Authors

Listed below is a little bio about each of our authors. If you’d like to contact one of our authors, please let us know and we’ll pass on your details.

SERIES SIX

Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning scholar and widely anthologised prose poet. She was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University in 2016 and a Visiting Fellow in Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, in 2014. She is the series editor of the Spineless Wonders anthologies of microliterature and has judged awards including the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the Lord Mayor’s Prize for Poetry. She is an Associate Professor of Writing and Literature and the current poetry editor of Westerly magazine.

Ian Gibbins trained in zoology and pharmacology before becoming a neuroscientist for thirty years and Professor of Anatomy for twenty of them at Flinders University, South Australia. He retired in 2014. Ian was internationally recognised for his research on the microscopic organisation of the nerves communicating between the spinal cord and the internal organs. Along the way, he won awards for his research, teaching and curriculum development, and communicating science to the public. Ian is now a widely published poet, video artist, and electronic musician, employing diverse styles and media, often with strong links back to his science roots. His video and audio work has featured in several gallery exhibitions, public art commissions, performances and international festivals. Ian actively supports the Adelaide poetry scene, not least by running websites and various poetry events. He also has a key role in managing the Adelaide Festival of Ideas.

Paul Hetherington has published 13 full-length collections of poetry. He won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award (poetry) and the 1996 Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. He was a finalist in the 2018 international AestheticaCreative Writing Competition (UK) and the 2017 international Bridport Prize Flash Fiction competition (UK); and commended in the 2016 Newcastle Poetry Prize. In 2015-16 he undertook an Australia Council for the Arts Residency at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome and in 2012 he was awarded one of two places on the Australian Poetry Tour of Ireland. He is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) and a founding editor of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations. He founded the International Prose Poetry Group in 2014.

Jennifer Liston is originally from Galway, Ireland, and now lives in Adelaide, South Australia. She has published three poetry collections and her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Jacket2,The Canberra Times, Verity La, The Found Poetry Review, The Australian Poetry Anthology, Cordite Poetry Review, Transnational Literatureand BestAustralian Poems. She has also written poems for art installations such as the ARTHouse Epicurean ekphrastic project for SALA; ‘Raining Poetry in Adelaide;’and Queensland Poetry Festival’s ‘Letter:Box:Stamp:Collect.’ Jennifer has read at numerous Irish and Australian poetry events and on radio in Ireland and Australia. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. Visit http://jenniferliston.com and http://rescuedpoetry.com.

Jan Owen is a South Australian writer whose seventh book, The Offhand Angel, was published in London by Eyewear Publishing in 2015. Her volume of translations from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Malwas published in the same year by Arc Publications, and a book of satirical limericks, The Wicked Flowers of Charles Baudelaire, came out with Shoestring Press in 2016. She has received various awards including the 2016 Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the Multicultural NSW Early Career Translator Prize.

Dominic Symes is a poet from Adelaide. His poetry has been published in Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Award Winning Australian Writing, Mantra (US), Coldnoon (IND), and Broadsheet (NZ). He was featured in ABR’s States of Poetry Series at the 2017 Adelaide Writers Week. He is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and curates the monthly poetry reading series NO WAVE. His reviews and criticism have been published in Axon: Creative Explorations and Cordite. More of his work appears at http://www.domsymes.com.

 

SERIES FIVE

Peter Goldsworthy has won literary awards across a wide range of genres including the 1982 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the 1988 Australian Bicentennial Poetry prize, the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction, and the inaugural Helpmann Award for Best New Work, shared with composer Richard Mills,  for the opera Batavia.  Five of his novels have been adapted for the stage;  his 1995 novel Wish was recently rereleased in the Text Australian Classics series, and his 1989 novel Maestro as an Angus & Robertson Australian Classic.  New Selected Poems was published in the UK in 2001.  His most recent book is The Rise of the Machines and other love poems.   He is currently working on an opera about Ned Kelly with composer Luke Styles.

