Christopher
(Kit) Kelen is a poet and painter, resident in the Myall Lakes of NSW.
Published widely since the seventies, he has a dozen full length collections in
English as well as translated books of poetry in Chinese, Portuguese, French,
Italian, Spanish, Indonesian, Swedish, Norwegian and Filipino. His latest
volume of poetry in English is Poor Man's Coat - Hardanger Poems,
published by UWAP in 2018. In 2017, Kit was shortlisted twice for the Montreal
Poetry Prize and won the Local Award in the Newcastle Poetry Prize. In 2019 and
2020 Kit won the Hunter Writers' Centre award in the NPP. He was also
shortlisted for the ACU prize in 2020. Kit's Book of Mother is
forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann in 2021. Emeritus Professor at the
University of Macau, where he taught for many years, Kit Kelen is also a
Conjoint Professor at the University of Newcastle. In 2017, he was awarded an
honorary doctorate by the University of Malmo, in Sweden. Literary editor for Postcolonial Text and Series Editor
for Flying Islands Pocket Poets Series, Kit has mentored many poets and
translators from various parts of the world, and run a number of on-line
communities of practice in poetry (most notably Project 366 [from 2016-2020]).
Kit is a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW. You can follow Kit's
work-in-progress a the Daily Kit. Kit is the Co-ordinator of
the THESE FLYING ISLANDS community blog.
JEAN KENT was born in Chinchilla, Qld, in 1951. She published her first poems in a literary magazine in 1970, while she was completing an Arts Degree (majoring in psychology) at the University of Qld; her first collection, Verandahs, appeared twenty years later, in 1970. Since then, another eight books of her poetry have been published. The most recent are The Hour of Silvered Mullet (Pitt Street Poetry, 2015) and Paris in my Pocket (PSP, 2016). Awards Jean has won include the Anne Elder Prize and Dame Mary Gilmore Award (both for Verandahs), the Wesley Michel Wright Prize, the Josephine Ulrick Prize and Somerset Prize. She has been a runner-up for the Newcastle Poetry Prize and winner of its Local Section, and was a judge of the prize in 2013. She has received several writing grants from the Australia Council, including Overseas Residencies in Paris in 1994 and 2011. As well as writing poetry, fiction and (occasional) nonfiction, Jean has worked as an educational psychologist, counsellor in TAFE colleges, lecturer in Creative Writing, mentor and facilitator of poetry workshops.
With Kit Kelen, Jean was co-editor of A Slow Combusting Hymn: Poetry from and about Newcastle and the Hunter Region (ASM/Cerberus Press, Flying Island Books, 2014). Her Flying Island pocket book is The Language of Light (2013), a selection of her poems with Chinese translations by Iris Fan Xing.
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Béatrice (Anne-Marie, Marie-Jeanne) Machet is a French born poet, living between France and the USA, whose dance lessons as a child influenced and still influence her writing. As a teen she learned a lot from the Native American point of view about Native American history and Native cultures, until she felt impregnated with them. After having been involved in the French science-fiction milieu, flirting with cartoons and magazines such as Actuel, Charlie Hebdo, Fluide Glacial, she met Jean-Hughes Malineau, a Gallimard editor, who encouraged her to begin a career as a poet. From this initial meeting, each published poetry book of hers will testify to an evolution in her writing practice. Since 2016, she is an active member of the sound poetry group Ecrits Studio (ecritsstudio.fr). At her credit some 15 books and 30 chapbooks of poetry (three of them in English) plus 7 Native American poets’ collections she translated into French, and four anthologies gathering 40 Native American contemporary poets whom works she translated into French.
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 is on editorial boards of French poetry magazines such as Recours au poème, Sur le dos de la tortue, Les cahiers d’Eucharis.
She is regularly granted writer residences, is regularly invited in international poetry festivals in France and abroad. She leads creative writing workshops, is called for teaching and performing in schools and colleges. She gives lectures and conferences about contemporary Native American literature. She also launched and created Radio cultural programs, poetry oriented, from 1984 to 1986 and from 2018 to nowdays. She is responsible of and produces a monthly radio program (Radio Agora, Grasse) dedicated to contemporary poetry.
Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer and interviewer, and is the Managing Editor of Compulsive Reader, a literary review site that has been running for some 23 years. Her interview podcast, Compulsive Reader Talks, has over 150 wonderful interviews with the likes of Maria Tumarkin, Ben Okri, and John Banville, to name just a few. She has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, and online, and is the author of several published books of fiction and poetry. Her Flying Island book, High Wire Step, was published in 2018. Her most recent publication is Unreliable Narratives, published by Girls on Key Press in 2019. A new poetry book, Density of Compact Bone, is forthcoming from Ginninderra Press in 2021.
To find out more about Magdalena's other works, or for the most recent publications, visit: http://www.magdalenaball.com
Myron Lysenko began writing haiku and senryu in the late 1990’s. He is the Victorian Representative for the Australian Haiku Society. He has published seven books of poetry, the most recent two consisting of haiku. His latest, published by Flying Islands was released in January 2021 and is titled a ghost gum leans over.
Myron has run almost 50 public and private ginko since 2008. A ginko is a haiku outing in a scenic spot where a group people gather to write haiku, then share, discuss and revise them.
His poems have appeared over 600 times in journals and anthologies around the world.Myron has been writing, performing, publishing, editing and conducting poetry workshops since 1980. He was a founding editor (with Kevin Brophy) of the lively independent literary magazine Going Down Swinging from 1980 to 1994. They then passed the magazine on to new editors.
Myron is a poetry organiser; he was director of the Montsalvat National Poetry Festival, a convenor of La Mama Poetica, and currently runs the monthly reading in Woodend, Victoria Chamber Poets.
Myron teaches creative writing at the Woodend Neighbourhood House and is the leader of the poetry and music band Black Forest Smoke who have released a CD It's Alright.
Kerri Shying is a poet of Wiradjuri and Chinese family, publishing across many journals and anthologies.
She is the author of a bilingual pocketbook of poems "sing out when you want me",2017, Flying Island Press, "Elevensies", 2018 Puncher and Wattman and “Knitting Mangrove Roots”2019, Flying Island Press.
Kerri held the Varuna Dr Eric Dark Flagship Fellowship for 2019 for her current collection 'Know Your Country" 2020, Puncher and Wattman, and was shortlisted in 2017 for both the Helen Ann Bell Prize and the Noel Rowe Award.
Kerri has been convenor of Write Up for 5 years, a free arts/writing group for people living with disability.
She lives with disability in Newcastle, NSW with her famous dog Max Spangly.
Kerri is a nominee in https://theaspireawards.com.au 2020, an activity of the Human Rights Commission, for disability activism in the arts.
Les Wicks’ 14th book of poetry is Belief (Flying Islands, 2019). For 45 years Les has been active in the Australian literary community. He has been a guest at a substantial list of international festivals.
Publication has been seen in over 350 different newspapers, anthologies and magazines across 32 countries in 15 languages.
Equally well known is his work as a publisher and editor. Australia saw Artransit which put poetry/art into Sydney and Newcastle buses but that is just one of dozens of similar roles: some predictable like literary magazines while others range as far afield as publishing a poem on the surface of a river. The most recent publication is To End All Wars (Puncher & Wattmann, Nov 2018).
john bennett
writer, photographer, video artist. PhD 'A new defence of poetry'. His exhibition ‘First light, from Eos to Helios’ at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, 2017, consisted of photographs, video and texts advocating natural aesthetics as a way to connect back to nature. An ABC documentary on this project ‘Poetry at First Light’ was broadcast on Radio National’s Earshot, 2016.
Pocket Diary’, Flying Island Books, 2012
He lives in Gumbaynggirr country and has worked with Aboriginal story tellers, has had Bundanon Fellowship, artist in residence, Macleay Museum, Sydney, and been awarded.Sydney Harbour Artist of the Year (for poetry).
He served as Artistic director of the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival for five years and his visual work is being used by Government agencies, local tourist bodies, community groups and a number of arts, festival and environmental organisations.
Alan Jefferies is a poet and childrens' author born and raised in Brisbane. He started writing and publishing after moving to Sydney in 1976.
Between 1998 and 2007 he lived and worked in Hong Kong where he co-founded (with Mani Rao & Kit Kelen) OutLoud; Hong Kong’s longest running English language poetry reading.
He's published six books of poems, his most recent being “Seem” (Flying Islands, 2010) (Chinese translation by Iris Fan Xing).
He currently lives in Woolgoolga on the NSW mid-North Coast.
A new book of poems, "in the same breath" is forthcoming from Flying Islands in 2021.
Links:
https://www.asiancha.com/content/view/2973/635/
http://www.foame.org/Issue10/poems/jefferies.html
Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS-2HJATXJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-nQqY-NooE
In 1950, Andrew Burke wrote his first poem – in chalk on a slate board. It was variations on the letter A. In 1958 he wrote a very amateurish poem modeled on Milton’s sonnet on his blindness. Luckily it is lost. In 1960 he wrote a religious play about the Apostles during the time Jesus was in the tomb. It was applauded. He wrote some poems influenced by TSEliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. They caused a rift in the teachers at the Jesuit school because they were in vers libre: the old priests hated them but the young novices loved them. It was his first controversy.
Around about this time, Burke read the latest TIME magazine from USA. It had a lively article about the San Francisco Renaissance, quoting Lawrence Ferlinghetti who wrote: Priests are but the lamb chops of God. This appealed to Burke who became a weekend beatnik over night. He was playing drums in a local jazz band, so he hitch-hiked a la Kerouac across Australia to Sydney where he worked in factories, on trucks, at a rubbish dump and moving furniture. He never played drums again, but he certainly lived the bohemian lifestyle.
His poems appeared in these early days in Westerly, Nimrod, Overland and the Bulletin, and he returned to Perth to regain his health and joined a circle around Merv and Dorothy Hewett. A local poet William Grono hit the nail on the head when he described them as ‘I am London Magazine and you are Evergreen Review’.
Long story short, Andrew Burke has written plays, short stories, a novel, book reviews and some literary journalism alongside a million advertisements and TV and radio commercials. He has also taught at various universities and writing centres and gained a PhD from Edith Cowan University in 2006 when he was teaching in the backblocks of China.
As a poet he has published fourteen titles, one of the most popular being a bi-lingual pocket size book published by Flying Islands Press in 2017, THE LINE IS BUSY (translated by Iris Fan).
He is retired now but still writing and lending a hand to younger poets. A small selection of poems follow.
Born in New York, he lived in many countries until Australia finally took him in. He was a Foreign Expert EFL teacher in China for many years. There were some extreme sports once; now he plays (mostly) respectable chess and pool. He likes taking photographs. Some days he thinks there is nothing easy about the Tao.
Her Flying Islands publication is 'Exhibit', 2013.
KA Rees — Come the Bones
KA Rees writes poetry and short fiction. Her poems and short stories have been included by Australian Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, Kill Your Darlings' New Australian Fiction anthology, Margaret River Press, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, Spineless Wonders and Yalobusha Review, among others.
Kate was shortlisted for the 2016 Judith Wright Poetry Award, she was the recipient of the 2017 Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction and runner-up in the 2018 Peter Cowan Short Story Award. She was a 2019 Varuna fellowship holder for her manuscript of short stories and the national winner of the 2019 joanne burns Microlit Award.
Kate is an inaugural participant in the 2021 Sydney Observatory Residency Program where she is writing the beginnings of her second collection of poetry on the Nocturn, and some of the more peculiar aspects of Sydney's histories.
You can find her on Instagram: @kateamber01 and on Twitter @perniciouskate.
Come the Bones is Kate's debut poetry collection.
Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang was a nomad writer and translator before finally settling in in Southern Sweden. He started writing professionally - as a journalist - at an early age of 12, mainly motivated by an innocent wish of seeing his name printed in newspaper. After writing a number of short stories for various newspapers, he published two novels in 2006.
In 2013, he got involved with Flying Islands and started translating Iman Budhi Santosa's poems (Faces of Java) into English. He was then granted Indonesian government funding for a poetry translation project in 2015. His own collection of bilingual poems, Encounters: Never Random, was published in 2017 by Flying Islands.
He is currently teaching Creative Writing in Malmö University, Sweden and at the same time trying to get back to a poet mode. His latest works, translations of three children's books from Danish to Indonesian, are coming in March 2021.
Steven Schroeder
Steven Schroeder is a poet and painter who lives and works in Chicago. More at stevenschroeder.org.
Harold Legaspi
After high school in 1999, I undertook a cadetship with a Chartered Accountancy firm and commenced my university studies on a part-time basis at The University of Technology, Sydney. I received an exchange scholarship to study abroad at The University of Westminster in London, which allowed me to travel extensively around Europe.
