People

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet and an RMIT Adjunct Professor with non/fictionLab. 

“In her memoir Too Afraid to Cry (2013), indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann related how she had been tricked away from her mother as a baby, repeating the trauma her mother had suffered when she was taken from her grandmother many years before. Ali in turn had to give her own child up for adoption. In her poetry collection, Inside My Mother (2015), she explores the distance between the generations created by such experiences, felt as an interminable void in its darkest aspects...but in other ways... lit by dreams and visions of startling intensity, populated by symbolic presences and scenes of ritual and commemoration, chief amongst them the separation and reunion of mother and child.” (Source: Giramondo Publishing)

Ali’s verse novel, Ruby Moonlight (2012) won the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry and Book of the Year in 2013. In 2017, she was awarded the Wyndham Campbell Prize.

Alvin Pang (Dr) is a poet, writer, editor and translator whose broad creative practice spans over two decades of literary and related activities in Singapore and elsewhere. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English, his writing has been translated into more than twenty languages, including Swedish, Croatian and Macedonian. His latest titles include WHAT HAPPENED: Poems 1997-2017 (2017) and UNINTERRUPTED TIME (2019). For his contributions to the literary arts, he has received Singapore's Young Artist of the Year Award, the Singapore Youth Award and the JCCI Education Award, among other accolades. The Editor-in-Chief of the public policy journal ETHOS, he also serves on several advisory boards, including the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra and Rabbit: Journal of non-fiction poetry. In 2020, he completed a PhD in writing with RMIT University, in which he explored the possibilities of literary practice conducted across multiple languages, genres, careers and communities.

Dr Bonny Cassidy is a poet, critic, editor and essayist living on Dja Dja Wurrung lands in central Victoria. Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Bonny has released four poetry collections, most recently, Chatelaine (Giramondo, 2017), shortlisted for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. In 2016 she co-edited the anthology, Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers) with Jessica L Wilkinson. Bonny is a Director of the Board of Australian Poetry Ltd. She coordinated the Melbourne Visiting Poets Program 2015-19 funded by the Australia Council, bringing First Nations and regional poets to the RMIT campus. Bonny was a team member commended for the 2020 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Reconciliation-Based teaching and a facilitator of the University-wide Bundyi Girri (Shared Futures) program of professional development for non-Indigenous staff. Her first book of nonfiction, Monument is forthcoming from Giramondo in 2023.

Brigid Magner is a literary studies scholar and essayist. Her research work is primarily concerned with the intersections between literature and place. She is fascinated by the functions and consolations of literature in the world. Brigid's main research areas are reader studies, the history of the book, regional literary history, trans-Tasman literary culture, literature and place-making, contemporary Australian literature and literary studies pedagogy. Her monograph Locating Australian Literary Memory was published by Anthem Press (2020) and shortlisted for the Walter McRae Russell and Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) awards. Her current projects include Reading in the Mallee: The Literary Past and Future of an Australian Region (2021 to 2024).

David Carlin is a creative writer, researcher and teacher with a background in writing and directing for theatre, circus and film. His research interests include essaying and hybrid forms, ecocriticism and the Anthropocene, community digital archives, memory, collaborative methods and creative practice, and the ethics of intercultural exchange. David’s nonfiction books include The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet, 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, Our Father Who Wasn’t There, and The Abyssinian Contortionist. His award-winning essays have been published in Meanjin, Griffith REVIEW, Hunger Mountain, Speak, Overland, Westerly, Sydney Review of Books and elsewhere. Co-founder of WrICE, he is also Co-President of the NonfictioNOW Conference, a founding Contributing Editor of Speculative Nonfiction, and Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University, where he co-directs the non/fictionLab.

www.davidcarlin.net.au

Eugenia Flynn is a writer and researcher, with a primary focus on Indigenous literatures. Her practice explores narratives of truth, grief, and devastation, interwoven with explorations of race and gender. Her essays, short stories and poems have been published in IndigenousX, NITV, Peril magazine, The Lifted Brow, Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry and #MeToo: Stories From the Australian Movement. Her text work has appeared in exhibitions such as Waqt al-tagheer: Time of Changeat ACE Open, Enough خلص Khalas: Contemporary Australian Muslim Artists at UNSW Galleries ,and SOULfury at Bendigo Art Gallery. 

