JONATHAN AARON is the author of three poetry collections: Journey to the Lost City, Corridor, and Second Sight. His work has received many honors, and his poems have appeared in Best American Poetry numerous times. He received his PhD from Yale University and is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College. Aaron lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
BILL ADAMS teaches about the complex relations between people and nature in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. He has published various books on conservation and development, including Wasting the Rain (Minnesota University Press, 1992), Future Nature (Earthscan 1995), Against Extinction (Earthscan 2004) and Green Development (Routledge, 2009). Bill lives in a village just within bicycling distance of Cambridge, and blogs on conservation at thinkinglikeahuman.com
Australian-born poet RICHARD JAMES ALLEN’s recent collection of poems, Fixing the Broken Nightingale (Flying Island Books) is his tenth book as a poet, fiction, performance writer and editor: http://www.fixingthebrokennightingale.com/. Widely published in anthologies, journals and online since winning the ‘under-21 section’ of the English Teachers Association of NSW National Writing Competition in 1980, Allen has been the recipient of numerous awards, nominations and grants, as well as opportunities for presentations, screenings and broadcasts, in a unique international career as an acclaimed writer, director, choreographer, filmmaker, performer, new media artist, and scholar. Further information at The Physical TV Company website: www.physicaltv.com.au
MICHAEL AMHERST is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. He has authored several short stories and is currently working on a novel. His work has been published in the Guardian, the Spectator, The White Review and elsewhere. ’I Suppose I’m Somebody’ was short-listed for the 2012 Bridport Prize. Born in Cheltenham in 1983, Michael studied English at Oxford, where he was awarded an academic scholarship, and later gained an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is represented by Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown.
CHRIS ANDREWS teaches at the University of Western Sydney. His second book of poems, Lime Green Chair, was published by Waywiser in 2012. He has translated books of fiction by Latin American writers, including César Aira’s Varamo (Giramondo, 2012) and Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (New Directions, 2003).
PAUL PAX ANDREWS settled in Perth in 2001. An internationally acclaimed saxophonist and educator, he first appeared on the Sydney jazz scene in 1977. He studied jazz at the Sydney Conservatorium and saxophones with Howie Smith, Col Loughnan, Joe Allard and Roger Frampton. His performances include the Monterey Jazz Festival, Expo ’86 Japan, The World Saxophone Congress Chicago, and six years with the Australian Saxophone Quartet.
ROBERTO ARLT (1900–1942) was an Argentine writer. His novels El juguete rabioso (1926) and Los siete locos (1929) have been respectively translated as The Mad Toy and The Seven Madmen. The latter has recently been republished as an ebook by Serpent’s Tail Classics.
MICHAEL ATKINSON is an American writer, poet and film critic. He has written film and culture critiques for The Believer, Sight & Sound, The Guardian, Film Comment, The Village Voice, and other publications. His debut book of poetry was One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train (Word Works, 2002). He also edited Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood (SUNY Press, 2008).
ALICIA AZA is a lawyer and a poet, born in 1966 and living in Madrid, who has published three books: El Libro de los árboles (2010) which was a finalist for the Andalusia Critics award; El Viaje del invierno (2011) which won the “Rosalia de Castro” International Poetry award; and Las Huellas fértiles (2014).
SERGIO BADILLA CASTILLO was born in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1947. He studied journalism at the University of Chile and worked in various media from 1969 until 1973, when, after the Pinochet coup, he was forced into exile, first to Argentina, then to Romania, and finally in 1976 to Sweden. There he took a degree in social anthropology at Stockholm University and worked as a culture journalist on Swedish radio, travelling throughout Europe and North Africa, until returning to Chile in 1993. His publications from this period include Más debajo de mi rama (1980), La morada del Signo (1982), Cantonírico (1983), Reverberaciones de piedras acuáticas (1985) and Terrenales (1989). Publications in Chile include Saga Nórdic (1996), La Mirada Temerosa del Bastardo (2003), Poemas Transreales y Algunos Evangelios (2005), Ciudad Transreal (2009), Ok Atacama (2010). Badilla lives in Santiago where he contines to write and teach. His work has appeared with English translations in two chapbooks, La cabeza de la Medusa / The Medusa’s head (2012) and Espectros y Sombras / Ghosts and shadows (2013), and in French translations by Patricio Sánchez in Ville assiégée (2010).
STUART BARNES’s poetry has appeared widely in publications such as Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, Mascara Literary Review, Otoliths, Poetry Ireland Review, Seizure, Southerly, Verity La, The Warwick Review and The Weekend Australian Review, and is represented in the anthologies The Night Road (Newcastle Poetry Prize 2009), Short & Twisted 2010, Time with the Sky (Newcastle Poetry Prize 2010), fourW twenty-three and fourW twenty-four. In 2014 he was Runner-Up for the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript. He is poetry editor of Tincture Journal, co-poetry reader for Verity La, and slush reader (poetry, flash) for One Throne Magazine. Twitter @StuartABarnes, Tumblr spines, jackets, sleeves (stuartabarnes.tumblr.com)
SHAINDEL BEERS’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary (contrarymagazine.com). A Brief History of Time, her first full-length poetry collection, was released by Salt Publishing in 2009. Her most recent collection, The Children’s War and Other Poems, was released by Salt in February this year. She is currently working on a short story collection. Find out more at shaindelbeers.com.
RICHARD BERENGARTEN was born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians. In 1975, he founded the international Cambridge Poetry Festival, which ran until 1985. He has lived in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and the USA, and has worked extensively in Eastern Europe and Russia. His poetry integrates English, European, Slavic, Jewish, Mediterranean, American and oriental traditions. His many books include For the Living: Selected Longer Poems 1965-2000, In a Time of Drought, The Blue Butterfly, Under Balkan Light, Imagems 1, Manual and Notness. He is recipient of various literary awards in the UK, Serbia and Macedonia: The Blue Butterfly provided the Veliki školski čas memorial-oratorio for Nazi massacre-victims in Kragujevac (Serbia, 2007), and his poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. A former Arts Council of Great Britain Writer-in-Residence at the Victoria Adult Education Centre, Gravesend, Visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, British Council Lector in Belgrade, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, he is currently a Preceptor at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, a Bye-Fellow at Downing College, an Academic Associate at Pembroke College, a Fellow of the English Association, and poetry editor of the Jewish Quarterly.
SARAH BERRY writes on film, media, and cultural studies, and designs interactive multimedia projects. She is the author of Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (2002).
VANESSA BERRY is a zine maker, writer and artist. She is one of Australia’s best known and most prolific zine makers. She made her first zine in 1996 and has now published more than 130 zines. A collection of stories from her zines was also published as a book, Strawberry Hills Forever (Local Consumption Publications, 2007). Most of her writing appears in her zines and blogs. She has also had had her writing published in many literary journals and anthologies such as Meanjin, Heat and The Sleepers Almanac. Her zines have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and at many smaller galleries, and are held in the collections of many zine libraries in Australia and around the world. vanessaberryworld.wordpress.com
ÁLVARO BISAMA (Valparaíso, Chile, 1975) is a writer, cultural critic, and professor. In 2007, he was selected as one of the 39 best Latin American authors under the age of 39 at the Hay Festival in Bogotá. Estrellas muertas (Dead Stars), his third novel, won the 2011 Santiago Municipal Prize for Literature and the 2011 Premio Academia, given out by the Chilean Academy of Language for the best book of 2010. His most recent novel, Ruido (Noise), was published in 2013.
Since 2008, IAIN BRITTON has had collections of poems published by Cinnamon Press, Interactive Press, Oystercatcher Press, Lapwing Publications and Kilmog Press, plus two pamphlets with Greendoor Publishing and Like This Press. Also, his work was included in the Shearcatcher Poetry Anthology, published by Shearsman Books, 2012. A recent collection, photosynthesis, has just been published by Kilmog Press (NZ), with Rufus Books (Canada) publishing new work in 2015.
