Barry Hill

Ivy Alvarez

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Red Morning Press, 2006). Her poems feature in anthologies, journals and new media in many countries, including Best Australian Poems 2009, and have been translated into Russian, Spanish and Japanese. The recipient of several awards, prizes and residencies, she has received funding towards the writing of her second book of poems from the Australia Council of the Arts. During 2010, she was a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester, after which she wrote a series of poems for her third book at St Fagans National History Museum, thanks to support from the Welsh Academi.

In 2008, Wales Arts International supported her participation through readings and workshops at the Booranga Writers Centre in Wagga Wagga and 'The Wanderer' performance and response project for the Critical Animals symposium in Newcastle, New South Wales. Fundación Valparaíso also invited her to attend a writing residency in Spain that year. In 2005, she received residency fellowships from MacDowell Colony (USA) and Hawthornden Castle (UK). She also accepted an Arvon Foundation bursary and the honour of Special Poetry Guest to Dublin’s Trinity College/Florida International University poetry summer program in 2004. That same year, her poem ‘earth’ appears in the Australian/Pacific Region Literacy Placement Test for Scholarships, initially selected from the anthology Moorilla Mosaic: Contemporary Tasmanian Writing. In addition to poetry, she also writes plays, reviews and articles, and has served on the editorial board of a number of journals, including the Asia-Pacific Writers Network [apwn], Cordite Poetry Review and qarrtsiluni. Born in the Philippines, Ivy Alvarez grew up in Tasmania, Australia. She is currently resident in Cardiff, Wales, having previously lived in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland.

Terry Jaensch

Terry Jaensch is an Australian poet/actor and monologist. His first book, Buoy was published in 2001 (FIP) and shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award by the Fellowship of Australian Writers. He has worked as Writer-in-Community, Poetry Editor (Cordite) Artist-in-Residence, Dramaturge, Artistic Director of the 2005 Emerging Writers’ Festival, poetry teacher and in a variety of arts/community and local government programming positions. In 2004 he wrote and recorded 15 monologues based on his childhood in a Ballarat orphanage for ‘Life Matters’ ABC Radio – since reworked and performed for theatre as ‘Orphan’s Own Project’.

He was awarded an Asialink residency in Singapore where he worked collaboratively with poet Cyril Wong. The resulting work, Excess Baggage & Claim (transitlounge publishing), was launched in 2007. He has won awards including the Melbourne Poet’s Union International Poetry Prize, the Victorian Writers’ Centre Poetry Slam and was on the winning team of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival Poetry Slam. His work has been anthologized, most recently in Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann) and published in journals nationally and in the US, Germany, Japan, Singapore and India. His poems have been translated into Bengali and interpreted through classical Indian dance. He has a background in acting, having studied at the Herbert Berghof Studio and Stella Adler conservatory in New York.

Nicolas Low

Nicolas (Nic) Low is a New Zealand-born writer and artist based in Melbourne, Australia. He holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne and is currently Writing Program Manager at the Asialink Institute, responsible for sending Australian writers on residencies to Asia, and developing delegations, tours and cross-cultural collaborations.

Nic writes for Australian publications including Dumbo Feather, Griffith Review, Art Monthly and The Lifted Brow, and has had work included in various journals and anthologies. He won the Enid Durham Poetry Prize in 2004, and in 2007 was runner-up in the New Media section of the Newcastle Poetry Prize. In 2008 Nic was awarded a residency to work on his first novel at The Avoca Project, a multi-arts collaboration run by artist Lyndal Jones. Nic is also the co-creator, designer and editor of Nomadology (Undergrowth, 2006), featuring socio-political travel writing from 30 young Australian writers.

From 2006-2008 Nic was the Co-Director of the Australian National Young Writers Festival, curating an annual program of 120 events featuring 220 of Australia’s emerging and established writers. He is the founder of the annual CRACK experimental theatre festival, and has sat on the Next Wave Festival’s curatorial board.

As an installation artist, Nic has received commissions to create work for festivals across Australia, including an ambush-style sound installation for the Next Wave Festival / Commonwealth Games Cultural Program 2006. He is the recipient of two Melbourne Fringe Visual Arts Awards, including the Adelaide Fringe Touring Award 2007. His most recent work, entitled A Map of a Dream of the Future, was an installation of 400 native Tasmanian plants that functioned as a large-scale work of data visualisation, based on a State-wide survey of attitudes towards climate change. The work was presented in a flooded warehouse for the Junction 2010 National Regional Arts Festival.

David Prater

David Prater is an Australian-born writer, editor and researcher. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Australian Literature (University of Sydney, 1994), a Master of Arts in English (University of Melbourne, 2004) and a PhD in literature and publishing (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, 2010). Over the last decade his poetry has been published in a range of Australian and international journals and anthologies, including Best Australian Poetry 2003 (UQP). His debut poetry collection We Will Disappear was published by Soi3 (Papertiger Media) in August 2007, and was launched at the Melbourne Writers Festival and the Queensland Poetry Festival. Vagabond Press published his chapbook Morgenland, containing poems written in Korea and Japan, in the same year.

David has been invited to appear at numerous Australian writers’ festivals including the National Young Writers Festival, Next Wave Festival, the Emerging Writers Festival, the Melbourne Writers Festival, Overload Poetry Festival and the Queensland Poetry Festival. He has also performed internationally in London, New York City, Sofia (Bulgaria), Ten’ri (Japan), Seoul (ROK), Montreal (Canada), Amsterdam and Utrecht (The Netherlands). In 2005 he undertook a four month Asialink residency at Sogang University, Seoul, teaching courses in Australian culture and creative writing. In 2009 he returned to Seoul for a second Asialink residency, hosted by the Korea Language Translation Institute. Since 2000 David has been the Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review, an online journal of Australian poetry and poetics funded by the Australia Council for the Arts. He has now produced thirty five issues of the magazine, which features new works by a diverse range of emerging and established Australian poets. He currently lives in Karlskrona, Sweden, where he is undertaking post-doctoral research on electronic literature and pedagogy at Blekinge Institute of Technology.