In 2004, I commenced my Chartered Accounting program with Deloitte (a “Big Four” firm) and worked with clients in a wide variety of industries: NGO’s, charities, technology, construction, media & telecommunications, manufacturing, finance and retail. I gained my qualification in 2006 and completed my Masters of Commerce at The University of Sydney in 2010.
After my post-graduate studies, I lived in Taiwan on a sabbatical. I worked in a shanty Taiwanese noodle house and studied Mandarin at the National Taiwan Normal University to fill my days and nights. I associated mostly with my colleagues, in particular, the family that owned the kitchen, who took me under their wing. They called me Haku Chen, a name that stuck during my sojourn.
When I returned to Sydney, I became long-term unemployed. I tried kitchens, I tried warehouses, I even volunteered for the U.N. and trained as a suicide help-line therapist. I excluded my qualifications in my resume and applied for menial work, anywhere I could help but I received no offers. I turned to writing to contemplate life. I wrote poetry, short stories and a novella – writing that now sit in the hard-drive gathering dust.
From 2012-2014, I found employment at the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, helping a team of professionals. We advocated land rights for Indigenous Australians in NSW.
Towards the end of 2014, I embarked on a writer’s residency in Beijing. I stayed in my bedroom most days, writing short stories and participating in online writing classes to develop my understanding of characterisation and plotting. Towards the end of the sojourn, I flew to Tibet and caught the train back to Beijing, visiting wonderful places throughout China along the way.
From 2016-2020, I was enrolled in the Master of Creative Writing program at University of Sydney. I was the A.J.A. Waldock scholar, but spent most of my time in solitude. I learnt at the university and have been given an offer to study the Doctorate of Arts at University of Sydney, beginning in March 2021. Jose Rizal's legacy will be motif in my writing.
I have written a couple of unpublished novels (A Silent Voice and Making the Man), an unpublished collection of short-stories (Artline), and recently published my first book of poetry, Letters in Language with Flying Islands – many thanks to Kit Kelen et al.
I am working on another book of poetry (The Edge of Seas) with David Musgrave, and am writing two books of poetry (Words, Enough and Filipinismo) as part of my Doctoral studies. I wrote an epic poem recently 'Lost Generation', which was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Anthony Mannix’s The Toy of the Spirit, intended to provoke the logic of language, while resonating with history that refers to both the personal and the collective.
Nathan Curnow
Nathan Curnow is an award-winning poet, spoken word performer and past editor of literary journal, Going Down Swinging. His books include The Ghost Poetry Project, RADAR, The Right Wrong Notes and The Apocalypse Awards. He has recently taught creative writing at Federation University, and toured Europe in 2018 with loop artist, Geoffrey Williams, performing in Poland and opening the Heidelberg Literature Festival in Germany. He lives in Ballarat and is the current judge of the annual Woorilla Poetry Prize.
George Watt
The author and editor of several books, both university monographs and English language text books, I have come to the writing poetry late in life with the publication last year of "Sandpaper Swimming" with Flying Island Books. My first book of poetry.
My first book, "The Fallen Woman in the 19th Century English Novel", published in 1984 was recently re-released by Routledge and can be found on Amazon. I am currently working on a novel which looks like it probably has just found publisher. After retiring from a career in teaching and administration in universities in Australia, USA, Japan and Macau I completed a masters in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The best thing I ever did!
Former Artistic Director of the Poets Union Inc., and director of the inaugural Australian Poetry Festival, Richard is the creator of #RichardReads (https://soundcloud.com/user-387793087), an online compendium of Global Poetry, Read Aloud, and an editor of the landmark anthology, Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts (Currency Press/RealTime).
Well known for his multi-award-winning career as a filmmaker and choreographer with The Physical TV Company (http://physicaltv.com.au/), and critically acclaimed as a performer in a range of media and contexts, Richard has a track record for innovative adaptations and interactions of poetry and other media, including collaborations with artists in dance, film, theatre, music and a range of digital platforms.
The recipient of numerous awards, nominations, and grants, as well as multiple opportunities for presentations, screenings and broadcasts, he graduated with First Class Honours for his B.A. at Sydney University and won the Chancellor’s Award for most outstanding PhD thesis at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Brian Purcell
David McAleavey
Greetings. My Flying Islands pocket book is titled TALK MUSIC, and it appeared in early 2018 (copyright date Dec. 2017).