JOHN BRYSON’s poetry is published in literary magazines, and most recently The Monthly, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. His prose works include novels, stories and feature pieces. He has lectured at Australian universities in law, literature and journalism and, in 1998, in universities in Northern Spain and Southern France. His feature journalism is widely published in news presses and journals. In 2000 a Schools of Journalism Panel included him in ‘The 100 Australian Journalists of the Century.’ His documentary novel Evil Angels won three Australian and two UK awards, and is now a film starring Meryl Streep and Sam Neill. Appointments advisory to government include the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Prime Minister’s Creative Fellowship Panel. A one-time trial lawyer, he suspects practising in advocacy developed his understanding of the structure of stories, how they might best be presented, and a sympathy for plight.
BLANCA CASTELLÓN (b.1958) is a celebrated Nicaraguan poet whose books include Ama del espíritu (1995), Flotaciones (1998), Orilla opuesta (2000), Los juegos de Elisa (2005) and Cactus body (Cold Hub Press, New Zealand, 2014) a bilingual chapbook of recent poems which was launched at the 10th Festival Internacional de Poesía, Granada, Nicaragua in 2014. A bilingual English/Spanish selected poems is in preparation. Her poetry has been described as “both as light as foam and as sharp as a cut-throat razor” (Rogelio Guedea).
NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER was born and raised in New York City. He was educated at Harvard College, where he studied with Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht. Afterward, he traveled and lived in Europe. He became a regular contributor to the New Yorker in his early twenties, and began publishing his work in other leading magazines, both in the United States and abroad, including Esquire, the New Republic, the Nation, and the Paris Review. He has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the Paris Review 50th Anniversary Anthology, the Best American Poetry, Poet’s Choice, the Everyman’s Library volumes, Poems of New York and Conversation Pieces, the Faber Book of Movie Verse, and the Grand Street Reader. He has edited two major anthologies himself, Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Anchor, 1989) and Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975 (Scribner, 1994). His books have been translated and published in many other countries, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from various institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught at Yale, Barnard College, and New York University, and is now a Professor on the permanent faculty of the graduate Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Constance Christopher, and continues to travel widely, most frequently to Venice, Hawaii, and the Grenadine islands.
MICK COUNIHAN taught media studies and cultural history in various universities for many years. He does not to do so any more due to chronic nausea induced by the ‘scholarly’ literature on digital media and social networking. He would like to have written the Lew Griffin novels of James Sallis, the entire oeuvre of W. G. Sebald and the simple folk poetry of songs like “Fat, old, drunk and proud” by Lancaster County Prison, Live! at the Village Idiot, NYC (1996).
FLORA DELALANDE is a young French historian and poet. Born in Normandy, she began writing poetry when she was sixteen. In 2011, she created the organisation « Le Temps des Rêves » with other poets interested in fusing different art-forms. After Dialogue avec l’Orage [Dialogue with the Storm], her first poetry book, she published Trésors parcheminés [Shrivelled treasures], illustrated by Hassan Manasrah, a Palestinan sketch artist. In 2013 she began to perform her poetry live.
RICK DeMARINIS has published nine novels, six story collections, and a book on the art and craft of the short story. Magazine publications include The Antioch Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Epoch, Esquire, GQ, Grand Street, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, and others. He taught fiction writing at several universities, retiring from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1999.
JOHN DENNISON is a poet and literary critic, and a chaplain at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, where he lives with his wife and young family. He holds a PhD in literature from the University of St Andrews, research which forms the basis for a forthcoming monograph on Seamus Heaney’s prose poetics. Recent poetry by John Dennison has appeared in PN Review, New Walk, Poetry Proper and Broadsheet (NZ). His poems also featured in New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011).
JOE DOLCE was born in Painesville, Ohio, USA, in 1947. He moved to Australia in 1979, becoming a citizen in 2004. He is known for the most successful song in Australian music history, ‘Shaddap You Face’, Number One on the pop charts in fifteen countries and the record-holder for the largest selling single in Australian music history for 33 years. Over the past twenty years he has achieved award-winning recognition as songwriter, composer, poet and essayist. He has set fifteen poems of C.P Cavafy to music and works by Sappho, Sylvia Plath, Les Murray, Ali Cobby Eckermann and others. He won the Launceston Poetry Cup, at the 25th Tasmanian Poetry Festival, in 2010. He has had poetry and essays published in Quadrant, Monthly, PEN (in English/Arabic translation), Meanjin, Etchings, Overland, Cordite, Journey, Carmenta, Vine Leaves, Australian Love Poems 2013, Eye of the Telescope (sci-fi) and Antipodes (USA). He lives in Carlton, Victoria.
PETER DOYLE lectures in Media Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948 (2006, with Caleb Williams) and Crooks Like Us (2009), two books which draw on the forensic photography archives at the Justice and Police Museum, Sydney. He is also the author of three crime novels featuring lurk mechant Billy Glasheen: Get Rich Quick (1996), Amaze Your Friends (1998), and The Devil’s Jump (2001).
DANIEL EAST is an Australian writer currently working in Sydney, publishing theatre reviews on media culture reviews (reviews.media-culture.org.au). He is a graduate of UOW’s Creative Writing degree and his work has appeared in Cordite, Mascara, Going Down Swinging, Voiceworks, Red River Review, Verity La and is soon to appear in PAN Magazine and cutthroat. He co-wrote Sexy Tales of Paleontology, which won the 2010 Sydney Fringe Comedy Award and he is a member of Australia’s only performance poetry boyband, The Bracket Creeps.
MICHAEL EATON’s film and television screenplays include Fellow Traveller (Best Screenplay , British Film Awards), Shoot To Kill (Best Drama, Broadcasting Press Guild and Royal Television Society; BAFTA nominated) Why Lockerbie? Signs and Wonders, Flowers of the Forest, Night Shift (Best Drama, Community Relations Council Film Awards) and Shipman. For Nottingham Playhouse he wrote Leaves Of Life, Angels Rave On and Charlie Peace – His Amazing Life and Astounding Legend. He adapted The Pickwick Papers and George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical for the Radio Four Classic Serial as well as two Dickens short stories, The Bride’s Chamber and George Silverman’s Explanation as afternoon plays and he has also compiled a collection of silent films based on the works of Dickens, Dickens Before Sound, for the British Film Institute; in the bicentennial year of 2012 he wrote five short radio plays about Dickens and London and co-wrote a BBC TV documentary about Dickens and Film. His film The Masks of Mer about the making of the first ethnographic cinematographs by Alfred Haddon in the Torres Strait was followed by a Radio Three drama Head Hunters in 2014. He was awarded the M.B.E. for Services to Film in the 1999 New Year’s Honours List and was visiting Professor in the School of Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University.
PHILLIP A. ELLIS is a freelance critic, poet and scholar, and his poetry collection, The Flayed Man, has been published by Gothic Press. He is working on another collection, to appear through Diminuendo Press. Another collection has been accepted by Hippocampus Press, which has also published his concordance to the poetry of Donald Wandrei. He is the editor of Melaleuca. He has recently had Symptoms Positive and Negative, a chapbook of poetry, and Arkham Monologues, a poetry pamphlet, published. His website is www.phillipaellis.com
NICHOLAOS FLORATOS is an undergraduate student at Macquarie University, studying for a Bachelor of Arts with a major in creative writing and cultural studies. Nick is academically and creatively interested in the efficacy of identity and matters of the self. He has Filipino and Greek heritage from his mother and father’s side respectively and has had the odd privilege of being raised in both cultures. He is new to the professional publishing scene, with his first set of publications occurring this year. His poetry is typically inspired by a combination of his personal and student life.
