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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 of The Canberra Times. Her latest books are Goodbye, Cruel (Pitt Street Poetry, 2017) the chapbook Listen, bitch with artist Caren Florance (Recent Work Press, 2019) and Man-handled (Recent Work Press, 2020).

Links: melindasmithpoet.com and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Smith

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

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 by Spineless Wonders.
Jane Skelton’s poetry and stories have also appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including in Overland, Island Magazine, Going Down Swinging, Hecate and the Margaret River Press collection. Earth Eaters, a novel, was a winner in the Varuna LitLink award in 2010, and extracts are included in Lives of the Dead.
Actors have given voice to her creative writing at Little Fictions events in Sydney, and in the 2018 Story-Fest.
Jane has a doctorate in Creative Arts and is a casual academic at Western Sydney University. She is a member of the LGBTIQA+ community.

Links: janeskelton.com.au

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

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 award for lifetime achievements in Poetry.

Philip Salom began publishing in 1980 and since then has written fourteen books of poetry and five novels. His book Sky Poems won the British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize in London for the overall Best Book of Poetry in the British Commonwealth and his first book The Silent Piano won the earlier Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Book. His collections are praised for their expansive imagination and language. He has received further acclaim through international reviews and from guest appearances in America, Canada, Britain, the Republics of Serbia and Macedonia, Italy, Singapore and New Zealand.

Of his five novels two have been shortlisted for Australia’s most prestigious fiction prize, the Miles Franklin Award (The Returns in 2020 and Waiting in 2016). The Returns was also shortlisted for the 2017 Prime Minister’s Award. Playback won the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Fiction. Salom’s novels have also been shortlisted in the Queensland Premier’s Prize, the ASL Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Prize. The Fifth Season was published in November (Transit Lounge, 2020).

Links: philipsalom.com

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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

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications

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.

am interested in the way light breaks on edge, the way pigment takes to surface, the way words tumble out onto the page, the way the eye of the ear sees them.

I find common ground with John Cage when he says “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry” and (in the same piece, his “Lecture on Nothing”) when he says “Kansas is like nothing on earth.” Kansas, southeastern Colorado, the northeastern corner of New Mexico, the panhandle of Oklahoma, and (especially) the panhandle of Texas – that is where I grew up, and it shaped my eyes like nothing on earth.

I find common ground with Helen Frankenthaler when she embraces chance and lets paint flow on raw canvas to create forms that surprise and invite us to see worlds we would never have seen alone. This leads me to embrace lyric poetry as a form of abstraction (in the way that computer scientists use the term), a simplification (and an interface) that allows us to manipulate complexities below the surface without getting bogged down in them. And it leads me to agree with Georgia O’Keeffe when she says all painting is abstract.

I often find myself spending as much time on what is not there as on what is. This usually means focusing on a single image and letting the whole composition spring up around it — not a narrative but an all at once that evokes a here and now that is, here, now, neither. A likely story is likely to grow out of this when readers and viewers encounter it, but I hope my art always invites more than it contains.

Links: stevenschroeder.org

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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.

Links: lousmith.net

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Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and emigrated to Australia in 1958 aged nearly ten. His family settled in Sydney, where he grew up and completed his studies. From the early 1970s he worked as an editor for book publishers in Sydney and (after 1980) Melbourne. His poetry has appeared widely in Australia and overseas, and he has received a number of major awards for his work. The most recent of his six collections, Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (2014), was shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His collection of short stories The Man who Took to his Bed (2017), and his novella The Poet (2005, joint winner of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction), have been published in Czech translations; The Attic, a selection of his poetry translated into French, was published in 2013, and a Flying Island bilingual volume of Chinese translations, Water Music, in 2017. Some of his poetry has appeared in Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Macedonian and German, and he has collaborated with his Czech translator, Josef Tomáš, on English translations of the twentieth-century Czech poets Jiří Orten and Vladimír Holan. The numerous public readings he has given include appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, Macedonia, Portugal, and on Norfolk Island. An 80-minute CD in which he reads from his work was published in 2019 under the title Towards the Equator. His next poetry collection, Letters from the Periphery, is due in 2021.

Concerns that have driven Alex’s poetry and fiction are many and various: history, language and music; the riddles of time and the allure of memory; philosophy, faith and the quest for self-knowledge; art and the creative impulse; fantasy, eros and the affections. His interest in speculative fiction has played a recurring role in his thinking and his work, as has a lifelong passion for music. As a poet, he enjoys both the disciplines and the aesthetics of formal design and the diverse challenges of freer structures. Integral to his project has been a focus on musicality and the primacy of rhythm. He likes probing the elasticities of syntax, and exploiting the ‘contrapuntal’ layerings available to imagery and meaning via compression, connotation, ambiguity.

Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications