For general enquiries, please send to info@aawp.org.au
For membership enquiries, memberships@aawp.org.au
For accounts, accounts@aawp.org.au
Associate Professor Julia Prendergast
President/Chair: info@aawp.org.au
Portfolio: Prizes and Partnerships
Julia lives in Melbourne, Australia, on unceded Wurundjeri land. She is a fiction writer, prose poet, and essayist, with a particular interest in realist forms of writing. Her novel, The Earth Does Not Get Fat (2018) was longlisted for the Indie Book Awards (debut fiction). Her short story collection, Bloodrust and Other Stories, was published in 2022. Julia is a practice-led researcher—an enthusiastic supporter of transdisciplinary, collaborative research practices, with a particular interest in neuro|psychoanalytic approaches to writing and creativity. She is President|Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), the peak academic body representing the discipline of Creative Writing (Australasia). Julia is Associate Professor and Discipline Leader (Creative Writing, Literature and Publishing) at Swinburne University, Melbourne.
Dr Lee McGowan
Deputy Chair
Distinguished Professor Jen Webb
Treasurer: accounts@aawp.org.au
Jen Webb is a Canberra-based poet, who arrived here via South Africa, New Zealand,Canada, and various parts of Australia. After an earlier career as an accountant, she shifted into the academy, and is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice, and Dean of Graduate Research, at the University of Canberra. Jen researches the relationship between the field of creative production and the social, economic, political and ecological domains; and writes (mostly) prose poems. Recent publications include the scholarly volumes Researching Creative Writing (Frontinus, 2015) and Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (with Caroline Turner; Manchester UP, 2016), and poetry volumes Watching the World (with Paul Hetherington; Blemish Books, 2015), Sentences from the Archive, and Moving Targets (Recent Work Press, 2016 & 2018) and, with Shé Hawke, Flight Mode (Recent Work Press, 2020). She is co-editor of the literary journal Meniscus, and research journal Axon: Creative Explorations.
Dr Julian Novitz
Secretary
Dr Katrina Finlayson
Public Officer
Katrina Finlayson is a creative writer and researcher, working mostly in creative nonfiction. She holds a doctorate in creative writing from Flinders University, and her PhD research used the psychoanalytical theory of the Uncanny as a launch point to explore ideas about the anxiety of being a stranger and how this relates to creative writing. Katrina’s personal and critical essays have been published in Meanjin, TEXT journal, and Axon. Her writing explores ideas about strangeness, place and displacement, home and travel, and the nature and significance of memory and identity.
Dr Jessie Seymour
Portfolio: Memberships Liaison, memberships@aawp.org.au
Associate Professor Natalie Kon Yu
Portfolio: Research
Associate Professor Sue Joseph
Portfolio: Postgraduate & ECR Representative
A journalist for more than forty years, working in Australia and the UK, Sue Joseph (PhD) began work as an academic at the University of Technology Sydney in 1997. As a Senior Lecturer, she taught journalism and creative writing, particularly creative non-fiction. Now as Associate Professor, she is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of South Australia, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, and a doctoral supervisor at the University of Sydney and Central Queensland University. Currently Joint Editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and Joint Editor of the Palgrave series of books on Literary Journalism. Joseph has written four books and co-edited five more.
Sarah Giles
Portfolio: AAWP website | online presence coordinator
Sarah Giles (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Swinburne University researching the possibilities of the contemporary short story cycle exploring women’s experiences of isolation, trauma and mental illness. Sarah works at Writers Victoria and the Jewish Museum of Australia as Marketing & Communications Officer. Her writing has been published in The Writing Mind: Creative Writing Responses to Images of the Living Brain, ACE IV: Arresting Contemporary stories by Emerging Writers, ACE III: Arresting Contemporary stories by Emerging Writers, The Incompleteness Book, TEXT journal, The Victorian Writer and Lip Magazine.
Sarah takes an interest in fractured narratives, women’s relationships, Joy Hester, intersectional feminist perspectives and realist fiction.
Dr Ben Stubbs
Portfolio: Document Management
Dr Ben Stubbs is a senior lecturer in journalism and creative writing at the University of South Australia. Prior to academia he was a travel writer for publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald. He has written five books exploring different facets of creative non-fiction and travel writing and his most recent research explores writing and isolation and was published by Routledge in 2022. Ben is part of the Special Issues editorial team for TEXT journal.