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Dael Allison was co-runner up in the 2005 Wildcare Nature Writing Prize. Her essay ‘Portrait of a Wild Pool’ was published in Island 102. She has also had poems accepted in Blue Dog, Five Bells, Hecate and New England Review.

Yahia Al-Samawy is a well-known and respected Arab poet. He has published several volumes of poetry in Arabic and has received major awards and accolades, including the prestigious Prize of the Arab Union for Poetic Creativity. He travels regularly to the Middle East for writers' festivals and gatherings, most recently in 2005 to the Janadiriya in Saudi Arabia. Yahia was born and educated in Iraq. He was imprisoned and tortured under Saddam Hussein's regime. He fled and spent years in exile in Saudi Arabia before migrating with his family to Australia. He now lives in Adelaide with his wife Wejdan and their children Shayma, Ali, Najed and Sarah. Yahia al-Samawy's books Nuqoush ála jidha' nakhla (published in Arabic) and Two Banks with No Bridge were published in 2005.

Jude Aquilina’s poetry, short stories and articles have been published in
a wide range of newspapers, anthologies and literary journals including The Advertiser; Artstate, Australian Women's Forum; The Australian Writer #321; The Bunyip; The Canberra Times; Centoria; The Colonial Athens; Elders Stock Journal; A Fall of Rainbows; Friendly Street Poetry Anthologies #18 - #28; Gathering Force; Grass Roots; The Herald; Hobo; Illness, a journal; The Mount Barker Courier; Muse Magazine; The New England Review; The Northern Star; Overland; Panorama; Poetrix; Razor; Redoubt; SAETA Newsletter; The School Magazine; The Shimmering; Social Alternatives; Spindrift; Spinning Thistledown; Tamba; Tears in the Fence (UK); Vernacular; and Westerly.

Julie Beveridge is a Tasmanian born emerging poet who lives in Brisbane. Her first publication Rock’n’Roll tuxedo was launched at the Queensland Poetry Festival: spoken in one strange word 2005. Julie has read as part of the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival 2005, the Tasmanian Poetry Festival 2005 and at various events in Brisbane, Ipswich, Nambour, Lismore and Bulimba.

Janice M. Bostok has been writing haiku and its related forms for over thirty years. In 1972 she edited and published the first magazine in Australia which was devoted to haiku, TWEED, which ran until 1979.

Diane Briggs is a Hobart poet.

Stephen Brock’s poetry has been published in journals including Otherland, SaltLick Quarterly, Catalyst (NZ), SideWalk, Hobo, The Gawler Bunyip and the online journal Malleable Jangle. His translations of Juan Garrido-Salgado’s poetry from Spanish to English have appeared in Imago and Ulitarra and more recently in his Collected Poems (Five Islands Press, 2005).

Nathalie Buckland is a hippy grandmother who lives in the dynamic village of Nimbin. She has written poetry since childhood. Single parenthood and a career in Early Childhood absorbed most of her creative energy for years, but she is now getting some of her work published in poetry journals, and avidly learning about haiku.

Kay Cairns is a West Australian writer whose poetry won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize, 2004.

Grant Caldwell has had seven books published, five of poetry. His work has been published widely in Australia, as well as in Ireland, U.S.A., Canada, India, Italy, Colombia, Japan and Germany. His 1996 collection of poetry, You Know What I Mean (Hale & Iremonger) was nominated for the Age Book of the Year Award. His latest poetry collection is Dreaming of Robert De Niro (Five Islands Press, 2003). He teaches creative writing at the School of Creative Arts, University of Melbourne.

Kay Carney is a Tasmanian writer, who is developing the first draft of a novel for the older children’s fiction market titled The Legend of Whale Back Island.

Graham Catt is a South Australian writer of poetry, short stories and children’s fiction. His work has been published in numerous magazines and journals around Australia including The Weekend Australian, Blue Dog, Quadrant, LiNQ, The Canberra Times and Verandah.

James Charlton’s award-winning poetry collection, Luminous Bodies, was published by Montpelier Press in 2002. He is poetry editor of the Australian literary quarterly, Island, published in Tasmania.

Eva Collins left Poland as a teenager left and came with her family to Australia. Studied and taught English here before venturing into Creative Arts. Has a BA (Philosophy and Psychology), TSTC (teacher’s qualification) and Dip. Arts (Professional Writing and Editing). "As a freelance writer and photographer I like to capture stirring images on film and paper. Seeing familiar situations in a new way or noticing unusual juxtapositions of elements creates an exciting sense of discovery."

Jen Crawford lives in Auckland, where she writes, teaches and administers Poneme (www.poneme.org). Her 2000 collection Admissions (Five Islands Press) was shortlisted for the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmour awards.

Geoffrey Dean is a short story writer. His most recent book is The Literary Lunch: Selected Stories, (Roaring Forties Press, November 2004).

Michael de Valle lives in the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria with his wife, Lynette, and their two sons, Jack and Liam. In 2005 Woorilla published Michael's poetry collection, the fluorescent sun and Mockingbird published his first short story collection, Take a Breath & Hold It. A second collection of stories will be published by Mockingbird later this year.

Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne and has lived in Sydney and Brisbane. He has published numerous books of poems including The Ash Range, which won the Victorian Premier’s New Writing Award; The Epigrams of Martial, winner of the Wesley Michael Wright Prize; Mangroves, The Age Poetry Book of the Year (2003) and winner of the 2004 ASAL Gold Medal; and Compared to What: Selected Poems 1971–2003, published by Shearsman (UK, 2005). His cultural history Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture, 1901–1939, was published by UQP in 2001. He was poetry editor of Meanjin from 1994 to 1997.

Brook Emery has worked as a swimming instructor, beach inspector, removalist and contract cleaner. He has been an English and History teacher in London, northern NSW and Sydney. His first collection of poetry, and dug my fingers in the sand (Five Islands Press, 2000), won the Queensland Premier's Prize for Poetry and was short-listed for the NSW Premier's Prize. His second collection, Misplaced Heart (FIP, 2003) was also short-listed for the NSW Premier's Prize. He has won many awards for individual poems, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize.

Adrian Flavell’s most recent acceptances have come from LiNQ, Social Alternatives, The Canberra Times, Takuhe (N.Z.), Tamba and The Weekend Australian.

Martin French is an occasional writer living in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne. He is the current Editor of Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review.

Kit Fryatt’s main research interests are in twentieth-century anglophone Irish poetry and the theory of allegory from the Renaissance to the present. She is currently preparing a book-length study of the allegorical mode in the work of seven Irish poets, entitled Hierarchy and Resistance: Allegorical Making in Twentieth-Century Irish Poetry; and has published an article on Paul Durcan ("'Bovinity': Paul Durcan's Cattle Mythology", in New Voices in Irish Criticism IV, eds Fionnuala Dillane and Ronan Kelly, Dublin: Four Courts, 2003). Forthcoming and in preparation are articles on masculinity and anorexia in Austin Clarke's late long poem "Mnemosyne Lay in Dust" (1966), on the politics of revision in Thomas Kinsella's "Downstream" (1962), an account of Louis MacNeice's coverage for the BBC of the Independence and Partition of India and an essay for Cyphers on Maurice Scully's epic Livelihood.

Juan Garrido-Salgado’s poetry has been published widely in Australia, Spain and Latin America. He has three books published in Spanish and English in Chile, as well as in Australia. His Collected Poems published by Five Islands Press, and his new bilingual book translated by Peter Boyle will appear in July 2006 from Picaro Press: Navegante inmóvil,que amó en la oscuridad del océano/Unmoving Navigator, who fell in love with the ocean's darkness. He is currently working on the translation of an anthology of indigenous poetry from Chile in collaboration with Steve Brock.

Beverley George is a poet and editor, and publisher of Yellow Moon, a literary (print) magazine for writers of haiku and other verse [http://users.mullum.com.au/jbird/YM-about.html]

Kerryn Goldsworthy - a former lecturer in literature at the University of Melbourne, now a freelance writer and independent scholar. Former editor of Australian Book Review. Author of two books, editor of four. Most recent publications in Best Australian Essays 2005, Meanjin and Westerly. Regular TV critic for The Monthly and book reviewer for The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. Technophobic ailurophile. Bad gardener.

