Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara woman born on Kaurna land in South Australia. Her first collection little bit long time was written in the desert about her journey to find her family and launched her literary career in 2009.

Ali received a Deadly Award for outstanding contribution to Indigenous Literature in 2012. She Ali toured Ireland as Australian Poetry Ambassador and won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and Book of the Year award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Ruby Moonlight, a massacre verse novel (2013). Ali was the inaugural recipient of the Tungkunungka Pintyanthi Fellowship at Adelaide Writers Week (2014) for her memoir Too Afraid To Cry, and was the first Aboriginal Australian writer to attend the International Writing Program at University of Iowa. In 2017 Ali received the prestigious Windham Campbell Award for Poetry from Yale University, USA. She is the recipient of the 2018 Australia Council New Literary Fellowship. She is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University.

Dicky Senda is a writer and food activist from Mollo, South Central Timor, Indonesia. Has published a poetry compilation Cerah Hati (2011), a collection of short stories Kanuku Leon (2013), Hau Kamelin & Tuan Kamlasi (2015) and Sai Rai(2017). He was invited to the Makassar International Writers Festival (2013), Bienal Sastra Salihara (2015), Asean Literary Festival 2016, Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2017 and Melbourne Writers Festival 2018. Now lives in Taiftob village in the mountains of Mollo, South Central Timor and manages social enterprise communities named Lakoat. Kujawas, which integrates art communities, citizen libraries, archive rooms and production space for processed agricultural products. Together with the community in his village, he initiated Skol Tamolok, a critical and contextual education model for indigenous people, the Apinat-Aklahat residency program and the Mnahat Fe’u Heritage Trailer, a gastronomic tour program during the harvest season in the Mollo mountains..

Dr Ann Ang is an Assistant Professor in English Literature with the ELL Academic group at the National Institute of Education and teaches courses related to literature in English. Employing postcolonial methodologies within the frame of world literature, she studies contemporary Anglophone writing from India, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. Dr Ang's articles and reviews have been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Pedagogies: An International Journal and English Literary History (ELH) (English Literary History. Her work has also appeared in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies.

Dr Michelle Aung Thin is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication where she teaches in Communication and Advertising. She researches writing that deals with intercultural and cross-cultural experiences as well as how to write ethically about difference. She is a prize winning novelist and copywriter with an international reputation. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Monsoon Bride (Text 2011), was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier Literary Awards as an unpublished manuscript. Her latest novel, Hasina (Allen & Unwin 2019), was released as Crossing the Farak River (Annick, 2020) in the USA and Canada where it won the Freeman as well as an USBBY - Outstanding International Book. she has been awarded grants from the Australia Council and National Library of Australia Creative Fellowship. Her writing looks at mixed-race, cross-cultural and cosmopolitan experiences in colonial Burma as well as contemporary Myanmar, Australia and Canada.

David Carlin is a Professor of Creative Writing at RMIT University, Australia. His books include the collaboratively authored The After-Normal (2019) and 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (2019), as well as Our Father Who Wasn’t There (2010) and The Abyssinian Contortionist (2015). He has co-edited volumes including A-Z of Creative Writing Methods (2023), The Near and the Far, Vol 1&2 (2016 and 2019), and Performing Digital (2015), and made award-winning works for radio, film, theatre and circus. David is co-President of the NonfictioNOW Conference, and co-founder of the WrICE Asia-Pacific Collaborative Residency program and the non/fictionLab research group. Description goes here

Priya Sarukkai Chabria is an award-winning poet, writer, translator and curator of eleven books, including four poetry collections, two SF novels, translations from Classical Tamil, literary nonfiction, a novel, and two poetry anthologies. Winner, Muse India Translation Prize, Kitaab Experimental Story Award, Best Reads from Feminist Press. Awarded by the Indian government for Outstanding Contribution to Literature. Appearances include Writer’s Centre, Norwich, Sun Yat-sen International Writers Program, Guangzhou, Commonwealth Literature Conference, Innsbruck, UCLA, JLF, etc. Priya collaborates with artists and channels Sanskrit aesthetics and Tamil Sangam poetics into her work. Anthologies publications include Another English Poems from Around the World, Asymptote, Avatar, Kenyon Review, MAI: Feminism, PEN International, Post Road, PR & TA, Reliquiae, South Asian Review, British Journal of Literary Translation, Literary Review(USA), Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction I &II, etc. Founding Editor, Poetry at Sangam. She’s on the Advisory Council of G100, India, and WrICE, Australia. www.priyasarukkaichabria.com

Conchitina Cruz is Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman. She received her PhD in English from State University of New York (SUNY) Albany. Her books of poetry include Dark Hours, elsewhere held and lingered, There is no emergency, and Modus.

Arpita Das is the Founder-Publisher of the award-winning independent publishing house based in New Delhi, Yoda Press. She teaches the Publishing Seminar to senior students of Creative Writing at Ashoka University and a Foundation Course called Introduction to Critical Thinking to first-year students. In the past, she helped set up the Word Lab at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements in Bangalore, and led the Sage School of Publishing courses at various universities and institutions across India. A Board Member of PublisHer (womeninpublishing.org), she writes often on book culture, publishing, popular culture, gender and bibliotherapy for various periodicals and platforms. She is also the Editor of the South Asia Series at Melbourne University Publishing.

Dr Melody Ellis is a writer and creative practice researcher based in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University where she is a member of the non/fictionLab research group. Melody is interested in the politics of value, power, interpretation, subjectivity, and resistance. She brings to her writing and thinking a rigorous engagement with critical theory, art, aesthetics, and collaborative arts practices.

Marjorie Evasco is a SEAWRITE 2010 and National Commission for Culture and the Arts Ani ng Dangal awardee, whose books have won the National Book Awards for poetry, oral history, biography, and art. She received the Writers’ Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) Pambansang Alagad Balagtas award for poetry in 2004; the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan for literature from the City of Manila in 2005; the Outstanding Silliman University alumna award for creative writing in 2008; and the 2011 Carlos P. Garcia award for literature from Bohol, her home-island. She is a University Fellow and Professor Emeritus of Literature of De La Salle University, Manila. Her poems are published in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Voices from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008), The World Record: International Voices from the Southbank Centre’s Poetry Parnassus (2012), AGAM: Filipino Narratives of Uncertainty in Climate Change (2014), Sustaining the Archipelago: Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry (2017), and Harvest Moon: Poems and Stories from the Edge of the Climate Crisis (2021).

Dr Eugenia Flynn is Vice Chancellor’s Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow in Writing and Publishing at the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University. Eugenia’s research has a primary focus on Indigenous literature and sits at the intersection between literary studies, creative writing, and critical Indigenous studies. Eugenia’s creative practice explores narratives of truth, grief, and devastation, interwoven with explorations of race and gender. Her essays, short stories and poems have been published in  NITV, Peril magazine, IndigenousX, The Lifted Brow, Borderless: A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry and #MeToo: Stories From the Australian Movement. Her text work has appeared in exhibitions such as Waqt al-tagheer: Time of Change at ACE Open, Enough خلص Khalas: Contemporary Australian Muslim Artists at UNSW Galleries, and SOULfury at Bendigo Art Gallery.  Eugenia is an Aboriginal (Larrakia and Tiwi), Chinese Malaysian and Muslim woman who grew up on Kaurna land in Adelaide and now lives and works on Kulin country in Melbourne.

Roanna Gonsalves is the author of The Permanent Resident (UWAP) published in India and South Asia as Sunita De Souza Goes To Sydney (Speaking Tiger).  The book won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Multicultural Prize 2018 and was longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award 2018. Her four-part radio series On the tip of a billion tongues, commissioned and broadcast by ABC RN’s Earshot program, is a portrayal of contemporary India through its multilingual writers. Roanna holds a PHD and has been teaching and mentoring writers of all ages within communities as well as at schools and at New York University Sydney, UNSW, AFTRS, Western Sydney University and Macquarie University. She is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award and is co-founder co-editor of Southern Crossings. She has been an invited keynote speaker and panellist at numerous literary events. She is a recipient of The Bridge Awards’ inaugural Varuna – Cove Park Writing Residency 2019 in Scotland, and was part of the Australia Council for the Arts’ India Literature Exploratory delegation 2020. She works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at UNSW Sydney. Roanna can be found at roannagonsalves.com.au and @roannagonsalves. 