PENNY FLORENCE currently works primarily with digital poetry, exploring translation and visual art. She has published on a range of academic interests, most of which concern poetry or painting, or how they relate (she is Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London). Ant Hill, from which this selection is taken, is her first collection of poems. Although she has always jotted poetic notes, she has rarely properly written poetry. These 5 poems are the first she has published. She lives in Cornwall, on the Penwith Peninsula, in the far South West of Britain.
JAMES FRANCO is an American actor and filmmaker.
Born in 1958, GENG XIANG is from Yongshou, Shanxi, and now lives in Xi’an. A member of the Chinese Writers’ Association as well as a leading member of Chinese Poetry Society, he began writing poetry in the 1980s and has had poems published in shikan (Poetry Monthly), shiyue (October) and huacheng (Flower City). In 1991, he attended the Fourth National Young Writers’ Conference and, in the same year, he attended the Ninth ‘Youth Poetry Conference’, held by Poetry Monthly Society, and was a representative at the sixth and seventh Chinese Writers’ Association Representatives Conferences. In 2010, he visited Serbia as part of the Chinese writers’ delegation. He has published eight collections of poetry and essays, including At the Back of Xi’an, Gathering Copper from the People, The Chang’an Book and The Lamp on the Land. He has won the Lao She Award for Essays, the Bing Xin Award for Essays and the Poetry Monthly Annual Award.
BARRY GIFFORD was born in Chicago in 1946. The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages, Gifford began as a poet and musician. His most recent prose works are The Roy Stories, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, and Memories from a Sinking Ship: A Novel. His most recent poetry collection is Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems (2012). Gifford lives in the San Francisco area and maintains a website at www.barrygifford.com
LESTER GORAN was a professor of English at the University of Miami. Kent State University Press published three collections of Goran’s short stories—Tales from the Irish Club (1996), She Loved Me Once and Other Stories (1997), and Outlaws of the Purple Cow and Other Stories (1999)—as well as The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer (1994). Goran was the author of nine novels: The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue (1960), Maria Light (1962), The Candy Butcher’s Farewell (1964), The Stranger in the Snow (1966), The Demon in the Sun Parlor (1968), The Keeper of Secrets (1971), and Mrs. Beautiful (1985). He died in 2014.
JAMIE GRANT was born in Melbourne and now lives in Sydney. He has worked as an advertising copywriter, a trainee teacher, a publisher’s representative, a bookseller, a proofreader, and as a freelance editor and journalist. He was editor of the William Heinemann Australia poetry series and poetry editor of The Bulletin. He has published eight collections of his own poetry and has edited five anthologies, including 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know and 100 Australian Poems of Love and Loss. His latest book is Glass on the Chimney (2014).
ROBERT GRAY was born in 1945 and grew up on the north coast of NSW. He lives in Sydney and has worked as a journalist, advertising copywriter, tutor to Chinese students, buyer for bookshops, and as an occasional teacher of literature. He has published eight books of poetry, six selected editions, a collected poems, and a prose memoir, for which he has received many literary prizes. Books of his poetry have been published in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and China, and a selection is about to appear in the United States.
ELIAS GREIG is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. His research focusses on the link between poetic and political representation in the early work of William Wordsworth. Other research interests include William Hazlitt, Mary Wollstonecraft, British Radicalism in the 1790s, and Robert Burns. He has discussed Romantic Literature on ABC radio, reviewed theatre for The Conversation, and is the Postgraduate Representative for the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA). All these achievements have been funded by over ten years of casual work: in retail, as a shoe salesman, and, most recently, bookseller; in academia, as a casual lecturer and tutor at the University of Sydney, and, most recently, casual marker at several universities across Australia. Of these occupations, shoes pay best, books worst, and marking is by far the most unpleasant.
ROGELIO GUEDEA (Mexico, 1974) is a poet, essayist, novelist and translator. His is the author of forty books of poetry, essays, narrative, interviews and translations. Some of his recent books are: Mine fields (Aldus, 2013), Life in the rear window and other portable stories (Lectorum, 2012), Wristwatch: a chronicle of Mexican poetry (19th and 20th Century) (UNAM, 2011) and The crime of Los Tepames (Random House Mondadori, 2013), a bestseller in Mexico. He is editing a critical history of 19th and 20th Century Mexican poetry, which will bring together 40 international scholars and will be published by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes and the Fondo de Cultura Económica. He is a columnist for the Mexican newspapers El Financiero and La Jornada Semanal and currently the coordinator of the Spanish Programme at the University of Otago.
PHILIP HAMMIAL has had twenty-six collections of poetry published. His poems have appeared in 25 poetry anthologies and in 105 journals in twelve countries. He has represented Australia at eight international poetry festivals, most recently at Medellin, Colombia (2012) and Granada, Nicaragua (2014). In 2009-10 he was the Australian writer- in-residence at the Cité International des Arts in Paris.
KENT HARRINGTON is a 4th generation San Franciscan, born to an Irish-Jewish father and Guatemalan mother. His early education was spent at the Palo Alto Military Academy, where he was sent at an early age. He attended San Francisco State University and received a degree in Spanish Literature. After living both in Spain and Latin America, he returned to the Bay Area and began his career as a novelist supporting himself as a teacher, carpenter, factory worker and life insurance salesman. His first published work was the well-received noir thriller Dark Ride published in 1997. Booklist’s review said: “This is as noir as it gets.” His follow-up noir thriller Dia De Los Muertos is considered a modern crime classic. Amazon’s editorial review says: “If ‘American noir’ were in the dictionary, you might find Kent Harrington’s picture in place of the definition.” Other works include Red Jungle, set in Guatemala, and The Good Physician. Red Jungle was selected as one of the “10 Best Crime Novels” of the year by Booklist. Kent lives in Northern California with his wife.
ROGER HICKIN is a New Zealand poet, visual artist, book designer and publisher. Although he has written and translated poetry since the late 1960s, for many years his main preoccupation was with sculpture and painting. In the early 2000s poetry began to demand more attention. His Waiting for the Transport (Kilmog Press, Dunedin) and The Situation & other poems (the initial Cold Hub Press chapbook), both appeared in 2009. Roger is the director of Cold Hub Press—www.coldhubpress.co.nz—which publishes New Zealand poetry as well as international poetry in several languages, including So we lost paradise, a bilingual selected poems of Chilean poet Juan Cameron, and two chapbooks of poems by Sergio Badilla Castillo (in collaboration with the author).
SIOBHAN HODGE was recently awarded a PhD at the University of Western Australia in the discipline of English, studying Sappho’s poetry and its translation. Born in the UK, she divides her time between Australia and Hong Kong, and is currently undertaking a writer’s retreat in Cambridge. She recently published a chapbook, Picking Up the Pieces, and has had poetry and criticism published in several places, including Cordite, Page Seventeen, Yellow Field, Peril, Verge, and Trove. Siobhan nurtures a longstanding interest in working with horses, drawing on both classical dressage and natural horsemanship methodologies, and is working on a related poetry collection.
RICHARD HUGO (1923-1982) was an American poet. His best known books are Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (1965), Good Luck in Cracked Italian (1969), What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American (1975), 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977), The Right Madness on Skye (1980), and Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (1991).
HONG YING 虹影 (b. 1962 Chongqing, China) began her writing career as a poet during the early 1980s in China. After relocating to London in 1990 she continued to publish poetry as well as short-story collections and novels in rapid succession. To date she has written twelve novels in Chinese, some of which have been published in many languages and made into TV series or films. She is best known in the English-speaking world for her novels Summer of Betrayal, Daughter of the River and K: The Art of Love. Her autobiographical novel Daughter of the River has been translated into thirty languages, and K: The Art of Love won the Premio Letterario Rome award in 2005. Her four poetry collections include Quick, Run Eclipse (1999) and I am also called Salammbo (2013). Hong Ying now lives in Beijing and Italy.
