The Best Australian Poems 2016
Page 15
Ellen van Neerven is a Yugambeh woman living in Brisbane. Her debut work of fiction, Heat and Light, has won several prestigious awards. Comfort Food, her first poetry collection, was published by UQP in 2016.
Ann Vickery is a Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She is the author of Devious Intimacy (Hunter Publishers, 2015), The Complete Pocketbook of Swoon (Vagabond Press, 2014), Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt Publishing, 2007) and Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2000).
Chris Wallace-Crabbe lives in Brunswick. He taught literature for many years at Melbourne University, and also overseas. Mainly a poet, he also collaborates on artists’ books, most recently Imagined Cities (NGV, 2016) with Jan Senbergs. His latest books of poetry are My Feet Are Hungry (Pitt Street Poets, 2014) and Afternoon in the Central Nervous System (George Braziller, 2015).
Simon West is a poet and Italianist, and Honorary Fellow in the School of Languages at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Ladder (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), and a translation and critical edition of The Selected Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (Troubadour, 2009).
Petra White works as a policy adviser. Her fourth collection of poetry is forthcoming from Gloria SMH in 2017.
Jessica L. Wilkinson is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry. She has published two poetic biographies, marionette: notes toward the life and times of miss marion davies (Vagabond Press, 2012) and Suite for Percy Grainger (Vagabond Press, 2014). She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Fiona Wright’s book of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance (Giramondo, 2015), won the 2016 Kibble Award, and her poetry collection, Knuckled (Giramondo, 2011), won the 2012 Mary Gilmore Award. She has recently completed a PhD at Western Sydney University’s Writing & Society Research Centre.
Ouyang Yu, now Professor of English at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, has to date published 82 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, literary criticism and translation in English and Chinese. His latest book in Chinese is A History of Literary Exchange between Australia and China (Showwe Press, Taiwan, 2016).
Fay Zwicky began publishing poetry and short stories as an undergraduate at Melbourne University. She has been a concert pianist and was a Senior Lecturer in English literature at the University of Western Australia. She now devotes her time entirely to writing. Fay has received a number of awards for her writing. Her most recent publication with UQP is the collection Fay Zwicky: Poems 1970–1992 (1993).
Billy Marshall Stoneking’s first collection of poems, Ear Ink (Dead Center Vanity Press), appeared in 1979. A major collection, Singing the Snake: Poems from the Western Desert 1979–1988, was published by Angus & Robertson in 1990. With Eric Beach and others, he was involved in the foundation of the Poets Union of Australia. He was also involved in the performance poetry scene, and featured in the performance poetry anthology Off the Record, edited by π.o. (1985). Billy died in July 2016.