Paul Dawson’s latest collection of poems is Lines of Desire (Puncher & Wattmann, 2025). His first book, Imagining Winter (IP, 2006), won the national IP Picks Best Poetry manuscript award. Paul has been anthologised in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (Puncher & Wattmann, 2013) and Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1888-2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 2009). His poems have appeared in journals such as Meanjin, Island, Westerly, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Mascara Literary Review, and others. Paul is the poetry editor of Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary journal, where he established the Southerly Poetry Prize in 2026. He is a professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales.

Marcella Polain was born in Singapore, and migrated to Australia with her Armenian mother and Irish father. She lives and works on unceded Wadjuk Noongar land. Marcella has a background in theatre and screen. She has published four poetry collections and two novels, as well as short fiction and braided essays. Her work has won the Anne Elder Poetry Award, has twice won the Patricia Hackett Prize, and been shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, the WA Premier’s Poetry Prize and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She has also been a recipient of an Australia Council grant. With visual artist Paul Uhlmann, Marcella co-founded fold editions, dedicated to the creation of hand-made books. She has been awarded the Gold Medal by the Writers Association of Armenia and has been published internationally and in translation.

Marcella has particular interest in trauma, migration, exile, genocide (including the Armenian Genocide), counter-narrative, resistance, hybridity, and liminality. She has taught Creative Writing for over 30 years at universities in Western Australia and now holds an Honorary position at Edith Cowan University. In that time, Marcella has worked with more than three dozen emerging writers – in the community and in postgraduate courses – supervising, mentoring, and helping to shape and edit manuscripts for publication. (Her work with postgraduate students was recognised with the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research Supervision.) The writers she has worked with include: Kaya Ortiz, Brendan Ritchie, Holden Sheppard, Nandi Chinna, Shevaun Cooley, Elizabeth Lewis, Jennifer Kornberger, Karleah Olson, Jo Pollitt, and Christopher Konrad.

Guiding authors through the creative writing process and through the publishing/sales/marketing process is something Stuart MacDonald has been doing for several decades. His broad experience of manuscript assessment, and of assisting, mentoring and motivating writers and students of creative writing, ranges from business books, self-help and autobiography to romance, serious fiction and poetry. Stuart’s background in publishing management includes directorships with a number of publishers including HarperCollins, Woodslane, Harlequin and Dorling Kindersley. He has spoken at numerous conferences here and overseas, and has lectured for a number of publishing organisations and educational institutions including the Australian Publishers Association and Macquarie University.