DAVID HOWARD spent thirty-five years compiling one book: The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011). He is a winner of the Gordon & Gotch Poetry Award, the New Zealand Poetry Society Competition, the New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-Career Writers Award, and the University of South Pacific Press Poetry Prize. David holds the Robert Burns Fellowship 2013 at Otago University.
JOHN HUGHES’ first book, The Idea of Home, won the 2005 NSW Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction, the 2006 National Biography Award, and was the National Year of Reading ‘Our Story’ winner for NSW in 2012. His second book, Someone Else: Fictional Essays, won the Adelaide 2008 Festival Award for Innovation and the 2008 Queensland Premier’s Award for Short Stories. It was also listed for the inaugural 2009 Warwick International Prize for Writing. His third book, The Remnants, was published in 2012 by UWA Press, who will also publish The Garden of Sorrows in October, 2013. He is currently Librarian at Sydney Grammar School.
PAOLO FABRIZIO IACUZZI was born in Pistoia, in western Tuscany, in 1961 and has lived in Florence since 1992. He has published four collections of poetry—Magnificat (1996), Jacquerie (2000), Patricidio [Parricide] (2005) and Rosso degli affetti [Red of affections] (2008)— which have increasingly focused on the frailty of the individual within violent cycles of history. His fifth collection, Il bene cucito al bene [Good stitched to good] is forthcoming. The Oedipus sequence published in this issue was written to complement sculptures by Antonio Crivelli, commissioned for a staging of Oedipus Rex in the Roman theatre at Fiesole in 2011. Paolo has translated Frank O’Hara and Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) into Italian and has rediscovered and re-published numerous works of the poet Piero Bigongiari (1914-1997), whose archive he oversees. Paolo is Artistic Director of the Accademia Pistoiese del Ceppo, a literary academy in Pistoia, and chairs the Premio Letterario Internazionale Ceppo Pistoia, awarded since 1956. For information: www.paolofabrizioiacuzzi.it
JON A. JACKSON is the author of the Detective Sergeant Mulheisen Mysteries. He tells us about himself and his novel-in-progress, Not So Dead: “I was born in Detroit before WW2, then spent my early years on a farm upstate in Michigan, before the family returned to the big city. I served in the Air Force mainly in the Detroit area and went to college there. Eventually, I moved to Montana and I’m still here, more than forty years later. But Detroit is still present in my mind… in fact, that Detroit only exists in my mind, now. But I have a great love for Montana and this novel, as well as its precursor, Go By Go [Dennis McMillan Publications, 1998], are set in the unique western city of Butte, a kind of alpine Detroit, previously exploited by Hammett in Red Harvest. I’m hoping to publish this Butte novel before too much longer.”
J. KATES is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire.
MITSUYO KAKUTA set her sights on becoming a writer from an early age. Her debut novel—Kōfuku na yūgi (A Blissful Pastime), written while she was a university student—received the Kaien Prize for New Writers in 1990. She has been working continuously as a writer ever since. Three nominations for the Akutagawa Prize—Japan’s most coveted literary award—serve as a measure of the promise with which she was regarded from early in her career. Then, at the encouragement of an editor, she shifted toward the entertainment end of the literary spectrum, where she garnered a much broader readership with works depicting the lives of women in her generation, from their mid-thirties to forties. After publishing two novels in 2002, Ekonomikaru paresu (Economical Palace) and Kūchū teien (Hanging Garden), she went on to win the Naoki Prize for the second half of 2004 with Taigan no kanojo (Girl on the Other Shore). Her successes continued with Yōkame no semi (Cicada on The Eighth Day), which received the 2007 Chūōkōron Literary Prize and was made into a televised drama series as well as a movie; the book sold more than a million copies, vaulting her into the ranks of Japan’s bestselling authors. In 2012 she added to her list of honors by earning the Shibata Renzaburō Award for her novel Kami no tsuki (Paper Moon), and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for her volume of short stories Kanata no ko (The Children Beyond). Kakuta’s stories have appeared on the Granta website, in Asia Literary Review, and in the earthquake anthology March Was Made of Yarn (Vintage).
ANTIGONE KEFALA is a poet and prose writer of Greek-Romanian heritage. She has worked as a university administrator and as an arts administrator with the Australia Council for the Arts. She left with her family after the Second World War and moved to Greece and then to New Zealand, where she studied French literature at Victoria University of Wellington. She has lived in Sydney since the sixties. Her books have been translated into Greek, French, Czech and Romanian. Her latest publications are Sydney Journals (Giramondo, 2008), Absence: New and Selected Poems (Hale & Iremonger, 1998), Max—The Confessions of a Cat (Owl Press, 2009).
MABEL LEE 陈顺妍 PhD FAHA (b. 1939, Warialda NSW, Australia) is adjunct professor at the University of Sydney, after serving on the academic staff for 34 years. From the early 1980s until 2000, she was assistant editor of the Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia (JOSA) and co-editor of the University of Sydney East Asian Series. Her translations include three titles by Yang Lian, winner of the Flaiano International Poetry Prize in 1999: Masks and Crocodile (1990), The Dead in Exile (1990) and Yi (2002); and five titles by 2000 Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian: Soul Mountain (2000), One Man’s Bible (2002), Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (2004), The Case for Literature (2006) and Aesthetics and Creation (2012). She began publishing translations of Hong Ying’s poetry in 1999, and thirty new poems will be included in Hong Ying, Zhai Yongming and Yang Lian (forthcoming 2013).
REBECCA LEHMANN is the author of the poetry collection Between the Crackups (Salt, 2011), which won the Crashaw Prize. Her poems have been published in journals including Tin House, Ploughshares and The Antioch Review. She currently lives in Texas, USA, where she teaches creative writing and literature.
JOHN LEONARD was born in the UK and came to Australia in 1991. He has a PhD from the University of Queensland and was poetry editor of Overland from 2003 to 2007. He has four collections of poetry, the most recent being Braided Lands (2010). His book The Way of Poetry (2010) considers poetry in the context of Daoism. www.jleonard.net
JON LEWIS is the Distinguished Professor of Film Studies and University Honors College Eminent Professor at Oregon State University. He has published eleven books, including The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture, Whom God Wishes to Destroy… Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry, and for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series, The Godfather. Between 2002 and 2007, Lewis was editor of Cinema Journal and had a seat on the Executive Council of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
R. ZAMORA LINMARK’s latest poetry collection, Pop Verite, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press. He has just completed his third novel titled These Books Belong to Ken Z. He is the Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor in Creative Writing at University of Miami and is currently working on a sequel to his first novel Rolling The R’s which, in 2016, will be twenty years old.
MIMI LIPSON lives in Kingston, New York. She completed an MFA in creative writing at Boston University in September 2012. Her work has appeared in YETI, Chronogram, and various places online. She has a story in the Significant Objects anthology (Fantagraphics, 2012), and her chapbook, Food & Beverage, is available from All-Seeing Eye Press. She is writing a novel about sociolinguistics.
RICHARD LOWENSTEIN is an Australian filmmaker. His films include Dogs in Space (1986), Say a Little Prayer (1993), and He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (2001). He has also directed numerous award-winning music videos, concert films, and commercials.
LU YE is a Chinese poet born in December 1969. She has published a number of poetry collections, such as feng shenglai jiu meiyou jia (Wind is Born Homeless), xin shi yijia fengche (Heart is a Windmill) and wode zixu zhi zhen wuyou zhi xiang (My Non-existent Home Town). She has also published 5 novels, including xingfu shi you de (There was Happiness) and xiawu dudianzhong (Five in the Afternoon). She has won a number of poetry awards, including the People’s Literature Award in 2011. She now teaches at Jinan University, China.