Cary Hamlyn was born in Adelaide and graduated from Flinders University with a B.A. majoring in English and Visual Art.  She travelled extensively in Asia and Europe in her twenties and on her return settled in Sydney for five years, where she studied scriptwriting and film production at AFTRS and later worked in the documentary film industry as an assistant film editor. Sick of the stress of freelancing life in Sydney, she moved back to Adelaide in the late 1980’s. After working on several films, she completed a second BA degree, this time in Social Work.  She has worked as a Social Worker and Counsellor since 1992. Cary has been writing poetry since the age of fourteen.  Her poetry has been published widely in anthologies and literary journals around Australia. She has been a guest reader at Ken Bolton’s acclaimed Lee Marvin readings at the AEAF in Adelaide. In 2016, Ginninderra Press published her first poetry collection, Scraping the Night.

Jill Jones has published ten books of poetry, and a number of chapbooks. The most recent are Brink, The Leaves Are My Sisters, The Beautiful Anxiety, which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2015, and Breaking the Days, which was shortlisted for the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and won the 2014 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. She has also won the Kenneth Slessor Award and the Mary Gilmore Award. Her work is represented in major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, The Poet’s Quest for God, and Contemporary Australian Poetry. She has been an invited guest at most of the major literary festivals in Australia as well as poetry festivals in Canada and the Czech Republic, and has appeared as a featured reader in events in the US, UK and NZ. Her poems have been translated into a number of languages including Chinese, French, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish. She was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University for five months in 2014-15. She is a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, University of Adelaide.

David Mortimer writes poems to read aloud. About music and sex, ideas and food, football, cricket, life and death. Suburban poems, local and global, imaginative and philosophical. Born in Adelaide, to poetry-loving parents, surrounded by family and friends with good bookcases and record collections, Mortimer moved straight from nursery rhymes to Hopkins and Keats, Blake and Donne, spoken aloud, spun on the turntable, argued with, and remembered for fun. He studied philosophy and English literature, art and morality, married for fun, has children and grandchildren, lives in Adelaide. His poems have been published widely in journals, magazines and websites, have won prizes and been shortlisted, broadcast and anthologized, including in Global Poetry Anthology (2012) and Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016).

Heather Taylor Johnson is a novelist and poet, editor and sometimes-academic, born in Minnesota. She settled in Adelaide, in 1999.  She worked hard for her PhD and from it came a novel about displacement and belonging, a common theme in her work. She wrote a book of poetry during her candidature about birth and death (other common themes) because during her time at the University of Adelaide she had experienced birth and she had experienced death. She’s ridden her bike all over Australia and she loves Australia – its spare country, its emotional cities, its easy gate – and she writes about it, about all of it. She’s published poems, lyric essays and literary reviews in journals like Meanjin and Southerly, Cordite and Westerly, Griffith Review and TEXT.

SERIES FOUR

Steve Brock was born in Adelaide in 1971, where he lives with his wife and teenage daughter. In 1989 Steve lived in Argentina for a year on an AFS student exchange, and later majored in Spanish at Flinders University. He completed a PhD in contemporary Australian literature at Flinders in 2003. Steve has worked in the public sector as a speechwriter and policy officer, and now works in the higher education sector. He published his first collection of poetry, The Night is a Dying Dog (Wakefield Press) in 2007, and received a grant from Arts SA for the completion of Double Glaze, published by Five Islands Press in 2013. Steve is the co-translator with Sergio Holas and Juan Garrido-Salgado of Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology (Interactive Press 2014). His poetry has featured in the Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.), and has been published in journals in Australia and overseas.

Judy Dally was a Junior Primary teacher for 22 years.  She completed an MA in Literature from Deakin University in 1994, was a tutor in Literature at Adelaide TAFE in the 1980’s and a tutor in Adolescent Fiction at Uni SA in 1991. Judy retired from teaching in 2000 and since 2003 has been a volunteer with Tutti Arts where she sings in the choir and runs weekly reading sessions for young people with a disability. Judy has co-edited two anthologies: Friendly Street Reader Number 20 with Jeff Kemp and Friendly Street Reader No 36 with Louise McKenna.  Her  poems have been published in various newspapers, literary magazines and anthologies as well as the last twenty-eight editions of the Friendly Street Reader. Her collection Asleep in the Teapot was published by Ginninderra Press in 2016.

Alison Flett was born and bred in Scotland. She has been writing poetry since the early 1990s when she was part of a group of writers, including Irvine Welsh and Ali Smith, who were published by small presses Clocktower Press and Rebel Inc. Her work also appeared in many anthologies including Dreamstate: New Scottish Poets (Polygon), Ahead Of Its Time (Jonathan Cape), Modern Scottish Women Poets (Canongate) and 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (Luath Press). Her collection Whit Lassyz Ur Inty was shortlisted for the Saltire Book of the Year Award in 2005.