Michele Lee is a multiple award-winning and critically acclaimed Hmong-Australian writer, known for her sharp ear and wit, creating character-driven stories often from the perspectives of imperfect women. Across stage, audio and live art, her works include Rice (2022, 2021, 2017), Security (2022), Single Ladies (2021), Going Down (2018), The Naked Self (2018, 2016), Talon Salon (2014, 2013, 2012) and See How The Leaf People Run (2012). For screen, Michele wrote on TV shows Hungry Ghosts (2020) and Retrograde (2020), and wrote two 6 x 2-minute stories released on TikTok (2022). Her sex-romp memoir Banana Girl (2013) is published by Transit Lounge. Michele regularly mentors other writers, assesses scripts and judges for scriptwriting programs.

Alvin PANG (Dr) is a poet, writer, editor and translator whose broad creative practice spans over two decades of literary and related activities in Singapore and elsewhere. Featured in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English, his writing has been translated into more than twenty languages, including Swedish, Croatian and Macedonian. His latest titles include WHAT HAPPENED: Poems 1997-2017 (2017) and UNINTERRUPTED TIME (2019). For his contributions to the literary arts, he has received Singapore's Young Artist of the Year Award, the Singapore Youth Award and the JCCI Education Award, among other accolades. The Editor-in-Chief of the public policy journal ETHOS, he also serves on several advisory boards, including the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra and Rabbit: Journal of non-fiction poetry. In 2020, he completed a PhD in writing with RMIT University, in which he explored the possibilities of literary practice conducted across multiple languages, genres, careers and communities.

Alice Pung is the bestselling author of the memoirs Unpolished Gem and Her Father’s Daughter, and the essay collection Close to Home, as well as the editor of the anthologies Growing Up Asian in Australia and My First Lesson. Her Father's Daughter won the Western Australia Premiers' Award. Her debut adult novel, Laurinda, won the Ethel Turner Prize at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her second adult novel, One Hundred Days, was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Award, and has been optioned by Michelle Law for development as a film. She is also the author of children’s books including Be Careful, Xiao Xin!, When Grandma Came to Stay and the Meet Marly books.

Alice has taught and mentored students in Australia and around the world, including guest lectures at Brown University, Vassar College, the University of Milan and Peking University. She delivered the 2022 State of the Writing Nation Address, and in the same year was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her services to literature.

Professor Francesca Rendle-Short is an award-winning novelist, memoirist and essayist. She is a writer and researcher interested in the affordances of language in/when writing the body, prepositional and queer thinking, ethical enquiry, the value of collaboration and community building, and trans-national literatures and literary practices. Her writing and scholarly praxis pays attention to form as well as content; it is experimental, idiosyncratic and playful in nature, attentive to whimsy and transgression. Her five books include two anthologies of Asia-Pacific and Australian writing The Near and the Far (Vol I and II; Scribe Publications) and the acclaimed novel-cum-memoir Bite Your Tongue (Spinifex Press). She is co-editor of A-Z of Creative Writing Methods (Bloomsbury) and is Professor of Creative Writing in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, co-founder of the non/fictionLab research group and WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange).

Hsu-Ming Teo is the Head of the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature at Macquarie University, Australia, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her academic publications include Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels  (2012), the edited volume, The Popular Culture of Romantic Love in Australia  (ASP 2017), and the co-edited volumes Cultural History in Australia (UNSW 2003), and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction (2020). She has published widely on Orientalism, imperialism, fiction, popular culture, love and popular romance studies. Her first novel, Love and Vertigo (2000), won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was shortlisted for several other awards. Her second novel Behind the Moon (2005) was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.  

Lily Rose Tope is Professorial Lecturer and former Department Head of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines, Diliman. She has a PhD from the National University of Singapore. She is author of (Un)Framing Southeast Asia: Nationalism and the Post Colonial Text in English in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines and co-editor of An Anthology of English Writing from Southeast Asia. She has written various articles on Southeast Asian literature in English, Asian literature in translation, Philippine Chinese literature and Philippine literature in English.