is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies within the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, the Convenor of the English Major, and a member of the WSU Writing and Society Research Centre. Within the Centre she founded the Poetry & Poetics Project which she co-directs with Dr Ben Etherington. She is a former Editor-in-Chief of How2, the established U.S.-based journal of contemporary and modernist innovative poetry and poetics, and she was a co-convenor of the 2016 ‘Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry’ Conference at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an internationally recognised poet and songwriter whose third collection of poetry First Light (Giramondo, 2012) was short-listed for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. Her album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive Award for Folk Recording and she supported Joan Baez on her 2013 tour of Australia/NZ. Her current research interests include contemporary poetry and poetic theory; Australian poetry and literature; experimental poetics and narratologies; poetics and sound; and critical theorisation of links between poetic form and ontology.
Kate recently published a series of four short essays on Active Aesthetics in Southerly literary journal: Into the Interior, Written to Music, Such Human-Scale Signatures and Night on our Faces.
WSU staff profile
FB: Kate Fagan – Musician
Photo credit: Tony Mott
Related Posts
Lyn Hejinian in conversation with Kate Fagan
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essay writer, translator and previous Guggenheim Fellow who holds a chair in literature at the University of California Berkeley.
Active Aesthetics
Active Aesthetics was a conference and festival of contemporary Australian poetry that took place over four days in April 2016 at the University of California, Berkeley and the San Francisco Center for New Music.
Kate Fagan: Archives of the present:
Temporal Shift, Maternal Legacy and Ontological Repair in the Poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann and Natalie Harkin. This paper was presented in the panel ‘Feminist Countercultures, Queer Affiliations, Alternative Histories’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Kate Fagan: Thinking with Things:
Object Habitats and Relational Aesthetics in the Poetry of Pam Brown and Astrid Lorange. The word ‘habitat’ is associated most often with living matter. Habitats are places of linkage; environments that sustain, and are built by, living things. But what happens when we think about poems as habitats for all and any thing, whether sentient or not?