Flying Island Poets

Melinda Smith is a poet, editor, teacher, arts advocate and event curator based in Canberra. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including the 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award-winner Drag down to unlock or place an emergency call. She frequently collaborates with artists in other disciplines including dancers, musicians and visual artists, and is also a former poetry editor ...

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 ...

Laurie Duggan, born in Melbourne and later a resident of Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane, moved from Australia to the UK in 2006, and returned to Australia in 2018. His recent books include Selected Poems 1971–2017 and No Particular Place To Go (both published by Shearsman in the UK), and a reissue of his first two books as East and Under the Weather (Puncher & Wattman). He is also ...

Sarah St Vincent Welch grew up in Sydney and was a member of No Regrets women writers workshop and the Sydney Poets Union. She has a double major and honours in English Literature from the University of Sydney. In 1987 she gained a Graduate Diploma in Media at University of Canberra (UC). She worked at the National Film and Sound ...

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. Morgan Bell is an Australian woman, ...

Daniel Ionita, born in Bucharest, Romania, teaches Organisational Improvement, part time, at the University of Technology Sydney. Over the last ten years Daniel has dedicated much of his time to poetry. He has had his own work published in both his native Romania as well as Australia and the USA. In addition, Daniel's passion has been sharing poetry through anthologies, ...

Brian Purcell is a poet and painter based in Bellingen on the mid-north coast of NSW. His first poems were published in Poetry and Audience (Leeds, UK) in the early eighties. In 1984-85 he met poets like Kit Kelen and Adam Aitken through publishing poems in Poetry Australia’s young writers’ issue, New Pressings.He became involved in community literature, as voluntary ...

Jane Skelton is a Blue Mountains writer of poetry, short stories and novels. Chimera, her chapbook of prose and poetry was recently published by Rochford Press. Lives of the Dead and Other Stories was published in 2013 by Spineless Wonders, and her novella Flying Foxes was short-listed in the Carmel Bird Award and published as an eBook in 2015, also ...

Rae Desmond Jones (11 August 1941 – 27 June 2017) was an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer and politician. Rae Desmond 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 ...

Anna Couani is a Sydney writer and visual artist who runs The Shop Gallery in Glebe. Her recent publications of poetry (7 books in all) are Thinking Process, Owl Press 2017 and Small Wonders, Flying Islands Press 2012. She co-produced The Harbour Breathes with photomonteur Peter Lyssiotis. She was involved in the small press with Magic Sam magazine and Sea ...

Philip Hammial grew up in and around Detroit, Michigan, where he spent his teenage years getting into serious trouble, a juvenile delinquent with too much imagination for his own good. After three years in the engine rooms of US Navy ships he went to Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, and then to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he ‘discovered’ ...

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 ...

Alan Jefferies grew up in Cleveland on the Queensland coast. He published his first poems in 1976 and since then his work has appeared in magazines and newspapers in Australia and overseas. He holds degrees in Communication and Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney and for many years worked as a librarian and teacher at the Workers’ Educational Association, ...

Greg McLaren (born 1967) is an Australian poet. Born in the New South Wales Hunter Region coalfields town, Kurri Kurri. He moved to Sydney in 1990 where he studied at the University of Sydney and in 2005 he was awarded a PhD in Australian Literature. His thesis was on Buddhist influences on the Australian poets Harold Stewart, Robert Gray and Judith Beveridge. As well as poetry, he has published reviews and criticism. Julieanne Lamond writes in Southerly that "McLaren ...

John Bennett grew up in the south of England when Red Squirrels were already becoming rare. He studied Philosophy & Sociology at university and travelled extensively before discovering Australia and settling here just over thirty years ago. He has worked at various sites including the Powerhouse Museum, NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service and Sydney University. He gained a PhD ...

Papa Osmubal (aka Oscar Balajadia) is a poet-artist residing in Macau-SAR, China. He has an MA in English Studies from the University of Macau, where when he graduated he was awarded the highest honor (Excellence). He is also into occidental calligraphy, doing both modern and old (classical) scripts. Among his many calligraphy heroes are Joseph 'Joe' Vitolo and Julien 'Kaalam' ...