Eugenia is an Aboriginal (Larrakia and Tiwi), Chinese Malaysian and Muslim woman who grew up on Kaurna land in Adelaide and now lives and works on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung Country in Melbourne

Francesca Rendle-Short is co-founder of non/fictionLab and WrICE. Francesca is interested in a research practice focused on ethical enquiry, trans-national literatures and literary practices, queer thinking, the value of collaboration and community building. Her scholarly praxis pays attention to form as well as content. It is experimental, idiosyncratic and playful in nature, attentive to whimsy and transgression. She has initiated and continues to lead numbers of industry-focused research projects including the WrICE ARC Discovery Project, The Jakarta Post B/DNL Studio X-CoLab and STREAT. Her five books include The near and the far (Vol I and II) and Bite your tongue.

Gemma Sou is a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT University. She is a development geographer who explores human-environment relations, with a particular interest in everyday humanitarianism, lived experiences of disasters and the representation of disasters in media. She works with artists to communicate her research in creative, engaging and socially responsible ways. She has worked in Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, U.K. She is on the editorial board for the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, and a Fellow of the Humanitarian Innovation Initiative at Brown University, U.S.A.

James Oliver (Seumas Olaghair) is a transdisciplinary academic, educator, and writer, with over 20yrs of experience across a range of creative and cultural disciplines and sectors. James' research training began in the social sciences, with a focus on lived experiences of cultural situations and practices. His wider creative practice research interests now also focus on decolonial practices, public pedagogies, and the possibilities afforded through creative and cultural ways of knowing (traditional and emerging), consistent with his native cultural position and practices of knowing.

James is also a Hebridean Gàidheal. His Dùthchas, or embodied connectedness and relationality with place and land has informed a life-long, and evolving enquiry of practice-as-research and ways of knowing. Initially, this was at the nexus of his native culture, language, place-based belonging, and configurations of identities; increasingly, this is becoming less about identities, more about ontologies and practices of emplacement, and ethical relations and collaborations with place - and learning with land. This has nurtured a 'practice-as-research' career beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, particularly at the intersections of cultural relations, Creative Practice Research and Indigenous Practice Research.

In relation to practice as research he published the book, Associations: creative practice and research (MUP, 2018); and details of his broader research practice and writing are available at academia.edu. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor with Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research lab (MADA/Monash).

Jessica Wilkinson is a writer, critic, scholar and editor whose research interests include: poetry and poetics; contemporary poetry; poetic biography; 'nonfiction poetry'; experimental/radical writing; literary theory. She has published three poetic biographies, Marionette: A Biography of Miss Marion Davies (2012), shortlisted for the 2014 Kenneth Slessor Award, Suite for Percy Grainger (2014), a poem from which won the 2014 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine (2019), Highly Commended in the 2020 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. She is co-editor, with Bonny Cassidy, of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers, 2016) and, with Cassandra Atherton, Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours (Hunter Publishers, 2021). Jessica is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry and the offshoot Rabbit Poets Series of single-author collections. She received a 2023 Keesing Studio Fellowship in Paris, through Australia Council for the Arts.

Julienne van Loon is a novelist whose research interests include the role of creativity in research practice, creative writing research methods and philosophies of knowledge. She also has expertise in feminist literary practices, the form of the novella, non-linear narrative, author livelihoods, the Australian book industry, cultural policy and cultural value, and creative writing pedagogy.

Julienne’s most recent book is the widely acclaimed The Thinking Woman (2019). Current research and creative practice projects engage with talking value in Australian writing, risk and discovery in leading research practice, and citizen-led democracy movements.

www.juliennevanloon.com.au

Linda Daley’s research is at the intersection of philosophy and literary and cultural studies. Her work has been published in internationally respected journals including Australian Feminist Studies, Australian Feminist Law Journal, New Writing, Film-Philosophy and Third Text.  She teaches literary studies and supervises HDR writing projects.

