Mama Alto
Mama Alto is a jazz singer, cabaret artiste and gender transcendent diva. She is a transgender and queer person of colour who works with the radical potential of storytelling, strength in softness, and power in vulnerability. As part of a 2019 Creative Victoria Creators Fund Fellowship and a 2020 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, she is working on a forthcoming book exploring the concept of the diva.
Read Mama’s essay here.
Léa Antigny
Léa Antigny is a writer and publicist living in Sydney. Her non-fiction has been published in The Guardian, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow and elsewhere. She tries not to tweet at @leaantigny.
Read Léa’s essay here.
Chris Ardley
Chris Ardley is a writer, glassblower and educator living in Melbourne. He is the recipient of ScreenWest OOMF funding for his debut film While You Have Light, and is currently working on a collection of short stories.
Read Chris’ essay here.
Nadia Bailey
Nadia Bailey is a writer and editor. She is the 2020 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow for Australian Writing, and was the recipient of the 2019 Kraków City of Literature Creative Fellowship. She is currently working on her first novel.
Read Nadia’s essay here.
Tyree Barnette
Tyree Barnette is a writer originally from North Carolina, USA. His other published works include a collection of articles written for SBS Voices where he explores being an African-American man in Australia. He is also part of the Sweatshop Writer’s Collective based out of Western Sydney that works with CALD writers and creatives.
Read Tyree’s essay here.
Adélaïde Bon
Adélaïde Bon is a French writer, actress and a feminist activist, living in Paris. Her first book, a work of non-fiction called The Little Girl on the Ice Floe, about the aftermath of childhood rape, has been translated in seven languages and won several prices. She is currently working on her first novel.
Read Adélaïde’s essay here.
Liz Breslin
Liz Breslin writes poems, plays, stories, reviews and a regular opinion column at Otaga Daily Times. Her poetry collection Alzheimer’s and a Spoon made it to The NZ Listener’s Top 100 Books of 2017. She was a UNESCO Cities of Literature writer-in-residence in Kraków, Poland in 2019. Find out more here.
Read Liz’s essay here.
Candice Chung
Candice Chung is a Sydney-based freelance journalist and editor. She writes about food and culture for The Sydney Morning Herald, SBS, Peddler Journal and more. Candice edits SBS’s Emerging Writers Project which supports the work of young Asian-Australian writers.
Read Candice’s essay here.
Mikaella Clements
Mikaella Clements is an Australian writer currently based in Berlin. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in the New York Times, Guardian, Catapult, Buzzfeed, Hazlitt and more. Her first novel, co-written with Onjuli Datta, is due out in July 2021.
Read Mikaella’s essay here.
Bre Audrey Graham
Bre Graham is a writer and editor. She has written for Refinery 29, Stylist, and Riposte amongst others and was Associate Editor of Oh Comely magazine. Bre runs Dishes To Delight and is currently working on her non-fiction debut. Originally from Sydney, she lives in London.
Read Bre’s essay here.
Eloise Grills
Eloise Grills is an award-winning writer, artist, critic and poet. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Meanjin, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Kill Your Darlings, among others. She is currently working on her first full-length book, an illustrated memoir called big beautiful female theory, about big fat sexy bodies. It will be published by Affirm Press in early 2022. She tweets and grams as @grillzoid.
Read Eloise’s essay here.
Charlotte Guest
Charlotte Guest is a writer and bookseller based in Geelong, Victoria. Her work has appeared in The Weekend Australian, Island Magazine, Kill Your Darlings, Griffith Review, Overland, and Westerly Magazine. Her story ‘Flight Mode’ was shortlisted for the 2020 Peter Carey Award. Charlotte is the recipient of the 2020 Tina Kane Emerging Writer Award, administered by Arts Mildura, and in 2021 she will be a Lemon Tree House International Artist-in-residence in Tuscany, Italy.
Read Charlotte’s essay here.
Lana Guineay
Lana Guineay is a freelance writer who lives by the sea in Adelaide. Her non-fiction and fiction has appeared in The Guardian, Going Down Swinging, The Adelaide Review, Anthology of Australasian Stories, the 2019 Swinburne Microfiction award and more. Her first book, Dark Wave, was recently shortlisted for the Viva La Novella prize. She is currently working on her second novel and is on staff at Writers SA. She tweets here.
Read Lana’s essay here.
Victoria Hannan
Victoria Hannan’s first novel, Kokomo, won the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. It’s out now through Hachette.
Read Victoria’s essay here.
Simi Kang
Simi Kang is a Sikh American community advocate, educator, artist, and scholar. She is currently a Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has appeared in The Asian American Literary Review, Kartika Review, Hyphen Magazine, Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, Gravy, and Gastronomica.
Read Simi’s essay here.
Bridget Lutherborrow
Bridget Lutherborrow is a writer and communications professional living in Melbourne. Her work explores topics such as foraging, feelings, lumberjills and anthropomorphic horses, and has appeared in publications such as The Lifted Brow, Going Down Swinging and Cordite. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wollongong and tweets at @birtiledge.
Read Bridget’s essay here.
Stephanie Madewell
Stephanie Madewell is the editor of Broccoli. She lives in a stone house in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, that she is slowly filling with books and keeps a blog called Even*Cleveland to catalog stray thoughts, thematic obsessions, original writing, and things she wishes she could buy.
Read Stephanie’s essay here.
Liam Pieper
Liam Pieper is an author and former (and probably future) line cook. His 2014 memoir, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award and the Ned Kelly Best True Crime award. His first novel The Toymaker won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christina Stead Fiction Award. He was the 2018 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow for Australian Writing. Sweetness and Light is his new novel.
Read Liam’s essay here.
Sam van Zweden
Sam van Zweden is a Melbourne-based writer interested in the ways food, memory, mental health and the body interact. Her first book, Eating with my Mouth Open, will be released with NewSouth in February 2021.
Read Sam’s essay here.
Erika Veurink
Erika Veurink is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Iowa. She is receiving her MFA from Bennington College. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Review, Cheap Pop, Hobart, Midwest Review, Triangle House, x-r-a-y, and elsewhere.
Read Erika’s essay here.
Hannah-Rose Yee
Hannah-Rose Yee is a writer living in Sydney. She writes about culture, modern life and the zeitgeist for Vogue, marie claire, Gourmet Traveller, Sydney Morning Herald and Man Repeller.
Read Hannah-Rose’s essay here.