As a professional full-time artist MARCO LUCCIO has held 35 solo exhibitions including a major show in New York City. He has exhibited in over 150 group, curated and award shows internationally and received several commissions. Luccio’s work is represented in numerous private, public and corporate collections, including the New York Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Historical Society and the National Gallery of Australia. His work has been shortlisted for many prestigious awards including the 2009 and 2010 Dobell Prize for Drawing and the 2013 Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing. In addition, Luccio has presented many guest lectures at institutions throughout Australia and overseas, including the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Students League of New York. The full series of Marco’s etchings for John Hughes’s book The Garden of Sorrows will be exhibited in Melbourne in November 2013. Visit Marco at www.marcoluccio.com
SUZANNE LUMMIS is an executive board member of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, founding member of the serio-comic performance troupe Nearly Fatal Women, and Literary Organizer for The Arroyo Arts Collective’s “Poetry in the Windows” public arts project. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The New Ohio Review, Hotel Amerika, Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, Rattling Wall, Solo Novo and the ambitious new literary magazine out of Santa Barbara, Miramar. She teaches several poetry workshops for The UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, including those she designed, “The Complete Poet: Vulnerability, Sexuality, Sense of Humor,” and “Poetry Goes to the Movies: The Poem Noir”. Her definitive essay on the poem noir appeared in New Mexico’s Malpais Review. In 2011, her organization, The Los Angeles Poetry Festival, produced a 25-event citywide series, Night and the City: L.A. Noir in Poetry Fiction and Film. In 2013, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” aired a segment on Suzanne Lummis and the noir element in Los Angeles poetry.
MORRIS LURIE (1938-2014) was a prolific Australian author who produced work in many genres, though he is best known for his novels, short stories and children’s books. For his previous appearances in Contrappasso, he supplied this biographical note: “Morris Lurie, to his horror and amazement, finds himself suddenly seventy-five years old. Where, mere moments ago, he was at Thos Cook in Tangier unwrapping the brown-paper parcel of his first book, Rappaport. Some three dozen or so others seem to have accrued since – novels, stories, pieces, children’s books. Flying Home, Madness, The Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race. His autobiography, Whole Life, won the Bicentennial Banjo Award. Hergesheimer in the Present Tense, a kind of novel in thirty hybrid chapters or stories, is imminent. He has been honoured with the Patrick White Award and a noisy granddaughter. His love of jazz is unabated. He lives and works where he was born, in Melbourne.”
TESSA LUNNEY has recently completed a creative doctorate at the University of Western Sydney. She examined silences in contemporary Australian war fiction and wrote a novel as the bulk of her dissertation. She has had her poetry, fiction and reviews published in Southerly, Mascara, Illumina, Phoenix, and Hermes, among others, as well as the inaugural issue of Contrappasso. She works as an editorial assistant at Southerly. She lives in Sydney, and dreams of Elsewhere.
LUCAS LYNDES is co-founder of Ox & Pigeon Electronic Books, a digital publisher of international literature in translation. His translation of the novel The Swimmers by Joaquín Pérez Azaústre was recently published by Frisch & Co. He lives in Lima, Peru.
MARY MACPHERSON is a poet and photographer from Wellington, New Zealand. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University and her work has appeared in many print and online journals. More information is available on her blog, marymacphoto.wordpress.com or website, marymmac.weebly.com
MEGAN McDOWELL is a literary translator from Richmond, Kentucky. Her translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Mandorla, LARB, McSweeney’s, Vice, and Granta, among others. She has translated books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Carlos Busqued, and Juan Emar. She is also a Managing Editor of Asymptote journal. She lives in Zurich, Switzerland.
IGGY McGOVERN was born in Coleraine and lives in Dublin, where he was Professor of Physics at Trinity College until retiring recently. He has published three collections of poetry, The King of Suburbia (Dedalus Press 2005), Safe House (Dedalus Press 2010) and the new sonnet sequence A Mystic Dream of 4, based on the life of the mathematician William Rowan Hamilton (Quaternia Press, autumn 2013). Awards include the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award for Poetry. Iggy edited the anthology 2012: Twenty Irish Poets Respond to Science in Twelve Lines.
TRAVIS MCKENNA is a student of Mathematics and Philosophy, who has also taken very recently to the writing of poetry. He was raised in the western suburbs of Sydney, spent some time abroad in Rome, and now lives in Newtown, in Sydney’s inner west. In addition to poetry, he is currently working on a set of short stories. His undergraduate study was in Classics and Italian Studies, with a special interest in the Renaissance.
AOI MATSUSHIMA is a London-based translator into Japanese and into English. She was a runner-up in the 1st JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) International Translation Competition in 2012. Since 2002, she has been head of the Japanese department at VSI Ltd in London, where she specializes in subtitles and voice-over scripts. She has also taught translation at various universities, and is currently a visiting lecturer at MA in Audiovisual translation at Leeds University and at Roehampton University. Aoi was born, educated and worked in Tokyo until 1997, when she moved to the UK. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University College, UK, and has won awards and published short stories in English, including Asham and Decibel Penguin Awards. She has a BA in English Language from Sophia University, Tokyo.
ANTHONY MAY teaches Writing and Cultural Studies in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, Brisbane. He has published in the fields of popular music, film, literary studies and publishing. He also publishes short fiction. He is currently co-writing a history of pop music since 1945.
ROBERT MEZEY is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Lovemaker, White Blossoms, A Book of Dying, The Mercy of Sorrow, The Door Standing Open: New & Selected Poems, Small Song, Evening Wind, Natural Selection, and Collected Poems 1952-1999. In addition, he has edited and co-edited several books and anthologies, including Poems of the American West, Poems from the Hebrew, and The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette. His poems, prose, and traslations have appeared in such journals as New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Grand Street, The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, Paris Review, The Quarterly Review, and The Iowa Review. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including The Robert Frost Prize, the Lamont Selection (for The Lovemaker), a PEN Prize (for Evening Wind), The Poets’ Prize (for Collected Poems), as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
TOBY MILLER is a British-Australian-US interdisciplinary social scientist. He is the author and editor of over thirty books, has published essays in more than a hundred journals and edited collections, and is a frequent guest commentator on television and radio programs. Miller’s work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, German, Turkish, Spanish and Portuguese. Among his books, SportSex was a Choice Outstanding Title for 2002 and A Companion to Film Theory a Choice Outstanding Title for 2004. Miller is now Professor of Cultural Industries in the Centre for Cultural Policy and Management at the City University of London.
SASCHA MORRELL reads, writes, teaches and researches in Armidale, New South Wales. She has published short fiction and poetry in UK and Australian journals including The Mays and Going Down Swinging. Her influences include Rick Bass, Howard Devoto, sunlight and classical myth.
PIP MURATORE is completing his PhD in French & Italian at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on Decadentism as a lifestyle, and its influence on the arts between the late nineteenth century and today. Previous projects have examined harlotry and heresy, Arthurian romances, Medieval and Renaissance literature and Humour Studies. When not writing his thesis, Pip is a keen writer of poetry, novellas and short stories. Some of his work has featured in publications including Hermes, Threads, and anthologies produced by Co. As. It (Comitato Assistenza Italiani). Pip has also written comedy sketches, and is currently working on the translation and performance of poetry and songs across multiple languages and periods, ranging from Renaissance Italy to Victorian London.
ELISABETH MURRAY is a student at the University of Sydney, studying for a Bachelor of Arts and majoring in English. She is interested in representations of interiority and everyday reality, writing the natural world and spaces of intimacy outside conventional power structures. Her academic and creative interests include US literature, modernism, nature writing and feminist and queer theory. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Voiceworks, dotdotdash magazine, and the University of Sydney anthologies Margins, Sandstone, Sparks and Perspectives. Her novella, The Loud Earth, will be published in 2014.