Henry Gould lives in Providence, Rhode Island (US). His books include Stone (Copper Beech Press, 1979) and Stubborn Grew (Spuyten Duyvil, 2000). He writes a blog at hgpoetics.blogspot.com

Jeff Guess: From a background of teaching English in high schools, Jeff now tutors at the University of South Australia and teaches poetry at the Adelaide Institute of TAFE. His eighth collection of poetry Winter Grace was launched during Writers’ Week in March 2004.

Kristin Hannaford is a Queensland poet. Kristin’s first poetry collection Inhale appears in Swelter (Interactive Press 2003) as part of IP’s Emerging Author Series. Two poems from her Wetland Sonnets sequence won prestigious Australian poetry prizes – Grasslands won the 2004 Leichhardt New Media Poetry Prize, and Shoalwater received joint second for New Media in the 2004 Newcastle Poetry Prize.

Rory Harris is a poet and teacher. His poetry collections include OVER THE OUTROW, FROM THE RESIDENCE, SNAPSHOTS FROM
A MOVING TRAIN, 16 POEMS, UNCLE JACK AND OTHER POEMS, WATERLINE and breeze. His radio dramas have been translated into Solomon Islands Pijin and broadcast on National Radio Solomon Islands. With Peter McFarlane he co-wrote and edited a series of poetry textbooks on teaching poetry for the Australian Association for the Teaching of English. In 1998 they completed a fifth text: DOING BOMBERS OFF THE JETTY (Macmillan Education Australia). He is Curriculum Coordinator of English and the Arts at St Paul’s College in Adelaide, South Australia.

Jodie Hawthorne grew up in Wynyard and Rocky Cape on the northwest coast of Tasmania, Australia. She has spent many years studying, working and travelling in Asia. For the last eight years she has lived mainly in China and now calls Shangri-la (Degen Tibetan region) home. A collection of haiku celebrating the people and landscape of Degen is forthcoming from Pardalote Press.

Dominique Hecq is the author of The Book of Elsa, a novel, two collections of stories (Magic and Mythfits), two books of poems (The Gaze of Silence and Good Grief) and two short plays (One Eye Too Many and Cakes & Pains). Noisy Blood is her latest collection. Together with Russell Grigg and Craig Smith, she has also co-written Feminine Sexuality: Freud and the Early Controversies. She currently teaches in the School of Creative Arts, The University of Melbourne.

Cheryl Howard is a recently revived poet. "I was frozen on tundra. I spoke the words, ‘I am a poet’, and the ice broke. That was in 2002. In 2004, the editor of Studio, Paul Grover, recognised a poem hidden somewhere in the flurries of words I was sending him. With his help I extracted it for publication, and then delivered four more unaided."

Jill Jones is a Sydney poet and writer. Her fifth full-length book, Broken/Open, was published by Salt Publishing in 2005, and was shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year 2005.

Christina Kirkpatrick writes poetry and haiku, and is currently working on a first collection of poems. She lives in an untamed garden in Hobart. More of her haiku can be found in Watersmeet: haiku anthology (Pardalote Press, 2005).

Karen Knight is a Tasmanian writer whose poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Best Australian Poems 2005 edited by Les Murray. Her most recent collection is the chapbook Doctor Says (Picaro Press, 2006). Karen recently received the Dorothy Hewett Flagship Fellowship Award from the Varuna Writers’ Centre, which includes a three week residency in Edinburgh, Scotland as part of the UNESCO City of Literary Exchange Program.

Stephen Lawrence’s poetry and fiction have been published in the United States, Canada, Denmark, Romania and the UK. He has three collections of poetry published through Wakefield Press, and was a guest author at the Adelaide Festival of Arts Writers’ Week 2000. His third collection, How Not to Kill Government Leaders, was launched at Writers’ Week 2002, where he was a judge for the National Festival Literary Awards.

Deanne Leber is a thirty-five year old West Australian writer, currently studying at Edith Cowan University.

Marti Leimbach is the author of several novels, including the international and New York Times bestseller Dying Young, which was made into a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts. Born in Washington, D.C., she currently lives outside London, England, with her husband and two children, one of whom is autistic. She teaches at Oxford University’s Creative Writing Program.

