From the Pros: Writing and Creative Practice Panel

GlassMagazine · Uni Writers’ Festival: Writing and Creative Practice Panel

Glass Magazine editor Ashleigh North sits down with industry pros writers Dr Rohan Wilson, Dr Ella Jeffery and Melanie Saward and publisher Rowena Beresford (Yellow Brick Books).

About the panelists

Dr Ella Jeffery is an award-winning poet and editor. Her debut collection of poetry, Dead Bolt, won the inaugural Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poems and was published in June 2020. She is a recipient of the 2019 Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award and her poems, essays and criticism appear in journals and anthologies including Meanjin, Southerly, Island, Westerly, Best Australian Poems and many others. She has performed her work as part of the Emerging Writers Festival, the Digital Writers Festival and the Queensland Poetry Festival.

Ella co-edits Stilts, a triannual digital poetry journal, and is poetry editor of the Australian academic journal Social Alternatives. She holds a PhD from Queensland University of Technology. Find Dead Bolt here.

Dr Rohan Wilson is a writer, teacher, and critic. He is the author of three novels, The Roving Party (2011) To Name Those Lost (2014), and Daughter of Bad Times (2019). His work has won numerous awards, including the 2011 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Award, and the 2016 Adelaide Festival Award. He lectures in Creative Writing at QUT. His academic research has focused fiction’s difficult relationship with history and the ways in which the Australian novel imagines its connection to the past. Find Rohan’s novels here.

.,….

Melanie Saward is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based writer, editor and PhD candidate. She is a proud descendant of the Bigambul and Wakka Wakka peoples. Melanie’s fiction and essays have appeared in Kill Your Darlings, New Australian Fiction, Overland, and Scum Mag. In 2019 her work was highly commended in the Calibre Essay Prize, the Boundless Indigenous Writer’s Mentorship and the Harlequin First Nations Fellowship. She was also shortlisted for the David Unaipon Award in 2018 and 2020. Find Melanie’s work here.

….

Rowena Beresford is both the Commissioning Editor and Managing Director of Yellow Brick Books, an independent traditional publishing company she co-founded in 2016. Yellow Brick Books specialises in off- beat, quirky and humorous picture books and junior fiction that will inspire kids to fall in love with reading. Rowena is also the founder of The Book Curator magazine, which keeps school librarians up-to-date with a wide range of fantastic fiction from independent and mainstream publishers, and equips them to better match those books to readers. See Yellow Brick Books here, and The Book Curator here.