She has performed her work on national television and radio and at literary festivals in Britain and Europe. Since moving to Adelaide in 2010 she has been published in various anthologies and journals including Cordite, Rabbit, foam:e, Etchings and Australian Love Poems 2013. She has been guest poetry editor for Transnational Literature and was shortlisted for the Whitmore Press Manuscript Award in 2014.

Mike Hopkins was born in London, and lived in England, Wales, Ireland, Zimbabwe and Malawi before settling in Adelaide in 1988. He has an honours degree in Economics from the University of London and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of South Australia. His working life involves translating the garbled thoughts of highly paid, illiterate executives into coherent business English, and cost justifying their desires to spend vast amounts of money on information technology. He has been writing poetry since 2009 having previously written song lyrics for the South Australian Trade Union Choir. He was twice Rostrum South Australia Speaker of the Year, a State finalist in the Australian Poetry Slam in 2012, won the South Australian Libraries World Poetry Day Slam in Adelaide in 2013 and the ‘60 Second Slam’ in the Adelaide Fringe in 2014. His poetry has been published in journals and magazines in Australia and Europe and has featured on both local and national radio. He attended the Seamus Heaney Poetry Summer School at Queens University Belfast in 2014. He is a member of the Poetica and First Draft poetry groups, and an ex-Convenor of Friendly Street Poets. He blogs at: mistakenforarealpoet.wordpress.com.

Louise McKenna was born in the UK and graduated from the University of Leeds with a joint honours degree in English Literature and French. She now lives in South Australia.  Her first poetry collection, A Lesson in Being Mortal, was published by Wakefield Press in 2010.  Her poetry has appeared in numerous Australian journals and overseas publications such as Mascara Literary Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Verity La, Red River Review, Eureka Street and Poetrix.  In 2013 she was shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize. Her work has also appeared in Light and Glorie, an anthology of South Australian poetry published by Pantaenus Press. Louise currently works as a nurse and teacher of French.

SERIES THREE

David Adès is an Adelaide poet and short story writer currently living in Pittsburgh.  He has been a member of Friendly Street Poets since 1979.  His collection Mapping the World was commended for the Anne Elder Award 2008.  In 2012 he was a volunteer editor of the inaugural Australian Poetry Members Anthology Metabolism. His poems have appeared widely in Australia and the U.S. in publications including over 20 of the Friendly Street Readers and numerous literary magazines. Poems have also been published in England, Israel, New Zealand and Romania and regularly anthologized including in Australian Love Poems, The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, APoems 2013, Volume 2 of the Australian Poetry Ltd Members’ Anthology, Once Wild: 2014 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology, Australian Poetry Members Anthology, Volume 3, 2014 and 2014 Anthology of Featured Poets – Moonstone Poetry Series (Philadelphia).  In 2014 David was the winner of the inaugural University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize.

Aidan Coleman has published two collections of poetry Avenues & Runways, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize and Asymmetry, which was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and residencies, most recently at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island (Ireland) and has been a guest at many literary festivals, including Melbourne and Sydney Writers’ Festivals and Ledbury Poetry Festival in the UK. Aidan’s poetry has appeared in many anthologies, including Best Australian Poems and Australian Poetry Since 1788, and he has coauthored a series of Shakespeare textbooks. He lives in Adelaide with this wife and three young children where he works as a speechwriter and lecturer.

Jelena Dinić arrived in Australia in 1993, during the collapse of Yugoslavia. She completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of SA and a few years later began writing poetry in Serbian and English. In 2014 she was a resident at the Eleanor Dark Foundation, Varuna Writers’ Retreat in the Blue Mountains. The same year she co-edited the FSP Anthology The Infinite Dirt. She is currently the principal of the Serbian Ethnic School where she also teaches the language. She has worn many dresses on her journey from Serbia to the Adelaide Hills where she now lives with her family. ‘Deceptively simple, Jelena Dinic’s short-lined poems contain a folkloric eastern-European symbolism reminis-cent of Vasko Popa. Just under the surface there are stories here of crisis, war, religion and family from her Serbian heritage. These poems wear pretty dresses, but if you get close, you’ll find the fabric smells of gunpowder.’ – Mike Ladd

 

