Matt Turner (b.1974) is the author of Not Moving (Broken Sleep Books, 2019), and the translator of Lu Xun’s Weeds (Seaweed Salad Editions, 2019). He is also the co-translator of works by Hu Jiujiu, Yan Jun, Ou Ning and others. His essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel and Hong Kong Review of Books. He lives in New York City, where he works as a freelance translator and editor.
Geoffrey Donald Page (born 7 July 1940) is an Australian poet, translator, teacher and jazz enthusiast.
He has published 22 collections of poetry, as well as prose and verse novels. Poetry and jazz are his driving interests, and he has also written a biography of the jazz musician Bernie McGann. He organises poetry readings and jazz events in Canberra.
Page has held residencies at numerous academic, military and political institutions, including Edith Cowan University, Curtin University, the Australian Defence Force Academy, and the University of Wollongong. From 1974 to 2001 Page was head of the English department at Narrabundah College, a secondary college in Canberra. He retired from teaching in 2001.
He has travelled widely, talking on Australian poetry in Switzerland, Britain, Italy, Singapore, China, the United States and New Zealand. His poetic style ranges from lyrical to satirical, from serious to humorous – and often addresses his concerns about contemporary society and politics. Judith Beveridge writes that “Page is a humanely satirical poet. He lets us view our condition with a fusion of the comic and the tragic.”
Page is the poetry reviewer for ABC Radio’s The Book Show and, for a decade before that, its Books and Writing program.
Page curated the Poetry at the Gods and Jazz at the Gods series at the Gods Cafe in Canberra, and now curates Geoff’s At Smiths.
Links: His own Wikipedia page – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Page
geoffpagepoet.com.au
trans Chris Song, Matthew Cheng (in National Library of Australia)
Gillian’s first poetry collection is My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001).
She has poems published in various anthologies including Poetry For The Planet: An Anthology of Imagined Futures (2021, Littoria Press), What we Carry: Poetry on Childbearing (2021, Recent Works Press), A Slow Combusting Hymn (ASM & Cerberus Press, 2014), and others. You can also find her work in various journals such as The Australian Poetry Collaboration (2019), Burrow (Old Water Rat Publishing, v1,2,3), and Live Encounters magazine: Special Australia-New Zealand edition (May 2021) and again in the Live Encounters Magazine 12th Anniversary edition, Vol 2 (Dec 2021).
Gillian is involved in running various poetry events including Poetry At The Pub (Newcastle) and is the Co-Director and Poetry Curator of for the Indie Writers Festival ‘IF Maitland’.
Gillian spent her childhood exploring the waterfront of Lake Macquarie and has lived in Newcastle, Northern NSW, the UK and Ghana, after finishing studies at the University of Newcastle. She lives in East Maitland with her husband and their four children, where they run their successful coffee roasting business, River Roast.
Links: www.facebook.com/GillianSwainPoet
Gillian’s first poetry collection is My Skin its own Sky (Flying Islands Press 2019) following the chap-book Sang Up (Picaro Press, 2001).
Steve Armstrong lives in Newcastle, New South Wales, and writes poetry when he’s not working as a social worker/therapist.
Described as a poet of “landscape, desire, memory, love, lust and loss…” (Mark Tredinnick), he won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize in 2015, the Local Award of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014 and 2019. He’s been shortlisted for the Ron Pretty Prize (twice), and the Australian Catholic University Poetry Prize. What’s Left is a collection that of poems that explores what it means to walk with the world; the natural world, or in those pockets of wild close at hand in an urban environment, and for that matter, within ourselves. Broken Ground, his first collection, was released by University of Western Australia Publishing in 2018. He posts poetry on Instagram @lyricforinstance
Links: www.stevearmstrong-poesis.com
What’s Left picks up where Steve’s 2018 collection Broken Ground left off, and further explores what it means to walk with the natural world. Many poems draw inspiration from classical Chinese poetry where a love of nature leads to a deeper meditation on what it means to be human. “Mengjiao – bird in an empty city”, and “pluck a lotus for pleasure – women poets of the Song Dynasty” are ASM titles that have been particularly influential.
Ross Donlon is a poet, born in Sydney, who now lives in Castlemaine, Victoria.
He is widely published in Australia & also in Ireland.
He was awarded the Varuna Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship in 2010 and has won two international poetry competitions, The Wenlock Poetry Festival Competition (under the auspices of the Arvon Foundation) & the Melbourne Poets’ Union International Poetry Competition.
A sequence from his book, The Blue Dressing Gown (Profile Poets) was produced for Radio National’s ‘Poetica’ in 2013.
Ross has been a frequent reader at festivals & readings in Australia and in recent years also in England, Ireland, Norway & Romania
His latest book, Sjovegen – (The Sea Road – 50 tanka for Alvik) is a collection in English / translated into nynorsk set in the Hardanger egion of Western Norway.
