Alex Miller
Alex Miller has twice won the Miles Franklin Award and is an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize.  He is the author of eight novels, several of which have been published internationally and all of which are in print in Australia.  His most recent novel is the critically acclaimed Landscape of Farewell (Allen & Unwin 2007).

Sandy Fitts
Sandy Fitts’ poetry collection, View from the Lucky Hotel, was published by Five Islands Press in 2008. Her poetry has won many prizes in the UK and Australia, including the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2008. www.sandyfitts.com

Karen Knight
Karen Knight’s poetry has won many awards, including the Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals, newspapers and anthologies, including Best Australian Poems 2005. She has written five collections of poetry. Her current collection is Postcards from the Asylum (Pardalote Press, 2008). Some of her work has been translated into Tamil and set to music by a New York composer. She has recently completed a collaborative work Twinset (Knucker Press, UK) with Scottish writer, Dilys Rose.

Nathan Curnow
Nathan Curnow is a poet from Portland, Victoria.  In 2006 he toured Australia and New Zealand with his first collection of poetry, No Other Life But This (Five Islands Press). With assistance from the Australia Council he recently stayed at ten haunted sites around the country writing a new collection of poems based upon his experiences.  His prizes include the Woorilla Poetry Prize, the Bauhinia Literary Awards and the UMPA Prize for Poetry (University of Melbourne).  .
He has been heard widely on ABC radio, JJJ and Radio New Zealand.
www.ncurnow.blogspot.com http://www.ncurnow.blogspot.com

Julie Gittus
Julie Gittus is a central Victorian writer living in the historic town of Maldon. Her short stories have been broadcast on ABC Radio and included in a range of Australian anthologies including the 2008 Families anthology as edited by Barry Oakley, and the Griffith Review. Her young adult fiction novel, Saltwater Moons, was published in 2008. Julie recently received a Varuna Fellowship to work on her second young adult novel. www.juliegittus.com.au

Brendan Ryan
Brendan Ryan grew up on a dairy farm in Western Victoria. His first collection, Why I Am Not a Farmer was published by Five Islands Press in 2000. He has had poems and essays published in The Age, Australian Book Review, Island, Heat, Meanjin, Southerly as well as The Best Australian Poems 2006, 2007, 2008 and Best Australian Poetry 2004, 2007, 2008. The poem, Back Roads, Local Roads was short-listed for the 2006 Australian Book Review Poetry Prize. His second collection of poetry, A Paddock In His Head, was published with Five Islands Press in 2007. A third collection of poetry, A Tight Circle, was published with Whitmore Press in 2008.

Cate Kennedy
Cate Kennedy is the author of two poetry collections,  "Signs of Other Fires", published by Five Islands Press in 2001, and  "Joyflight", published in 2004.  Her first collection was commended in  the Victorian Premier's Awards and went on to win the Vincent Buckley Poetry  Prize.  She is also the author of a travel memoir and the short story  collection "Dark Roots", published in 2006 by Scribe.  She is best known  for her short fiction and her stories have appeared in a wide variety of  publications including The New Yorker and the Harvard Review,  the English Women's Weekly, and a wide variety of Australian magazines and anthologies.

alicia sometimes
alicia sometimes is a writer, poet and musician. She is a presenter on Australia's biggest independent radio station, 3RRR with a weekly show Aural Text dedicated to poetry and spoken word. She was also co-ordinator of the first national Australian radio poetry slam on Radio National in 2004. Alicia has appeared on many spoken word CDs, been published in many journals, had her work on Australian TV (ABC and SBS) and has performed locally, nationally and internationally. Her first book is kissing the curve (FIP). She was editor of the national Australian literary magazine Going Down Swinging for seven years.

Terry Jaensch
Terry Jaensch is an Australian poet/actor and monologist. His first book, Buoy was published in 2001 (FIP). He has worked as Writer-in-Community, Artist-in-Residence, Dramaturge, Artistic Director of the 2005 Emerging Writers’ Festival, poetry teacher and in a variety of arts programming positions. In 2004 he wrote and recorded 15 monologues based on his childhood in a Ballarat orphanage for “Life Matters” ABC Radio. In 2004/05 he was awarded an Asialink residency in Singapore where he worked collaboratively with poet Cyril Wong. The resulting work, Excess Baggage & Claim (transitlounge publishing), was launched in 2007.

