comes the bogeyman: exploring contemporary issues in writing for children and Monsters under the bed: critically investigating early years writing, to be published by Routledge. He is also the editor of the e-journal Write4Children and a founding member of the TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses international advisory board.
Stephen Muecke is Professor of Creative Writing in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, South Australia, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Recent books are Latour and the Humanities, edited with Rita Felski, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020 and The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-WestAustralia, co-authored with Paddy Roe, Rowman and Littlefield International 2020.
Alvin Pang is a poet, writer, editor and anthologist who has been featured in major festivals and publications in Asia, Australia, Europe and America. A Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, his many publications include City of rain, Over there: poems from Singapore and Australia (co-edited with John Kinsella) and Tumasik: contemporary writing from Singapore. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He was named Singapore’s Young Artist of the Year for Literature in 2005 and received the Singapore Youth Award in 2007 for Arts and Culture.
Francesca Rendle-Short is the author of the novels Bite your tongue and Imago, the novella Big sister, and co-author with scriptwriter Felicity Packard of the short play entitled Us. Her short fictions, photo-essays, exhibition text, and poetry for the page and for the wall, have been published in literary journals and magazines, online and in exhibitions. She has worked variously as a radio producer, teacher, editor, freelance writer and arts journalist. She has a DCA from the University of Wollongong and is the Program Director of Creative Writing at RMIT University. She lives in Melbourne.
Peter Rose is the author of a family memoir, Rose boys which won the National Biography Award in 2003. His latest novel is Roddy Parr. He has also published five poetry collections, most recently Crimson Crop. Throughout the 1990s he was a publisher at Oxford University Press in Australia. Since 2001 he has been Editor of Australian Book Review, in which capacity he is also Writer and Editor in Residence at Flinders University.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, poet and essayist, is an Emeritus Professor in The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. Born in 1934 to a journalist and a pianist, he grew up with a family tradition of military-bohemian Scots. On leaving school he worked at such jobs as cadet metallurgist and electrical trade journalist before finding his metier as poet and as a university teacher. He has lived in Britain, the United States and Italy, as well as in his natal Melbourne, has taught at Harvard and read his poems all round the world. Wallace-Crabbe has published a dozen books of poetry, plus prose works, art criticism and varied anthologies. For diversion he walks, draws and plays tennis.
Terri-ann White has worked in the worlds of books and ideas for all of her professional life. She is currently director and publisher of UWA Publishing, where she has introduced a fiction and poetry list that has received acclaim. From 1999-2011 she was the founding Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia, a cross-disciplinary centre with tendrils out to the larger interested public. Terri-ann established the Arcane Bookshop in Perth straight after university in 1982 and was committed to building a literary community around the bookshop with events and ideas exchange. She has published widely since 1990, with a novel, a collection of short stories, and a range of edited books and collaborations.
Joseph Woods is an Irish poet and Director of Poetry Ireland since 2001. Born in Drogheda, he studied biology, chemistry and subsequently took an MA in poetry. He has lived in Japan, travelled for long periods in Asia—in particular India and China—and more recently in Latin America. His first two collections, Sailing to Hokkaido and Bearings were published by the Worple Press, UK. For his first book, he won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2000. He co-edited Our shared Japan, an anthology of contemporary Irish poetry concerning Japan. Dedalus Press gathered his first two collections in one volume entitled Cargo and in 2011 published his third collection Ocean letters. He has read widely, reviews occasionally and contributes to radio.
Note: Thanks to the late Ian Templeman (1938 —2015) for his contribution to Axon as an Editorial Board member.