I’m an author and scholar from Narrm/Melbourne, Australia.
Blueberries, my debut essay collection (Text Publishing and Scribe UK, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Stella Prize. I’m currently finishing my first novel, an anarchist comedy set during the first year of the pandemic.
Over the past decade I’ve edited little magazines, taught creative writing, hosted reading nights, and published and performed writing across genres, forms, and disciplines, particularly in and around the essay.
My writing interrogates the unbreakable nexus of the intimate/public and the interplay of gender, sexuality, capital, and public space therein. My PhD thesis traced the contemporary essay’s genealogy in three directions: its liberal-Humanist origins; its complex foothold within the university; and its deployment as a socially engaged literary form in the wake of second-wave feminism, bringing it into conversation with contemporary social movements including #MeToo. Both the creative and critical components of my thesis were concerned with the questions of how ideology informs and regulates literary genre and how genre is ‘legitimised’ and institutionalised.
Essays, stories, and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals including Sydney Review of Books, Paris Review Daily, Literary Hub, Meanjin, Overland, Cordite, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue Fiction Edition , TEXT Journal, and The Lifted Brow, which I formerly edited; and the anthologies The Cambridge History of the American Essay (forthcoming), Open Secrets (2021), Choice Words (2019), The Best of the Lifted Brow: Volume Two (2017), Poetic Justice (2014), and The Emerging Writer (2013). Journalism has been published in periodicals like The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Guardian Weekend and Eureka Street, where I wrote a monthly cultural politics column between 2011-2016. I have had work commissioned for gallery and performance contexts via Darebin City Council, Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, and ArtsHouse. I also published a chapbook, Yellow City, with The Atlas Review in 2019. My writing has received support from the Marten Bequest, Creative Victoria, Copyright Agency Limited, and Australia Council for the Arts.