Secret Cities: Contributor Notes

Poetry Editor: David Prater

David Prater is Cordite’s managing editor. He was born in Dubbo, Australia in the Year of the Rat, 1972 and received a BA (with Honours in Australian Literature) from the University of Sydney in 1994. In 2004 he completed a Master of Arts at the University of Melbourne, his thesis being an examination of that curious confection, Marzipan. In 2005 he was an Asialink resident in Seoul, Republic of Korea, where he pursued his obsession with PC Bangs. He is currently enrolled as a PhD student at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His debut poetry collection, We Will Disappear, was released in 2007 by soi3/ papertiger media. Visit his home page.

Ban’ya Natsuishi was born in Japan in 1955. Currently he works as Professor at Meiji University, and serves as Director of the World Haiku Association as well as President of Ginyu Press. He has attended many international poetry and haiku festivals and authored numeorus Japanese and overseas publications including A Future Waterfall and Flying Pope.

Alice White is a Melbourne poet. Her work has appeared in a range of publications such as The Mozzie and Blue Dog and she is actively involved in the St Kilda Music and Poetry gigs. Heartstricken a work she co-wrote with Nick Hamer-Smith was published by Ginninderra Press in 2001. Her website is http://alice.mi.white.googlepages.com/

D.J. Huppatz is a Melbourne-based writer who has recently returned from several years working in New York. His poetry, fiction and critical writing has been featured in numerous publications in Australia and the United States. He maintains a blog on contemporary culture, Critical Cities.

Leah Kaminsky is a doctor-writer. She won the Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship for Fiction (2007), came second in the John Shaw Neilson Award (2007) and received a Fellowship to the Shaindy Rudolff School of Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University in 2008. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in Mattoid, Quadrant, Voices, Fine Line, Poetry Australia and The Age and a poetry chapbook called Spilt Milk (RMIT Poets - ed Judith Rodriguez). She is completing her first novel.

Currently based in Perth, but pining to return to Canberra, Emma Rooksby is a writer, academic and public servant. She has had poems published in Australian journals and newspapers including Blue Dog, Famous Reporter, The Canberra Times and Eureka Street.

Jeff Klooger’s work has been published in a number of Australian literary journals, including Meanjin, Overland and Westerly. More recently his poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in/on Famous Reporter, Retort Magazine and dotlit. He has a PhD in social theory and philosophy from La Trobe University.

Rose Hunter has had stories and poetry in journals including On Spec, Contemporary Verse 2, Aethlon, Wet Ink, and The Barcelona Review. She also has poems forthcoming, in Word Riot and nth position. She is from Australia originally and now lives in Toronto.

Alamgir Hashmi has published eleven books of poetry and several volumes of literary criticism in Australia, England, Canada, Pakistan, India, the United States, etc. He has won a number of awards and honours, and his work has been translated into several European and Asian languages. For over three decades he has taught in European, Asian, and U.S. universities, as Professor of English and Comparative Literature.

William Doreski ’s most recent collection of poetry is Another Ice Age (2007). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review and Natural Bridge.

Liam Ferney is a Brisbane poet and a former poetry editor of Cordite. His first collection, Popular Mechanics, was published in 2004. He has recently been working on his forthcoming collection «the french word for voyage», in Brixton, England.

Aidan Fadden was born in Birmingham, UK. He lives in Rome where he works as
a teacher, editor and translator. His poems have been published in Italy in Pagine and eLL (Embrio LiveLiterature) in Sagarana and Kuma. Publication is forthcoming in Stand (UK).

Bob Morrow fell into writing poetry while in Ireland searching for his forebears’ roots, and is currently working on a collection of poems about family and the sense of place. Retired from teaching in TAFE, he divides his time between the city, the bush and a Bass Strait beach.

Fleur Beaupert is a Sydney-based writer, legal researcher and performer. She is completing a PhD in mental health law.

Sam Byfield’s first chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom (Pudding House Press) was published in 2007 and recent poems have appeared in Heat, Famous Reporter and LiNQ (Australia), The National Poetry Review, Cream City Review and Meridian (US), The Asian Literary Review (Hong Kong), Nimesis (UK), the Poetry Without Borders anthology, and in online magazines including Cordite and Mascara. In 2008 he has read at the Sydney Writers Festival and at The Bookworm in Beijing.

Stuart Cooke is writing a PhD thesis on Australian and Chilean ecopoetics at the ANU. His translation of Juan Garrido Salgado’s Once Poemas en Septiembre, 1973 was published by Picarro Press in 2007.

Sarah French’s Songs Orphans Sing was published by FIP in 2007.