I spent the Fall 2016 semester in a faculty exchange at the University of Macau, part of a short-lived program between UM and my home university, George Washington University in Washington, DC.
I have now retired from GW, effective Fall 2020, as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic: teaching wholly online, with all its imperfections, seeming like more work than pleasure. I'm still adjusting to my new retired status; one of my strategies for exploring the rest of my life includes reducing my involvement in poetry, though I do hope to return to the endeavor, should I recover the motivation.
Originally from Australia, Dan Disney has lived in South Korea for the last decade, where he teaches in the English Literature Program at Sogang University, in Seoul. His collections include and then when the (John Leonard Press), either, Orpheus (UWAP), and Report from a border (Light-Trap Press). He is editor of Beyond Babel: Creative Writing in Second Language Contexts (John Benjamins), and co-edited both Writing to the Wire (UWAP, with Kit Kelen), an anthology of poems protesting the dehumanization of people seeking political asylum in Australia, and New Directions in Australian Poetry (Palgrave, with Matthew Hall), in which a number of Australian poets theorize on the ethical possibilities of creative production into the early 21c.
Carol Archer is an Australian visual artist who lives at Markwell in the Myall Lakes region of N.S.W. Archer’s solo and collaborative works have been exhibited in Australia, Macao, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Italy and Portugal. Her most recent solo exhibition was Drawing Breath/ Desenhar. Respirar (Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon, 2017).
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish.
I am a Flying Islands poet - Atonement Macau, 2015.
Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives in Melbourne. With a BA in Germanic Philology, an MA in literary translation, and a PhD in English, Hecq writes across genres and disciplines—and sometimes across tongues. Her creative works include a novel, three collections of stories, and ten volumes of poetry— Kaosmos (Melbourne Poets Union) and Tracks: Autofictional Fragments of a Journey without Maps (Recent Work Press), both published in 2020 are her latest.
Fencing with Béatrice Machet in 2018, Dominique contributed a bilingual Flying Islands Press pocket book titled Crypto.
Michael Crane has made several appearances in Overland, Meanjin, Southerly and numerous other journals and the Best Australian Poems 2011, 2014 & 2015. He has had ten collections published with small presses since 1998 including his book with Flying Islands called Poems from the 29th Floor released December 2019. He organised Poetry Idol for the Melbourne Writers Festival for several years as well as publishing the annual literary journal, the Paradise Anthology. He has an interest in film making and was production assistant for Into The Limelight which was a series of short comedy films featuring people with a mental illness. He was recently a producer for a film called the Memo Rokumentary.
Morgan Bell
Morgan Bell is a Port Stephens author of short fiction. Her books include Sniggerless Boundulations, Laissez Faire, and Intersection Control: Collected Works. She is a qualified technical writer, creative writing teacher, and editor of Sproutlings: A Compendium of Little Fictions. Her first chapbook of visual poetry Idiomatic, For The People was released in 2019. She is due to have a Flying Islands pocketbook of visual poetry published in 2021.
I’m very happy to be a member of Flying Islands, with a new collection of poetry, Somewhere North (working title) to be a future Flying Islands Pocket Book of Poems. I’m a Blue Mountains based writer of poetry, short stories and novels that are seeking publishers.
My collection Lives of the Dead and Other Stories was published in 2013 by Spineless Wonders, and a novella Flying Foxes was short-listed in the Carmel Bird Award and published as an eBook in 2015. My stories and poetry have appeared many literary magazines and anthologies including in Overland, Island Magazine, Going Down Swinging, Hecate and the Margaret River Press short story collection. Earth Eaters, a novel, was a winner in the Varuna LitLink award in 2010, and extracts appear in Lives of the Dead. My short stories were performed at Little Fictions events in Sydney, and were featured in the 2018 Story-Fest. Chimera, a chapbook of short prose and poetry was recently published by Rochford Press.
I have a doctorate in Creative Arts (University of Western Sydney). My website is http://janeskelton.com.au/
Lou Smith
Lou Smith is a Melbourne-based poet of Welsh, Jamaican and English heritage who grew up in Newcastle, NSW. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies both in Australia and overseas including Wasafiri, Mascara Literary Review, A Slow Combusting Hymn, Overland, The Caribbean Writer, Nine Muses Poetry, sx Salon, Soft Surface and Caribbean Quarterly. Her book riversalt was published by Flying Islands in 2015.