ANDREW NETTE is a Melbourne based writer, cinephile, pulp scholar, crime and film reviewer. He is one of the founders of Crime Factory Publications, a small press specialising in crime fiction. He helps edit its on-line magazine Crime Factory and co-edited its publications Hard Labour, an anthology of Australian short crime fiction, and LEE, a fiction anthology inspired by the American cinema icon Lee Marvin. His short fiction has appeared in a number of print and on-line publications. Ghost Money, his debut novel, was published in 2013 through Snubnose Press. His site is www.pulpcurry.com. You can follow him on Twitter @Pulpcurry.
GUADALUPE NETTEL is the author of Juegos de artificio (1993), Les jours fossiles (2003), El huésped (2006), Pétalos y otras historias incómodas (2008), El cuerpo en que nací (2011), and El matrimonio de los peces rojos (2013). For several years she has collaborated with a number of French- and Spanish-language magazines and literary supplements such as Lateral, Letras Libres, Paréntesis, La Jornada Semanal, L’atelier du roman, and L’inconvénient. Recently she earned a doctorate in literature from the University of Paris. She was the recipient of the Premio Herralde, third place, for El huésped, and the 2008 Premio Antonin Artaud and the 2007 Gilbert Owen Short Story Prize in Mexico for Pétalos. She has won the Radio France Internationale Prix de la Meilleure Nouvelle en Langue Française prize for non-French-speaking countries. In June 2013 Granta named Guadalupe Nettel in their Best Untranslated Writers series. A novel and a collection of stories will be published in English in 2014 by Seven Stories Press in New York.
CHRIS OAKEY is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, studying Modernist and Post-Modernist poetics in relation to the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Christopher recently completed a Masters degree research project on the poetic epistemologies of Hilda Doolittle and William Carlos Williams. Chris has also published poetry in multiple venues, including The Cordite Poetry Review, Tabula Rasa and Contrappasso.
MARK O’CONNOR was born in Melbourne in 1945 and graduated from Melbourne University in 1965. He has been the Australian National University’s HC Coombs Fellow and a visiting scholar in its Department of Archaeology and Natural History. His poetry shows special interests in Italy (where he spent some years), in the Barrier Reef, and in other Australian environments. He has published 15 books of verse and is the editor of OUP’s much re-printed Two Centuries of Australian Poetry. He was Australia’s ‘Olympic poet’ for the Sydney 2000 Games, with a fellowship from the Australia Council to ‘report in verse on the Games’. Visit him at www.australianpoet.com
STEPHEN OLIVER is the author of 17 volumes of poetry. Travelled extensively. Signed on with the radio ship The Voice of Peace broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel. Free-lanced in Australia/New Zealand as production voice, newsreader, radio producer, columnist, copy and feature writer, etc. After 20 years in Australia, currently in NZ. His latest volume, Intercolonial, a book length narrative poem, published by Puriri Press, Auckland, NZ (2013). A transtasman narrative. Creative non-fiction in Antipodes, June 2014, and poetry in Plumwood Mountain, August, 2014.
GIORGIO ORELLI was born in 1921 in Airolo, in the Canton of Ticino in Switzerland. From his debut (Né bianco né viola, 1944) he has been regarded as a significant voice among living poets writing in Italian. After attending university at Freiburg, where he was a student of Gianfranco Contini, Orelli taught Italian literature and history at the Scuola Cantonale di Commercio in Bellinzona and lectured at several Swiss and Italian universities. A published short story writer (Un giorno della vita, 1960), literary critic (from Accertamenti verbali in 1978 to La qualità del senso in 2012) and translator, most notably of Goethe’s poetry (Poesie, 1974), Orelli is the author of several collections of poems: L’ora del tempo (1962), a selection of his work from his 20s to his 40s; Sinopie (1977); Spiracoli (1989); Il collo dell’anitra (2001). Orelli’s new book, L’orlo della vita, will be published soon. For his poetry, widely translated into French and German, Orelli has received many awards, including the Gran Premio Schiller in Switzerland (1998) and the Premio Bagutta in Italy (2002).
GEOFF PAGE has published twenty collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. He has also won the Grace Leven Prize and the Patrick White Literary Award. His recent books are A Sudden Sentence in the Air: Jazz Poems (Extempore, 2011), Coda for Shirley (Interactive Press, 2011), Cloudy Nouns (Picaro Press, 2012) and 1953 (University of Queensland Press, 2013).
TONY PAGE is a Melbourne poet, whose third book, Gateway to the Sphinx (Five Islands) appeared in 2004. He has read his work at the Edinburgh Arts Festival, Venice Conference of Commonwealth Literature, Shakespeare & Co in Paris, plus venues in the USA and Malaysia. As a theatre director, he has mounted productions of Shakespeare, Beckett, Brecht, Pinter etc. plus several of his own collaborations with various student groups. For 20 years, he worked in Thailand and Malaysia, but now lives in Australia. He has also written for the stage, with Who Killed Caravaggio? completed in 2009. He has recently been published in Eureka Street, The Australian Poetry Journal, The Canberra Times, Peril, Plumwood Mountain and Otoliths and is now finalizing a fourth collection of poetry.
ANDREA PASION-FLORES was born in Manila. She is a graduate of the University of the Philippines where she received her degrees in Journalism, Law, and her MA in Creative Writing. Her fiction has appeared in the Philippine Graphic, Philippines Free Press, the UP Institute of Creative Writing’s Likhaan and Silliman University’s Sands and Coral journals. Her story collection For Love and Kisses was published by UST Publishing House, Manila, in 2014.
MIRA PECK is an author of poetry and prose that blend her interests in science, art, family and justice. Her inspiration comes from a wide range of experiences, including the fields of chemical engineering, business, music and law; living in Poland, Australia and the USA; and hitch-hiking across Asia and Europe. During her twenty years of creative writing she has edited and published a quarterly newsletter, arranged literary workshops and public readings, and coordinated local critiquing chapters. Her multigenre collection, Sour Cherry Tree, was published in 2012 and received recognition from the San Francisco Book Festival. Her first novel, My Men, was published in 2013. She received the annual Goldfinch Prize for poetry in 2011 and for prose in 2010. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children and travels widely.
ELVIRA QUINTANA is a professional translator and interpreter. Her interest in World Literature has led her to explore contemporary Latin American Literature in order to bring a taste of it to the English speaking world. Elvira has a B.A. in Translation and Interpreting completed with Distinction that earned her the Arts Dean’s Medal for academic achievement at the University of Western Sydney. Elvira was born in Mexico where she pursued a law degree for two years; she completed the third year in France. Elvira has lived, studied and worked in Canada, France, Germany, and New Zealand and has found a permanent home in Sydney in the beautiful country of Australia. Elvira is currently travelling through Latin America with the aim of continuing her learning and unfolding the many cultures this region has to offer. To contact Elvira Quintana: quintana.eqr@gmail.com.
SARAH RICE won the 2014 Bruce Dawe poetry prize, co-won the 2011 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, placed third in the 2014 FAW Shoalhaven Literary Awards, and was shortlisted in the 2014 ACU, 2014 Axel Clark, 2013 Montreal, 2013 Tom Howard, 2013 Jean Cecily Drake- Brockman, 2011 CJ Dennis and 2011 Michael Thwaites poetry awards. Her limited-edition art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (prints by Patsy Payne, Ampersand Duck 2010) is held in the NGA as well as other private and public institutions and libraries. Publications include the Global Poetry Anthology 2013, Award Winning Australian Writing and Best Australian Poetry 2012, Long Glances: A Snapshot of New Australian Poetry 2013, Island, Southerly, Australian Poetry Journal, and Australian Book Review (forthcoming).
FRANK RUSSO’s poetry and fiction have previously been published in Southerly, The Weekend Australian, Transnational Literature, Blue Crow, ABC Radio and in anthologies in Australia, the United States and Canada. Two of his novel manuscripts have been short-listed and commended for the Vogel/The Australian Literary Prize and for other awards. The poem “Calvario” was highly commended in January 2014 for the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition (Ireland). Both poems published here will be included in Frank’s collection In the Museum of Creation (Five Islands Press, 2014/15). He holds a Masters in Writing from UTS and is completing a Doctorate in the English Department at the University of Sydney.