Ross had a poem included in ‘Best Australian Poems 2014’.
Harold Legaspi is a poet writing in Darug land. His first book, Letters in Language, was the runner-up in the inaugural Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry, was published 2021 in the Flying Islands Pocket Books of Poetry series with Cerberus Press and Association of Stories in Macau.
Letters in Language re-iterates what is possible in the prose poem and autography, and is intended to evoke cultural memory. The Tagalog (Filipino) mirroring the English translations are intended to provoke monolingual speakers to question, as it conveys Harold Legaspi’s identity, being bi-lingual, in a manner of speaking, to tell his story in a language he almost forgot through the migration process into Australia. By conveying meaning in two languages, his writing functions in the most concrete way, through exemplifying not abandoning the language that raised him in a land now foreign to him.
Robert Edmonds is a poet, psychologist and clown doctor whose work has appeared in many
publications. In 2016 he was longlisted for The University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s
International Poetry Prize. In 2020 he won third prize in the $25,000 Newcastle Poetry Prize.
His first poetry collection Gravity Doesn’t Always Work was published by Flying Island Books in 2021
Links: www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A35083
His first poetry collection Gravity Doesn’t Always Work was published by Flying Island Books in 2021.
Far and Wild is Irina Frolova’s first collection of poetry. It speaks to the experience of immigration and a search for belonging. It draws on fairy-tales and explores archetypes through cultural and feminist lenses.
Irina Frolova was born in Moscow in 1981, in the former Soviet Union. She moved to Australia in 2003, and now lives on the Awabakal land in NSW with her three children and two fur babies. Irina has a degree in philology from Moscow City Pedagogical University, and is currently studying psychology at Deakin University. Her work has appeared in Not Very Quiet, Australian Poetry Collaboration, Baby Teeth Journal, Rochford Street Review, The Blue Nib, and The Australian Multilingual Writing Project, as well as various anthologies. Irina is a regular at Newcastle Poetry at the Pub where she was a featured poet in January, 2019.
Links: www.facebook.com/irinafrolovapoet/
This book speaks to the experience of immigration and a search for belonging. It explores the nature of language as performative of place and consciousness, and raises the question of gendered cultural othering: what is it like to navigate Russian identity as a woman in a western country? It examines the stereotype of a Russian bride, who is seen as both submissive and a threat.
Far and Wild looks at archetypes through cultural and feminist lenses.
KA Rees writes poetry and short fiction. Her work
has been included by Australian Poetry Anthology, Australian Poetry Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Kill Your Darlings, Margaret River Press, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, Spineless Wonders, and Yalobusha Review among others.
Links: www.instagram.com/kateamber01/
Her debut poetry collection.
Chris Mansell studied Economics at the University of Sydney – because she’d read Das Kapital as a teenager and thought economics was the way to understand what is going on. She spent the first ten years of her life on the central coast of NSW, and then she moved to Niugini (Papua New Guinea). At 14, she decided that she would be a poet. She has won the Queensland Premier’s Award for Poetry, Amelia Chapbook Award (USA) and the Meanjin Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize, and was short-listed for the National Book Council Award and the NSW Premier’s Award.
Also by Chris Mansell: Poetry 101 Quads (Puncher & Wattmann/Thorny Devil Press, 2020) Parole (poems in English and French, translated by Tim Thorne, Well Sprung, 2019) Love Cuts poems, images, essay. With Richard Tipping (Well Sprung, 2014) Seven Stations (text only) (Well Sprung, 2013) Spine Lingo: new and selected poems (Kardoorair, 2011) A View from the Beach (PressPress, 2010) Letters (Kardoorair, 2009), Love poems (Kardoorair, 2006) Mortifications & Lies (Kardoorair, 2005) Stalking the Rainbow (Press Press, 2002) Day Easy Sunlight Fine in Hot Collation (Penguin, 1995) Shining Like a Jinx (Amelia, USA, 1992) Redshift/Blueshift (Five Islands Press, 1988) Head, Heart & Stone (Fling Poetry, 1982) Audio Raptors Blue (audio) (Well Sprung, Sydney, 1989) with music by Rob Cousins Seven Stations (CD) composer: Andrew-Batt Rawden (Hospital Hill, 2014), Fickle Brat (audio + text) (IP Digital, 2002) Short fiction Schadenvale Road (Interactive Press, 2011)
Links: chrismansell.com
Foxline reconnoiters the relationship between the land and the creatures on it: Man (a farmer), and Fox. The relationship between the creatures themselves reveals their alien natures. Both claim the land for themselves but neither is autochthonous. They are opposed to each other but have an understanding and an alliance nevertheless because they both kill and have nowhere else.