Lou has worked as an editor and proofreader and was the co-founder of independent publisher Breakdown Press, publishers of political poster series and books such as How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti and Political Mischief-Making from Across Australia and YOU: some letters from the first five years.
She is currently working on a number of writing projects including two new books of poetry, one of which is set in her hometown of Newcastle during the Great Depression.
Lou has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne where she sometimes teaches.
www.lousmith.net
Lou Smith
Lou Smith is a Melbourne-based poet of Welsh, Jamaican and English heritage who grew up in Newcastle, NSW. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies both in Australia and overseas including Wasafiri, Mascara Literary Review, A Slow Combusting Hymn, Overland, The Caribbean Writer, Nine Muses Poetry, sx Salon, Soft Surface and Caribbean Quarterly. Her book riversalt was published by Flying Islands in 2015.
Lou has worked as an editor and proofreader and was the co-founder of independent publisher Breakdown Press, publishers of political poster series and books such as How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Hoaxes, Graffiti and Political Mischief-Making from Across Australia and YOU: some letters from the first five years.
She is currently working on a number of writing projects including two new books of poetry, one of which is set in her hometown of Newcastle during the Great Depression.
Lou has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne where she sometimes teaches.
www.lousmith.net
Rae Desmond Jones (11 August 1941 – 27 June 2017) was an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer and politician.[1][2]
Jones was born in the mining town of Broken Hill in the far West of New South Wales. Although many of his poems and stories are concerned with urban experience, he always felt that desert landscapes were central to his language and perception. He wrote in colloquial language, which sometimes exploded in powerful narratives packed with ambiguous sexual and violent imagery, especially in his earlier poems and some of his novels. His original and bleak vision was frequently mediated by gusts of earthy humour and unexpected sensitivity and honesty.
He became a popular mayor of Ashfield, an inner Sydney Municipality, from 2004 to 2006, and during that period held together a broad coalition of Labor Party, Green and Independent representatives. He said that for him "poetry and politics are mutually contradictory, and he finds consolation from each in the arms of the other."
Tug Dumbly is the name, and sometimes Albatross, of Geoff Forrester, a poet and performer who has worked widely in live venues, schools, and radio. As a performer, he set up and ran some seminal spoken word nights in Sydney, including the legendary and drunken Bardflys. He has performed his poems and songs as a regular weekly guest on Triple J and ABC radio (on the programs of James Valentine and Richard Glover), as well as writing and recording for radio his ABC-syndicated culture and current affairs satire The Tug Report. He has released two spoken word CDs through the ABC – Junk Culture Lullabies and Idiom Savant – once won the Spirit of Woodford storytelling award, twice won the Banjo Paterson Prize for Comic Verse, and three times won the Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup.
Printwise, his work has appeared in publications including the Australian, the Canberra Times, Southerly, the Australian Poetry Journal and The Blue Nib. In 2020 he had two poems shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize, for which he was also shortlisted in 2019. In 2020 he won the Borranga Poetry Prize, and was runner up in the WB Yeats Poetry Prize. In 2019 he was longlisted (for the second time) for the Vice Chancellor’s Poetry Prize. His first poetry collection, Son Songs, came out through Flying Islands Books in 2018.
Geoff Page
James Walton
JAMES WALTON is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He is the author of four widely acclaimed collections of poetry. ‘The Leviathan’s Apprentice’, ‘Walking Through Fences’, ‘Unstill Mosaics’, and ‘Abandoned Soliloquies’. His fifth collection will be released shortly. His work has been translated to and published in Spanish and Farsi. He was nominated for ‘The Best of the Net’ 2019, and is a Pushcart Prize 2021 nominee. He began writing creatively when he turned 60, mainly poetry, and now also writes short stories and flash fiction. He was a librarian, a farm labourer, and mostly a public sector union official.
He lives in South Gippsland in an Edwardian house which was once a maternity hospital, and a doctor’s surgery.