FLOYD SALAS is the critically-acclaimed author of Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967), winner of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship; What Now My Love (1970); Lay My Body on the Line (1978), written and published on National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowships; the memoir Buffalo Nickel (1992), which earned him a California Arts Council Literary Fellowship; State of Emergency (1996), awarded the 1997 PEN Oakland Literary Censorship Award, and his poetry books, Color of My Living Heart (1996) and Love Bites: Poetry in Celebration of Dogs and Cats (2006). He was a staff writer for the NBC drama, Kingpin, released in February, 2003, and a 2002-2003 Regent’s Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. Tattoo the Wicked Cross and Buffalo Nickel are featured in Masterpieces of Hispanic Literature (HarperCollins). Tattoo the Wicked Cross earned a place on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Western 100 List of Best 20th Century Fiction. His papers are archived in the Floyd Salas Collection of the Bancroft Library, University of California. www.floydsalas.com
LUC SANTE is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and Folk Photography. He has translated Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines and written the introductions to George Simenon’s The Man Who Watched Trains Go By and Pedigree (all available as NYRB Classics). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College. The Other Paris: The People’s City, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries will be published in 2015 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
JOHN SALAZAR is the pseudonym of a former waiter from Sydney.
Since 2012, MEGAN SALTZMAN has taught and conducted research on Spanish language, culture and urban studies at West Chester University, near Philadelphia. Her main interest lies in how we—through our urban milieu—construct ideas regarding social identity, history and political potential. She is currently working on a book that focuses on contemporary Barcelona titled Public Everyday Space. She has published articles on urban nostalgia, alternative spaces of resistance in the city, and most recently on urban immigration and globalization in Spanish documentaries. Before moving to West Chester, Megan spent nine years teaching and researching in a variety of different places—Dunedin, New Zealand; Barcelona, Spain; Grinnell, Iowa; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Tokyo, Japan. She enjoys photography, textiles, languages, and wandering around cities. courses.wcupa.edu/MSaltzman/
TEGAN JANE SCHETRUMPF writes poetry, essays and creative non-fiction. Published in Wet Ink, Swamp, Theory of Everything, Southerly, Meanjin and Antipodes, she was shortlisted for the 2013 Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman Poetry Prize and will be included in its upcoming anthology. She has a Masters of Letters in Creative Writing and is currently undertaking postgraduate research at Sydney University into the turn of the 21st Century and its effect on Australian poetry.
DAHLIA SCHWEITZER is a writer, teacher, and former cabaret star who has toured widely in Europe and the United States. Schweitzer’s works include the books Queen of Hearts, Breathe With Me, Seduce Me, Lovergirl, and I’ve Been a Naughty Girl; essays in publications including Hyperallergic, Jump Cut, and The Journal of Popular Culture; and an album of electronic dance music, Plastique. Dahlia currently teaches classes on writing, art, and film in Los Angeles while working towards her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. Her book Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster will be published by Intellect Press in 2014.
ERIN MARTINE SESSIONS is a Sydney-based poet whose work has appeared in Australian Love Poems 2013, Contrappasso, the Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman prize anthology Long Glances, Sparks, and Swamp. She is a part-time librarian, part-time lecturer and always a poet.
KERRIN P. SHARPE’s first book, three days in a wishing well, was published by Victoria University Press in 2012. A group of her poems also appeared in Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet). A second book, there’s a medical name for this, was published by Victoria University Press in 2014. At present, she is completing her third collection, rabbit rabbit, with the assistance of a Creative New Zealand grant. Kerrin lived for many years in Wellington, New Zealand, where she completed the Victoria University course (IML) in creative writing. She now lives in Christchurch and, as well as writing herself, teaches creative writing. Her students have had many writing successes and she is very proud of them all.
CLIVE SINCLAIR began his career as a writer in 1973. In 1983 he was one of the original Twenty Best of Young British Novelists. So far he has produced fourteen books, which have earned him the Somerset Maugham Award, the PEN Silver Pen for Fiction, and the Jewish Quarterly Award. His new book of stories Death & Texas, was published in 2014. He lives in London, with the painter Haidee Becker. His son, a film-maker, lives in Los Angeles.
PAGE SINCLAIR was born and raised in Sydney and completed a BA at the University of Cambridge in 2013. She is currently working on her first collections of poetry.
ELIZABETH SMITHER has written 17 collections of poems as well as short stories and novels. She was New Zealand poet laureate (2001-3) and received the Prime Minister’s award for literary achievement in poetry in 2008. Her most recent publications are The blue coat (Auckland University Press, 2013) and Ruby Duby Du (Cold Hub Press, 2014).
MARCO SONZOGNI (born in 1971) lives in Wellington, New Zealand. He holds degrees from the University of Pavia (Almo Collegio Borromeo), University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Auckland. He is a widely published and award-winning editor, poet and literary translator, now Senior Lecturer in Italian with the School of Languages and Cultures at Victoria University of Wellington, where is also the Director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation. His literary translation projects include Swiss-Italian poets (Oliver Scharpf, Alberto Nessi, Pietro De Marchi, Fabiano Alborghetti, Giorgio Orelli), New Zealand poets, and the collected poems of Seamus Heaney (Meridiano).
ALEX SKOVRON is the author of six collections of poetry and a prose novella; his most recent book is Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014). Many journals and anthologies in Australia and overseas have published his work, and his novella The Poet (Hybrid, 2005) was recently translated into Czech. The numerous public readings Alex has given have included appearances in China, Serbia, India, Ireland, and on Norfolk Island. The Attic, a selection of his poetry translated into French, was published by PEN Melbourne in 2013. A collection of short stories is also in preparation.
N. J. TAIT is a translator and freelance writer and editor who works mainly on the north coast of New South Wales.
DAVID THOMSON, born in London, in 1941, and living in San Francisco since 1981, has consistently attempted to extend the ways in which we write and read about film. So his deeply researched biography of David O. Selznick, Showman, and the five editions of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, have been balanced by “novels” taken from the movies—Suspects, Silver Light and Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes. More recently he has mixed The Whole Equation and Have You Seen…? with a study of Psycho and The Big Screen, a one-volume historical survey from Eadweard Muybridge to Steve Jobs.
RICHARD KELLY TIPPING lives in Sydney working with visual poetry, photography and public sculpture. His word art is substantially represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, which lists and illustrates more than one hundred works through www.artsearch.nga.gov.au. Born in Adelaide, Tipping studied at Flinders University, and after travelling in the Americas co-founded the ongoing Friendly Street poetry readings in 1975. He lived in Europe and England from 1984-86, producing and directing documentary films on writers including Peter Porter, David Malouf and Randolph Stowe. He completed a masters degree and a doctorate at the University of Technology, Sydney, and lectured in media arts at the University of Newcastle until 2010. UQP published three collections of his poetry: Soft Riots (1972), Domestic Hardcore (1975) and Nearer by Far (1986); and Picaro Press Notes Towards Employment (2006). In 2007 he edited a special issue of Artlink magazine on The Word as Art. A fat book of visual and verbal poems is nearing completion, to be published by Puncher & Wattman. He is represented by Australian Galleries.
PAOLO TOTARO, born in Naples, Italy, lives in Sydney and writes poetry in both English and Italian. He was Foundation Chairman of the Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW, a Commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission, a contributor to The Bulletin, Visiting Professor at the University of Western Sydney and Pro-Chancellor and Member of Council of the University of Technology, Sydney, among other positions. His main interest has been human rights. A practising chamber musician, of late he has mostly been writing poetry. His Collected Poems 1950-2011 were published in 2012 by Padana Press, Sydney.