Jean Kent was born in Chinchilla, Queensland, 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 Queenslandl; 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 ...

Judy Johnson has published five full length collections and several chapbooks. Her books have won the Victorian Premier's Award and been shortlisted in both the NSW and WA Premier's Awards. She's been awarded the Wesley Michel Wright Prize 3 times. Her latest collection is 'Dark Convicts'(UWA publishing, 2017) a poetic exploration of her African American First Fleet convict ancestors.Her Flying ...

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 ...

Richard James Allen is an Australian poet, born in Kempsey, New South Wales, on the unceded lands of the Dunghutti Aboriginal People. His writing has appeared widely in journals, anthologies, and online, and he has been a popular reader at multiple reading venues, over many years. His latest volume of poetry, The short story of you and I, was published ...

Iman Budhi Santosa, an Indonesian poet published by Flying Island in 2015, passed away in December 2020. He had dedicated his life to mentor countless creative writers and poets in Yogyakarta, Indonesia since 1969. Iman is known as one of the street poets in Yogyakarta, actively writing poems and plays even in the three-year period when he was homeless and ...

Philip Salom is a contemporary Australian poet and novelist whose books have attracted widespread acclaim. He has published nineteen books – fourteen collections of poetry and five novels – notable for their originality and expansiveness and for surprising differences from title to title. Philip Salom has won the Outstanding Achievement Award of the 4th Boao International Poetry Award, a major ...

Jan Dean is a Hunter Region poet. She won the 2018 Newcastle Writers Festival joanne burns Microlit Award for her prose poem ‘Fish Flops and Flaps’ published in Shuffle by Spineless Wonders. She was awarded the Seniors’ Prize sponsored by Baytree by Ardency at the 2019 Lane Cove Literary Awards with ‘Moss Poem’. Her work has been published in Not ...

Dr Mark Tredinnick BA (Hons), LLB (Hons), MBA, PhD—is a celebrated poet, essayist, and teacher. His many works of poetry and prose include A Gathered Distance, Almost Everything I Know, Egret in a Ploughed Field, Bluewren Cantos, Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Red Writing Book. Since 2003, Tredinnick has published over two hundred works—poems, essays, reviews, papers, ...

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 ...

Chan Lai Kuen (a.k.a. Dead Cat) was born in Hong Kong. She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a degree in English, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (taken in Hong Kong) with a degree in Fine Art. Her book of poetry Were the Singing Cats (《有貓在歌唱》2010) was awarded Recommendation Prize of the 11th Hong ...

Wang Mingyun is a member of the Chinese Writers' Association and the China Film Association, and was awarded as a National First Class Writer. He is Vice-chairman of Anhui Writers Association and Chief Editor of the Poetry Monthly Magazine. Wang has published more than 10 books of poems, including The Fourteen Lines of the Body, Original Sin, and Immortal Book ...

Huang Lihai was born in the 70s in Xuwen county, the southernmost tip of the Chinese mainland. His poems have been included in more than one hundred anthologies and he has published a number of poetry collections, including I Know Little about Life, Feed Rainbows to the Birds and Who Can Outrun Lightning. He has written essays and critiques on ...

I am a poet and visual artist who spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor. I think of my work as an intersection of chance with design — a collaboration with the media, painting with light while celebrating the way(s) pigment takes to surface, not showing or telling so much as opening a space for a play of possibility ...

Andrés Ajens is a Chilean poet, essayist, translator and literary activist born in 1961. Among his books of poems and hybrid essays are Conmemoración de inciertas fechas y otro poema (1992), La última carta de Rimbaud (1995), Más íntimas mistura (1998), and O Entrevero (2008). His latest book is Æ (Santiago: Das Kapital Ediciones, 2015).  He co-directs and edits for Intemperie Ediciones and is a co-director with the late Emma Villazón of ...