He can be found at jameswalton.poetry.blog
Beth Spencer
Beth Spencer is an award-winning author of poetry and fiction. Her work has frequently been broadcast on ABC-Radio National, and her books include How to Conceive of a Girl (Random House), The Party of Life (Flying Islands), Vagabondage (UWAP) and The Age of Fibs (ebook published by Spineless Wonders and winner of the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award). She lives and writes on Guringai & Darkinjung land on the NSW Central Coast; she has a website at www.bethspencer.com, and can be found on social media @bethspen
Cui Yuwei
Dael Allison
Dael Allison: a poet, fiction writer, essayist and editor crawling towards the finish of a PhD in creative writing at the University of Newcastle. So, lying low until mid-year.
Walleah Press, published my book Fairweather’s Raft in 2012, outcome of my Masters of Creative Arts, UTS, researching artist Ian Fairweather. Eleven of the poems were made into a soundscape on ABC’s Poetica in 2014. Picaro Press published two chapbooks of my work, Wabi Sabi in 2013 and Shock Aftershock in 2010. I’ve edited numerous poetry anthologies, including Brew, 30 years of Poetry at the Pub, Newcastle (2018) and To End All Wars, (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018), co-edited with Anna Couani, Kit Kelen and Les Wicks.
Awards include the Wildcare International Essay Prize, NT Literary Awards Charles Darwin University Prize for Essay, the Henry Kendall Poetry Award, Queensland Poetry Festival Phillip Bacon Ekphrasis Award and three stints at Varuna – a Retreat Fellowship, the Varuna LitLink/NRWC Award for an Unpublished Novel and the Varuna/ Picaro Press Chapbook residency.
After five years working on fiction, I’m looking forward to returning to poetry and poets.
Jan Dean
Andres Ajens
Paps Osmubal
Richard Kelly Tipping was born in Adelaide, South Australia and
studied in humanities at Flinders University. He has lived in the
USA (1974/75), and the UK and Europe (1984/86). While lecturing
in media arts at the University of Newcastle he completed a
doctorate at the University of Technology Sydney titled Word Art
Works: visual poetry and textual objects (2007). Tipping has
published eight books of poetry, and is known internationally as
an artist working with sign language and typographic concrete.
He is strongly represented in the print collections of the Museum
of Modern Art, New York and the British Museum, London; and is
collected in depth by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Tipping lives
between gigs in Newcastle and Maitland, NSW.
www.richardtipping.com
Chris Mansell
Mark Tredinnick
Toby Fitch
Gillian Swain
Gillian Swain
Camellia Wei
Ross Donlon
Born in Ashfield, Sydney and now living in Castlemaine, Victoria, Ross Donlon has published five collections of poetry and a number of chapbooks. First published in The Bulletin in his teens, he enjoyed (you might say) a long break of over thirty years before publishing again, a second budding, as Judith Rodriguez once said.
Many years of travel and working at all sorts before arriving at teaching (state secondary and some tertiary), he is now mostly retired and traveling again. Happily he has featured at some poetry and arts festivals in various parts of Australia as well as in Europe, and has spent considerable time in Norway, a country with a society and political system close to his heart.
Active in Castlemaine arts, he convened literary components of three state festivals and has run poetry readings for many years. These feature local, Melbourne, interstate and even some international poets, such as English poet Chrys Salt, in 2019, and Scot, Hugh McMillan slated for 2021, but who knows whether Hugh will make it.
As publisher of Mark Time Books, he acted as editor for a number of leading Australian poets, and lately two poets in the U.K.
A program on the now lost Radio National program, Poetica, was devoted to a sequence of poems about his father, a U.S, serviceman he never met. A beautiful production.
He has been lately featured on Zoom readings at events from Scotland, England and Nashville, Tennessee.
Ross's own poetry has received favourable reviews in national newspapers in Australia, if not literary journals - he's that kind of poet.
He would add a pic here if he knew how. Great to otherwise be a part of the Flying Islands experience.
His Flying Islands pocketbook is, The Bread Horse, which features his own etching. 'The First Horse' on the cover.
Melinda Louise Smith
Pam Brown was born in Seymour, Victoria. Most of her childhood was spent on military bases in Toowoomba and Brisbane. Since her early twenties, she has lived in Melbourne and Adelaide, and has travelled widely in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions as well as Europe and the U.S., but mostly she has lived in Sydney. She has made her living variously as a silkscreen printer, bookseller, postal worker and has taught writing, multi-media studies and film-making and worked from 1989 to 2006 as a librarian at University of Sydney.
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