Lucinda is a writer and researcher of expanded nonfiction. She is the curator and program leader of Writing in the Expanded Field, writing program of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and editor of its annual journal. Lucinda’s own expanded writing practice spans journalism and arts criticism, auto-ethnographic and personal essaying, arts editing and publishing, academic writing, and experimental literary-visual works. She is the currently Writer in Residence at Linden New Art, St Kilda and has previously been Writer in Residence at Grey Projects, Singapore. Lucinda is Lecturer in the Professional Communication program.

Melody Ellis’s work explores subjectivity, the body, power, and ethics. She is a writer and early-career academic. She completed her undergraduate studies in fine art at Sydney College of the Arts and a doctorate in creative writing at RMIT University. Her interdisciplinary writing practice — including short fiction, experimental memoir and fictocritical essays — Melody brings to her writing on these themes an engagement with critical and literary theory, art history, form and aesthetics.

See also http://www.melodyellis.com

Michelle Aung Thin’s research interests include: postcolonial literary theory, in particular the ‘limit’; writing collaboration in social enterprise; the mobile phone and writers in Myanmar. She is currently working on her second book, researched during an Asialink Residency in 2014 (funded by Arts Victoria) which explores the limits of identity in contemporary Myanmar and cosmopolitan, colonial Rangoon.

Neika Lehman (they/them) is a writer, this mob art collective member and current Vice Chancellor’s Indigenous Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at RMIT, School of Media & Communication. 

Neika worked previously as a sessional academic in the Australian Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. Their freelance projects span writing, editing, curating, film practice and research.  

Neika grew up in nipaluna | Hobart and descends from the Trawlwoolway peoples of Tebrakunna Country. Their ancestors shape the loops in Neika’s poetry, creative nonfiction and occasional film practice, which often addresses the tensions between memory, time and desire in settler colonies.

Peta Murray is a writer-performer, theatre-maker and cross-arts collaborator interested in the application of transdisciplinary, queered and communal practices as modes of inquiry and forms of cultural activism. Peta’s best-known plays are Wallflowering and Salt, winner of the Victorian Premier’s Award for Drama. Other plays include AWGIE-award winners, Spitting Chips, on adolescence and bereavement, and The Keys to the Animal Room, on family violence.  Peta is a member of The Symphony of Awkward research collective, and one of a team of researchers on the ARC funded Discovery Project: Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially-Engaged Art. She was also one of six lab members to co-edit of the Bloomsbury A-Z of Creative Writing Methods (2023).

Rebecca Hill conducts research in feminist philosophy and decolonial theory. She is the author of The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle and Bergson (Fordham) and the editor of Philosophies of Difference: Nature, Racism and Sexuate Difference (Routledge). Rebecca's current book project engages with concepts of time, difference and relation. She is a founder and convenor of the Philosophies of Difference (PoD) seminars.

Ronnie Scott’s current research project is Australian Comics 1980-2020: A New History, a collaboration with the Australia Council for the Arts, Craig Walker Design, the National Library of Australia and researchers from the University of Melbourne and UTS Sydney. His debut novel The Adversary was shortlisted for a Queensland Literary Award and the ASAL Gold Medal. Ronnie’s novel Shirley was published in 2023.

Rose Michael is a speculative fiction writer, researcher, teacher with a decade’s experience as a publisher. Her first novel, The Asking Game, was a runner-up for the Vogel and received an Aurealis honourable mention. Short stories from it appeared in Island, Griffith Review and Best Australian Stories. An early extract from her second, The Art of Navigation, was shortlisted for a Conjure award. She has published speculative fiction criticism in The Conversation, TEXT, Sydney Review of Books and Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. Experiments towards her new novel appear in Going Down Swinging, Meanjin and Antipodes.

 www.rosemichael.com.au