Rachael Mead is a South Australian poet and writer who has been, at various times, an archaeologist, environmental campaigner, wedding decorator and bookseller.  She has an Honours degree in Classical Archaeology, a Masters in Environmental Studies and is currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. She’s been widely published in literary journals and anthologies in Australia and internationally. She was shortlisted in the 2013 Newcastle Poetry Prize and was awarded Varuna’s Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship for Poetry in 2011 and again in 2015. She writes arts reviews for InDaily and you can also find her talking enthusiastically about books behind the counter at the beautiful Matilda Bookshop in Stirling. When not in rehab for her addictions to op-shopping and books Rachael lives in the Adelaide Hills with her husband, animals and a ridiculous collection of op-shop overcoats.

rob walker lives in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia. He has worked as an educator in South Australian schools (as a primary classroom teacher and specialist in Performing Arts) and teacher of English to Junior and Senior High and adult students in Himeji, Japan in 2008 and 2012. Recent poems have been published in Australia in: rabbit, unusual work, foam:e, cordite, mascara, Australian Poetry Journal, Best Australian Poems, Transnational Literature, Friendly Street Poets anthologies, In their branches, War Music, Stars Like Sand, Divan, 21D, Quadrant, 4W New Writing, Text, and Going Down Swinging and overseas in Illya’s Honey, Poetry Magazine, Red River Review, The Cortland Review, and Four and Twenty. His short stories have appeared in: Short and Twisted, Bewildering Stories, Transnational Literature, Verity La and Between the Sheets. His essay Civility has been broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor. In the past he has worked with other artists, notably the jazz/funk/spoken word outfit Max-Mo and the Zephyr String Quartet. Much of his audio work is available free at ccmixter.org.

 

SERIES TWO

Graham Catt was born in the UK, but moved to Australia with his family when very young. He has been writing from an early age. Since taking up poetry in his 30s, Graham has published several hundred pieces in Australia and overseas, as well as five collections, including Shooting Stars (Ginninderra Press 2001) and The Hieronymus Bosch Shopping Mall (Picaro Press 2007). Graham has recently completed a collection of rock ‘n’ roll poems with the assistance of an Arts SA grant, and is currently working on several new volumes in the Nausea chapbook series. He also enjoys graphic design and photography, and has designed several book covers, websites and similar projects. www.grahamcatt.com

Kate Deller-Evans’ inklings of the pleasures of writing began in junior primary when she illustrated her first haiku, then, in her first year of high school, when her English teacher read her story to the class. Kate continued to write while raising a family and pursuing a career as a university lecturer. An ARTSA Project Grant for Poetry led to the creation of a collection of poems based on characters from Shakespeare. She also liked to write for children and young adults. Her PhD featured a teen verse novel, Copper Coast, set across Cornwall and South Australia’s own ‘Little Cornwall’ on the Yorke Peninsula. In her doctoral exegesis she renamed ‘verse’ novels for younger readers as ‘voice-zone text tile’ novels. Her poems have appeared on blue bottles, ceramic plates and in an artists’ book, Flotsam. Kate was also a reviewer for the Arts & Culture section of InDaily, the local online newspaper. Sadly, Kate passed away in 2016.

Steve Evans is Head of the Department of English, Creative Writing & Australian Studies at the Flinders University of South Australia. He is also a regular reviewer, the literary editor for an international journal, and has been on organising committees for six literary festivals. Steve has also been on arts funding and literary prize panels and is a member of the National Council of the Australian Poetry Centre in Australia. He has read at various festivals and other venues in Australia and internationally (UK, Singapore, New Zealand, Japan), where he has several times been writer in residence. His writing prizes include the Queensland Premier’s Poetry Award, New England Poetry Prize, and a Barbara Hanrahan Fellowship.