Benito Di Fonzo is the author of a verse-novel “Her, Leaving As the Acid Hits” and an Arts writer for The Sydney Morning Herald. He co-hosted spoken-word night Bardflys for a decade. His poems and plays have been performed everywhere from Sydney Opera House to pubs, piazzas and toilet-cubicles in London, Edinburgh, Rome, Adelaide and Perth. His favourite colour is irrelevant.

Linda Godfrey lives in Wollongong, south of Sydney, close to the ocean. She is writing a novel, can’t resist a prose poem, has a Masters of Professional Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney and is studying for a Masters of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong. And yet, strangely, still works as a youth worker.

Andrew Burke is an Australian poet with six books published, a novel in the wings, and a poetry collection in the hands of a publisher. He has taught at universities in Australia and China, and presently runs writing workshops at Tom Collins House, Swanbourne, WA. His website: http://hispirits.blogspot.com/

Nick Powell’s poems have appeared in The Age, The Weekend Australian Review, Five Bells, and Harvest. In 2007 a chapbook, of Fallen Myth, was published by The Poets Union as part of a Young Australian Poets Fellowship. He lives in Finland.

Lia Hills is poetry editor and co-initiator of Moving Galleries, a poetry/art project displayed on trains in Melbourne, Australia. In 2007, she wrote the French libretto for a ballet performed in Switzerland. Her prize-winning poetry collection ‘the possibility of flight’ (IP) will be released in 2008, and a crossover novel with Text Publishing in 2009.

Jennifer Compton wrote Open City while she was in residence at the Ligurian Study Centre in Bogliasco after her first visit to Firenze. Until September she is in residence at the Randell Cottage in Wellington, New Zealand. Her new book of poetry - Barefoot - is due out soon.

James Stuart’s most recent works include online poem-world The Homeless Gods and The Material Poem, an e-anthology of text-based art and inter-media writing. He is a 2008 Asialink Literature resident in Chengdu, China, and a candidate for a Masters of Creative Arts at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Elizabeth Kate Switaj has two books of poetry forthcoming: How to Drink a Floral Moon from Blue Lion Books and Magdalene & the Mermaids from Paper Kite Press. Her chapbook, The Broken Sanctuary, is available from Ypolita Press. She edits CRIT Journal and is assistant editor of Inertia Magazine. Her website: www.elizabethkateswitaj.net

Margaret Owen Ruckert (Margo) is a Sydney poet and writer and a former science lecturer. Read her work online: http://www.greendoorpublishing.com/margaret_ruckert.html

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). She wrote ‘accretion to smuggle’ during her residency at Fundación Valparaíso (Spain). A MacDowell and Hawthornden Fellow, the Australia Council for the Arts and the Welsh Academi have awarded her grants to write her second poetry book. Visit www.ivyalvarez.com

Having obtained his creative writing degree in a tower, Cameron Brockmann can only write at altitude, penning poetry and short fiction while gazing out of plane windows. His favourite city is the view from the air ten minutes before landing.

Bev Braune brought out Dream Diary with Savacou Publications (1982) and Camouflage with Bloodaxe Books (1998). A recent essay in poetics “Who is the reader? And how many of us are there?” appeared in Antipodes (2005).

Joanne Johns lives in Brisbane and often watches curiously as her love of poetry, photography and tinkering around on the computer fight for attention. She hopes no one loses an eye. Visit www.joannejohns.com.

Sarah Jane Barnett is a heritage professional who lives in Wellington with her partner Jim and cat Chicken. Her work has appeared in Sport, Landfall and JAAM and on the e-zines Snorkel and Turbine. Her poem ‘The Drop Distance’ was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2007. During 2006 Sarah completed the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her website is http://theredroom.org.

rob walker lives in Himeji where he teaches English, writes and obsessively takes photos. He has 3 collections: sparrow in an airport (2005), micromacro (2006), and phobiaphobia, (2007) as well as wide publication in Australian journals and online. In 2007 with his son Matt he won the Newcastle Poetry Prize (New Media.) He has also released spoken word and music on CD. Visit his poetry website and Japanese photo-journal wakarimasen. Please.

S. K. Kelen has travelled with intensity and written many poems in and about East Asia and the Pacific, and in Imaginationland. His most recent books are Goddess of Mercy (Brandl&Schlesinger, 2002) and Earthly Delights (Pandanus, 2006).

Nancy Anne Miller was born in Bermuda. She is a Bermuda Art Council grant recipient. Recently, poems have appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Edinburgh Review, and are forthcoming in Stand, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, The Fiddlehead and The Caribbean Writer. She is a MacDowell Fellowship recipient for poetry for 2008.