I am a Melbourne-based writer and visual artist and believe in potential of the Creative Arts to contribute to culture-making; the development of values and the making of a more humane, fairer world.  I work with words in poetry and prose and with images in visual art.  In addition I teach Poetry Writing and Appreciation to adults and work as a project-based Creative Writing Therapist.

Art-making to me is a political (in the widest possible sense) as well as an aesthetic endeavour and also about our relationship to the ineffable.

Background

After working for many years as a trained Social Worker in the areas of women’s health and domestic violence I needed to refresh my working life.  I moved to the country and set up a boutique hand-made greeting card business using botanical specimens and photography.  Living in the bush in a mudbrick cottage allowed me to experience myself as much more a part of my physical environment, imbedded in landscape in ways which profoundly changed me.  Practising my two creative disciplines in this context I was opened to the power of the natural world and the beauty of its multitudinous life forms.   They trained me in the art of attentiveness.  As my skills developed, the capacity for attentiveness emerged as an essential ingredient of arts practice.

I sold the greeting card making business in 2003 and moved back to Melbourne to turn my attention to writing.  Since then I have been developing my craft, studying technique and experimenting with various poetic and other literary forms.  My poems often take a personal individual focus but open out into universal concerns.

In 2006 I started teaching Creative Writing to adults and more recently have run groups in Creative Writing Therapy.

In 2018 I started a Masters in Creative Writing at RMIT and upgraded in 2019 to a PhD. I am writing a poetic biography of French novelist and utopian socialist George Sand. I hope to finish in 2023.

Awards

• • 2022 Shortlisted, Newcastle Poetry Prize, ‘Originary’
  • 2021 Shortlisted, Dawe Poetry Prize, ‘The Philosophy of Play-doh’
  • 2021 Longlisted, Lit USA, ‘Banerry’
  • 2021 Shortlisted, Dawe Poetry Prize, ‘The Philosophy of Play-doh’
  • 2020 Highly Commended, Martha Richardson Poetry Prize, ‘The Georges’,
  • 2019  Commended, New South Wales Women’s Writers Poetry Competition, ‘What if the lake’
  • 2017 Longlisted, Lane Cove Poetry competition, ‘Black kites’
  • 2016 Shortlisted, New Shoots Poetry Competition, ‘Arboreal sorority’
  • 2014  Longlisted, inaugural Canberra University Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, ‘Motherstone is womb’
  • 2013 Commended, Harris Poetry Competition, ‘Transubstatiation’
  • 2011 Equal First Prize and Appointment as Bard of the Stables, Stones Winery Inaugural Poetry Competition, ‘The Seduction of Shaving’
  • 2010  Martha Richardson Poetry Medal, First Prize, ‘Hawkesbury Houseboat’
  • 2009  Eastern Libraries Poetry Competition, Commended, ‘Styx’
  • 2009 Commended, Inverawe Nature Writing Prize, ‘What We Get Up To, Warrumbungle Creek
  • 2009Shortlisted, Page Seventeen Magazine Annual Poetry Competition, ‘Bovine North South Tendency’
  • 2009 Runner Up, City Nights Competition, 360 Programme, ABC Radio, ‘Emergency in the Night’
  • 2008 Shortlisted, Poetica Christi Competition, ‘A Beginning’