Jules Leigh Koch has published three collections of poetry. His fourth, The Wintering Dawn, for which he received a South Australian Literature Grant, is awaiting publication. He is one of the poets in The Signs of Life, Bowen Street 2012 and Stop 6 Tram Art Project 2014.  Jules has been a regular guest reader at The Lee Marvin readings at the Dark Horsey Bookshop, AEAF. ‘Jules Leigh Koch is a poet who, like the French and Australian Impressionists, works en plein air. He is a colourist, a sketcher with words, who sets up his easel at the beach, in city streets, suburban backyards and gum forests. With affection, he records the quotidian details of our suburbs, working with quick dabs, bright splashes of colour and deftly caught feelings.’ – Mike Ladd

Mike Ladd was born in the USA to Australian parents, but for most of his life has been living and writing in Adelaide. He grew up in the hills at Blackwood, did a degree in English and Philosophy at Adelaide University, then in the early nineteen eighties joined the new wave band The Lounge. Mike has often collaborated with musicians and artists, writing poetry for the screen and live performance with groups such as The Drum Poets, newaural net, and Max Mo. Mike has worked in radio for thirty years and currently produces Poetica, a program dedicated to Australian and international poetry, broadcast on ABC Radio National. Recently he and his partner Cathy Brooks have been running projects that put poems on street signs as public art. Mike is a poetry mentor, judge, and occasional reviewer. This collection draws together some of his work exploring the life and spirit of his hometown.

SERIES ONE

Jude Aquilina’s poetry and short stories have been published in newspapers, anthologies and literary journals in Australia and abroad. Jude has been a guest speaker at numerous writers’ festivals, including Adelaide Writers’ Week and Canberra Spring Poetry Festival. In addition to five poetry collections, she has published work across many genres, including but not limited to comedy, erotica, essays, articles and women’s perspectives. Jude lives and writes in the Adelaide Hills. She teaches at TAFE SA’s Adelaide College for the Arts in the Professional Writing Unit. Jude is a member and supporter of International PEN.  She freelances as an editor/mentor/workshop leader. Jude believes in poetry for the masses – and dreams of the day when poetry gigs book out football stadiums.

​Sharon Kernot’s first novel, Underground Road, was published by Wakefield Press in 2013 and was shortlisted in the Unpublished Manuscript category of the Adelaide Festival Awards in 2010. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, In the Shadows of the Garden, and one of poetry, Washday Pockets, both published by Ginninderra Press. Sharon is co-founder of North Eastern Writers, was on the Gawler Poets organising committee for two years and was the Poet in Residence at Tea Tree Gully’s 2013 Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in many journals, magazines and anthologies including Southerly, Best Australian Poetry 2014, Australian Love Stories, Mascara Literary Journal and Island Magazine. Her verse novel, The Art of Taxidermy, was shortlisted in the 2017 Text Prize and will be published in July, 2018.

Helen Lindstrom’s first collection of poetry, Cold Comfort, was published by Brand New Lino Press in 2009 and republished by Ginninderra Press in 2011.  Her poems have appeared in Blue Dog, The Canberra Times, The Friendly Street Reader and other anthologies. Her poem, Cold Comfort, appeared in Best Australian Poems 2005 and 5.30 a.m., which appears in this collection, was published in Best Australian Poems 2011. Helen has been the recipient of several awards and prizes including The Nova and Satura Prizes. Most recently she won 1st Prize in the Salisbury Writers’ Festival Poetry Competition for her poem ‘6 O’Grady Street’. Helen is on the organising committee of Gawler Poets at the Pub. She conducts poetry and creativity workshops for children and adults.

Louise Nicholas’s poetry has been published in newspapers, anthologies and literary journals in Australia, the USA and the UK, as well as in two Australian Best of… anthologies. She has been a guest speaker at many conferences, festivals and celebrations in Adelaide and regional South Australia as well as in the ACT and Victoria. During the Canberra Spring Poetry Festival, she was a member of the winning team for a debate that “Poetry is better than Sex”. Her first full-length collection, The List of Last Remaining, was short-listed for the Adelaide Festival of Arts Unpublished Manuscript award and is due for publication soon. Louise has retired from full-time teaching in primary schools but still teaches part-time.

Ken Vincent was born in Launceston Tasmania in 1939, moving to Adelaide immediately after the Second World War. He was educated at Christ Church Primary School in North Adelaide, Pultney  Grammar  School and Box Hill High School in Melbourne.  After exploring a number of jobs as a young man he became a social worker, graduating from the University of South Australia. He worked in statutory Welfare for almost forty years before retiring in 2008. Ken was co-founder of North Eastern Writers (NEW Inc.) and the founder of the Tea Tree Gully Poetry Festival. He co-edited two poetry anthologies, and published a collection of poetry, two novels and three novellas with Ginninderra Press. Sadly, Ken passed away in 2014 shortly after the release of his chapbook.