Joel Magarey is a Hansard reporter with the Victorian Parliament. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in literary magazines around Australia, including Meanjin, Overland, Southerly and Quadrant, and in the international poetry web journal, slope.

Kent McCarter lives in Melbourne. Current and forthcoming publications of his are in The Age, Cordite, Meanjin, Poetry New Zealand, Quarterly Review Literature Singapore, and Dislocate (US).

Shane McCauley’s most recent collection is Glassmaker, a hard-cover collection from Sunline Press, 2005.

Megan McKinlay is a West Australian writer who has previously published material in journals such as Westerly and Blue Dog.

David McLaren is a Melbourne-based poet and short story writer.

Grace McQuilten is a poet, artist and curator sometimes found around the streets of Melbourne. Her work has been published in a number of journals including Blue Dog, Volition, Polestar, Artlook, Positive Words, Un Magazine and the Australian Women’s Book Review. Her poetry has also been broadcast on Radio NAG, Queensland.

Geoff Miller is a bloke with a life-long love of words, red wine, and Elizabeth. "I have read on several ABC programmes and had work published in various magazines and anthologies. I write because it's fun and easier than golf."

Jal Nicholl grew up around Adelaide and has studied philosophy and English literature at Adelaide and Melbourne Universities. He has worked in a number of customer-service jobs and, as a teacher's aide, has taught poetry to children.

Graham Nunn is a Brisbane-based writer, current director of the Queensland Poetry Festival and founding member of local performance group, 'SpeedPoets'. Graham has won many awards, including the 4^th annual Paper Wasp Jack Stamm Haiku Award and the Seed Pearls International Literary Competition for haibun. His work appears online at GetUnderground, Retort Magazine, Lily Review, The Muse Apprentice Guild, Stylus Poetry Journal, SoftBlow, Simply Haiku and Sidereality, as well as in a wide range of print journals, including Aesthetica, Agenda, Blue Dog, Bottle Rockets, Egg Poetry, paper wasp, and Text Messages: an anthology of new writing talent. His latest book is Measuring the Depth, published by Pardalote Press.

Mark O’Flynn has published numerous short stories, a novella and two collections of poems, and a play. Grassdogs, his first novel, won the Varuna Award for Manuscript Development.

Juliet Paine is a South Australian poet, who in her professional life teaches English to secondary students at Loreto College. Her first poetry collection, Poems for a Paranoid Generation was published by Ginninderra Press. She is currently working on a second with the help of an Arts SA grant.

Jillian Pattinson is a Melbourne poet whose work has been published in Island, Meanjin, Blue Dog Australian Poetry, Poetrix, Tarralla, Yellow Moon and various anthologies. Her poetry was short-listed for the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2004 and 2005 and commended in the MPU International Poetry Competition 2005. Most recently, she has read at the Mildura Writers’ Festival 2005, the Overload Poetry Festival 2005 and Montsalvat Poetry Festival 2006.

Simon Patton currently works as a freelance literary translator specializing in contemporary Chinese literature, and teaches Chinese language and translation at the University of Queensland. He also co-edits the China domain of Poetry International Web with the mainland Chinese poet Yu Jian at china.poetryinternational.org

Perpetual Refugee is a Lebanese blogger.

Linnea Pierre is a West Australian writer whose previous work has been published in the poetry/prose collection A Circle in a Room Full of Squares (published by John Curtin College of The Arts, 2003).

Patricia Prime is a teacher living in Auckland, New Zealand. She writes poetry, haiku, reviews and essays.

Clare Roberts is a Hobart writer.

Graham Rowlands is an Adelaide-based satirical poet. Despite his seven collections, he prefers to publish widely in magazines and newspapers.

Carla Sari lives in North Carlton, Victoria. She enjoys writing all forms of poetry. She is also interested in reading and writing short fiction.

Marina Scott is a poet who lives in Geelong, Victoria. She hopes you enjoy sharing her haiku moments.

Michael Sharkey’s most recent collection is History: Selected Poems 1978 – 2000, published by Five Islands Press.

Henry Sheerwater is a Tasmanian poet whose first collection of poetry will appear in 2007.

Jim Shultz is the executive director of The Democracy Center in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the author of The Democracy Owners’ Manual, Rutgers University Press.