MARK TREDINNICK—winner of the Montreal Poetry Prize in 2011 and of the Cardiff Poetry Prize in 2012—is the author of Fire Diary, The Blue Plateau, Australia’s Wild Weather and nine other acclaimed works of poetry and prose. His new collection, Bluewren Cantos, will be out in early 2014. Raised in suburban Sydney, Tredinnick did time as a lawyer before working for a decade in book publishing. He has lived in Sydney and in the Blue Mountains; these days he lives and writes along the Wingecarribee River, where he is at work on Reading Slowly at the End of Time and an anthology of Australian love poetry (Inkerman & Blunt, 2013). Read more at Mark’s website: www.marktredinnick.com.au
LINDSAY TUGGLE grew up in the Southern United States, and migrated to Australia eleven years ago. She is currently pursuing research in Philadelphia and working on a book of elegies. Lindsay’s poetry has been commissioned by the Red Room Company and published in literary journals such as HEAT, Mascara and Contrappasso. Her poem “Anamnesis” was awarded second prize in the Val Vallis Award for Poetry. In 2011, she undertook an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship. In 2012, she was a John W. Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C..
TODD TURNER lives and works in Sydney with his partner and his daughter. His poems have appeared in various journals, newspapers and anthologies including Meanjin, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Islet, Overland, Quadrant, Southerly, The Weekend Australian and Verity La. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Jean Cecily Drake Brockman Poetry Prize. He was highly commended in the 2011 Blake Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2010 Newcastle Poetry Prize. His first collection of poetry Woodsmoke will soon be published through Black Pepper Publishing.
LYN VELLINS is a Sydney-based poet. She runs a monthly poetry reading group, ‘RhiZomic’, and was on the committee of many reputed publications andon several editorial committees whilst at Sydney University. Her first collection of poetry, A Fragile Transcendence, was published by Picaro Press in July, 2012.
JUAN VILLORO is a Mexican journalist and fiction writer. Translations of his writing have appeared in n+1, BOMB, Parkett, and Words Without Borders. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton and Yale Universities. His novel El testigo (The witness) was awarded the Herralde Prize, and his narco-terrorism chronicle, La alfombra roja (The red carpet), was the recipient of the King of Spain Prize. His most recent books are the novel Arrecife (Reef) and the collection of short stories and chronicles Espejo retrovisor (Rearview mirror). In 2012, his body of work was recognized with the José Donoso Iberian-American Prize.
Sydney’s Sun-Herald has called CLINTON WALKER ‘our best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture’. An art school drop-out and recovering rock critic, he was born in Bendigo in 1957, and is the author of Inner City Sound, his 1981 debut on the Australian punk uprising, finally back in print in 2005; Highway to Hell (1994), his internationally acclaimed, best-selling biography of Bon Scott; Football Life (1998), a personal history of minor league Australian Rules; Buried Country (2000); Golden Miles, originally published in 2005 and updated, through Wakefield Press, in 2009; Wizard of Oz: Speed, Modernism and the Last Ride of Wizard Smith (2012); and History is Made at Night: Live Music in Australia (2012). Walker lives with his family in Sydney and is currently working on a sequel to Buried Country and a graphic biography of Lionel Rose.
LUKE WHITINGTON lived in Italy for nearly twenty years, restoring Medieval structures in Umbria and Tuscany. He continued this work in Ireland, restoring the Norman castle of Portlick at Lough Ree. He founded the multimedia gallery Pleasants Factory in Dublin, which supported artists and writers for seven years. Luke’s poems have been published widely in Ireland, including in The Irish Independent, The Westmeath Independent and Poets In Cahoots. In Australia, his poetry has appeared three times in the Henry Kendall Award anthology and in Overland, Quadrant, The Canberra Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, Melaleuca and the Five Bells anthology. He has read poetry written for art in galleries at Cessnock, Bowral, Pearl Beach and the Charles Cecil Atelier Art School in Florence. He founded the Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman Poetry Prize and divides his time between the Central Coast, Canberra, Ireland and Renaissance Italy.
LES WICKS has been published across nineteen countries in ten languages. His eleventh book of poetry is Sea of Heartbeak (Unexpected Resilience) (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013). This year he will be performing at the World Poetry Festival (Delhi), Beyond Baroque (L.A.), Austin International Poetry Festival (Austin), Brett Whiteley Studio (Sydney), Struga Poetry Evenings and RhiZomic (Sydney). He can be found at leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm
FIONA YARDLEY is a sometime writer living in Sydney’s Inner West. She has previously had work published in See See Miscellany, Hermes, and Tangent, and one of her recent poems is forthcoming in Overland. At present she is writing a thesis in English literature on ethics and aesthetics in unreliable narrative fiction, and spending far too much money on Book Depository. “Eros. Thanatos. Orpheus” is part of a series of poems she is currently writing based on Grecian myth cycles, reimagining well-known stories and characters and experimenting with perspective, interiority, and motivation. Previously she has written a collection loosely centred around weather systems and the sea.
MIKHAIL FYODOROVICH YERYOMIN, born in 1936, is a poet, playwright and a translator, who saw few of his poems published in his homeland during the Soviet period. Instead, his work—consistently in eight-line stanzas rich with allusive scientific and linguistic byplay—appeared in émigré journals like Kontinent and Ekho. The first volume of his poems (in Russian) was published in the United States in 1986, and then in 1991 in Moscow. Each book is a cumulative addition to and a selection from previous work, and each carries the same title: Stikhotvorenia (Poems). In English translation, his poems have appeared in Fjords Review, The Hawai’i Review, Naked Punch, Parthenon West, Stand, Two Lines, and in the anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts. J. Kates’ translations of Yeryomin’s selected poems won the Cliff Becker Book Prize this year and will be published by White Pine Press in 2014. The poet lives in St. Petersburg.
Since his arrival in Australia in 1991, OUYANG YU has published 73 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, literary translation and criticism in both English and Chinese. His latest novel in Chinese is Taojin Di (Land of Gold Diggers), published by Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House in 2014 and his latest novel in English is Diary of a Naked Official, published by Transit Lounge in 2014. His latest translation into Chinese is The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, published by Nanjing University Press in 2014. He is now professor of English at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics.
EDITORS
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR is the co-founder and present editor of Contrappasso. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from Macquarie University, Sydney, where he has lectured on film studies and creative writing. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, PopMatters, Island, Extempore, and Over My Dead Body! His latest novella, Dog City, appears in Crime Factory #16. His book At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City is available from Wallflower/Columbia University Press. See www.matthewaspreygear.com.
THEODORE ELL co-founded Contrappasso and was co-editor until the end of 2015. He edited the Long Distance special issue (November 2015). His translations and articles have featured in The Italianist, Modern Greek Studies, Earth Sciences History, Quaderni Del ‘900, Mosaici, Philament, CLCweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Samgha and Atelier. His book A Voice in the Fire, on Florentine poetry of the Second World War, was published in March 2015 by Troubador (UK). Theodore’s own poetry has been selected for The Weekend Australian, The Canberra Times, Australian Love Poems 2013, Cuttings, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sandstone, Cellar Door and Hermes. He edited and produced the anthology Long Glances in 2013. He holds degrees in literature, modern languages, publishing and public policy from the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, and is now a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. In October 2013 he was made an Honorary Research Associate with the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies.
NOEL KING (co-editor of the Contrappasso special issues Noir and Writers at the Movies) has worked in many Australian universities, in a variety of media and cultural studies contexts: at Griffith University (1977-1980), the South Australian College of Advanced Education (now the University of SA, 1980-1886), Curtin University (1986-1989), UTS (1989-2001), and the University of Tasmania (2002-2003). He recently resigned from Macquarie University, where he taught film and cultural studies (2003-2012).
Contrappasso Magazine: International Writing 