Louise Oxley
Louise Oxley's poetry collections are Compound Eye (2003) and Buoyancy (2008), both published by Five Islands Press. Her poems have appeared in Australian and overseas journals and have won a number of national awards, including the Melbourne Poets Union, Tom Collins and Bruce Dawe Prizes. She is represented in anthologies and in the Wagtail series (Sitting with Cézanne, Wagtail 41, Picaro Press, 2005). Louise is Tasmanian editor for the journal Blue Dog. She works as an academic skills adviser to international students at the University of Tasmania.

E A Gleeson
E A Gleeson is a writer and funeral director from Ballarat. She contributes articles to a range of publications including The Age and The Australian. Her poetry has been performed and published in the USA, Ireland and throughout Australia.  Her poetry collection In between the dancing, published by Interactive Press, was awarded the 2008 Award for “Best First Manuscript”.

Ross Gillett
Ross Gillett’s awards for poetry include the Broadway Poetry Prize, the FAW John Shaw Neilson Award, the Melbourne Poet’s Union National Poetry Prize and most recently the 2008 Woorilla Poetry Prize. His poems have been accepted by The Age and The Australian and in magazines including Quadrant, Overland, Poetry Monash and Blue Dog.  They have featured in Radio National’s Poetica program and in Black Inc’s The Best Australian Poems 2004, 2005 and 2006.  His book The Sea Factory was one of the Five Islands Press New Poets 2006 series.

Alex Skovron
Alex Skovron was born in Poland, lived briefly in Israel, and emigrated to Australia in 1958. Alex’s poetry has been published widely and five collections have appeared to date, most recently The Man and the Map (2003) and Autographs (2008). Awards have included the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry (twice), the John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award (twice), the Australian Book Review Poetry Prize (2007) the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards. His prose novella, The Poet (2005) was joint winner (with Kate Grenville) of the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction.

Judith Rodriguez
Judith Rodriguez’s latest poetry publication, is Manatee (Wagtail #69 - Picaro Press). Picaro has also published a reprint of her Mudcrab at Gambaro's. Awarded the FAW Christopher Brennan Prize for Poetry, she had a New and Selected Poems with University of Queensland Press. She collaborated on the play Poor Johanna with Robyn Archer, and with composer Moya Henderson on the opera Lindy, produced by the Australian Opera in 2002. She has translated works from German and Colombian.  She was the editor of Penguin's Australian Poetry series in the 1990s. She served on the Committees of the Victorian Writers Centre and the Australian Society of Authors, and works for International PEN.

Sheryl Persson
Sheryl Persson is a member of DiVerse, a group of poets who write ‘ekphrasis’. They read regularly at galleries such as the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of NSW and the S. H. Ervin Gallery. Sheryl's poems, children’s poems and stories have been published in Australia and abroad in literary journals, including Poetrix, Quadrant, Blue Dog and Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2004 and 2005. In 2007 Ginninderra Press published Scarcely Random, a collection of Sheryl’s poems. She is also the author of four commissioned non-fiction books. Smallpox, Syphilis and Salvation, published by Exisle will be released in May 2009.

Ross Donlon
Ross Donlon lives in Castlemaine where he convenes a popular monthly poetry reading. He has published poetry in many journals, including Antipodes, Quadrant and Blue Dog and his work has been broadcast on Radio National's Poetica, RRR's Aural Text and on community radio. He appears on the CD, You Have Been Chosen. His first collection, Tightrope Horizon, was published in 2003 (FIP). He has read at many festivals in Australia and is a guest at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival in 2009.

Ian McBride
Canadian-born Melbourne poet Ian McBryde is widely published and anthologised both nationally and overseas. He has released eight collections of poetry and two CDs of spoken-word. He has performed his work at many venues and festivals across Australia, as well as Canada, England, and the USA. His ninth collection, entitled The Adoption Order, is to be released by Five Islands Press in July/August 2009.