 Martina Taeker is a published poet and short story writer. She has travelled and worked extensively overseas, including in Japan. She teaches various writing courses at the WEA in Adelaide, as well as to community groups.

Helen Taylor was born in England, and now lives on the inspiring south coast of WA. She has written all her life but only took up creative writing about twenty years ago. Helen has had a nature diary published The Wind in My Face, plus poetry and short stories in a number of publications. She is a member of Southern Scribes writers’ group and a contributor to their publications.

Tim Thorne is the author of ten volumes of poetry, the most recent being Best Bitter (PressPress, May 2006). Tim was for many years the Director of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival. He is the managing editor of Cornford Press, and the Launceston correspondent for the national literary journal Overland.

rob walker’s poems have appeared in cordite, malleable jangle, stylus, Thylazine, Friendly Street Poets, Blue Giraffe, Blast, Best Australian Poems 2005, Southern Ocean Review and other journals. His collection micromacro is forthcoming in September.

Louise Waller is a Queensland poet whose first collection Slipway was published in Swelter (Interactive Press 2003). Recent poetry has appeared in Blue Dog: Australian Poetry, Idiom 23, Haiku Review, Papertiger, & Silence/Stories Part 11 (uglybeautycage). She has received funding to develop her poetry for performance and was highly commended in the Arts Queensland Val Vallis poetry awards in 2001 & 2004. Louise is Poetry Reviews Editor for Foam:e.

Sue Watson is a member of Youngstreet Poets. Her work has appeared in Overland, Billy Blue Magazine, The Architecture Show, and the anthology A spill of shadow a thrust of light (Youngstreet 2005).

Ralph Wessman publishes famous reporter with Arts Tasmania’s support.

Terry Whitebeach is a Tasmanian writer of many genres. Her work includes poetry, prose, young adult fiction and radio plays. She has a recent PhD in history, is a biographer and an oral historian. Terry has spent time teaching creative writing in Alice Springs and been inspired by that desert landscape, as well as by the icebergs she found on a trip to Antartica.

Les Wicks’ seventh book of poetry is Stories of the Feet (Five Islands, 2004). Wicks has been a guest at most of Australia's literary festivals, toured widely and been published in well over 150 newspapers, anthologies and magazines across nine countries in seven languages. He runs Meuse Press which is focused on poetry outreach projects. http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm

Elizabeth Williams’ photography has been exhibited in galleries in Hobart. She lives in southern Tasmania.

Liz Winfield was born in 1964 into the remnants of the British Penal Colony of Van Dieman's Land. She has escaped to the mainland four times but prefers the world to come to her. In 1999 Liz instigated the Republic Readings in Hobart and has coordinated them ever since. She is a poetry editor for Famous Reporter and is young persons' liaison officer for the Fellowship of Australian Writers' (FAW) Tasmanian branch. Liz’s collection Too Much Happens appeared from Cornford Press in 2003. Her next collection, a chapbook from Walleah Press, will be launched at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival in October 2006.

Jim Young is a Hobart writer, and current president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Tasmania. His book The Flare of the Match was published by Breakwater Books (Canada) in 1981.

Quendryth Young, a grandmother, who lives on the far north coast of New South Wales, is a retired cytologist - a career that spanned forty years. She co-authored My Days' Circle with two other poets in 1994, and published a collection of her own poetry, Naked in Sepia, which was awarded the Fast Books Best Book of Poetry Award for 2005. Her passion for haiku is accelerating.

Ouyang Yu was born in Huangzhou, Hubei, in the People's Republic of China. He completed an MA in English and Australian Literature in Shanghai and worked as an interpreter, translator and lecturer in China. He came to Australia in 1991 to complete a PhD at La Trobe University, Melbourne, on the representation of the Chinese in Australian fiction (awarded 1995). He writes in both English and Chinese. Best known for his poetry, he has also written fiction and criticism in both languages, and has translated over a dozen major Australian literary texts into Chinese.
Ouyang's best-known works in English are his poetry collections Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems (1995), Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997), short-listed for the 1999 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes (2002). His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, was published in 2002. He is the founding editor of Otherland, the first (and only) bilingual journal of Chinese-Australian writing.