is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, the NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart Award for non-fiction and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction. Her poetry collection, Knuckled, won the 2012 Dame Mary Gilmore Award. She has recently completed a PhD at Western Sydney University’s Writing & Society Research Centre.

The suburbs are important to the physical and imaginary landscapes of this country; and integral to our imagining of the average citizen and their aspirations. But this does not account for the imaginative and dramatic uses to which the suburbs have been put in literature and criticism. My research charts the shifting cultural and historical perspectives on the Australian suburb, focusing especially on the suburban poems of Gwen Harwood and Dorothy Porter, who both use the suburbs as a theatrical and passionate place, a site of personal significance, transformation, and a range of complex and contradictory emotions. My creative practice largely explores memory, experience and place in suburban settings, and how meaning is made and found in everyday occurrences and spaces.

Publications

Knuckled, Giramondo Publishing, 2011.