Please join us for a very special evening of conversation about writing and biography, moderated by Dr Sarah-Jane Burton, of the Australian National University, with special guest, Associate Professor Paul Magee, of the University of Canberra. 

PANELISTS:

HEATHER CLARK (USA) is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield in Yorkshire, England. She is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2021. She is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship and is also the author of two other award-winning books on poetry: The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. 

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PATRICK MULLINS is a Canberra writer. He is author of Tiberius with a Telephone: the life and stories of William McMahon (2018), The Trials of Portnoy (2020), and Who needs the ABC? (2022), co-authored with Matthew Ricketson.

JESSICA L. WILKINSON has published three poetic biographies, most recently Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine (Vagabond, 2019). She is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry—which recently released its 36th issue—and the offshoot Rabbit Poets Series of single-author collections by emerging Australian poets. She co-edited the anthologies Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (2016) and Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours (2021). She is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne. 

GABRIELLE CAREY is an Australian non-fiction author of ten books, including Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my family, which jointly won the 2014 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. In 2020 Carey was shortlisted for the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship for her biography on the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, Only Happiness Here (UQP, 2020). Her essay ‘Waking Up with James Joyce’ was chosen as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2019 and her biography of James Joyce will be published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2023.

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MODERATOR AND GUEST:

SJ BURTON is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. She is currently working as the Official Historian for the New England Poetry Club in Boston, MA and her research has been funded internationally by several universities. In 2019 she was a Research Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard and she has also been the recipient of an Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library, Indiana University and a Dissertation Grant from the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America, Harvard. She has worked in both academic and professional roles in the tertiary sector including the English department at Macquarie University, Sydney and the Library division of Western Sydney University and previously working as a journalist and a communications executive, her work has been published and presented through both academic and mainstream media channels.

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PAUL MAGEE studied in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. He works as an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Canberra. Paul has published two books of verse, Cube Root of Book and Stone Postcard, named in Australian Book Review as one of the books of the year, 2014. Paul's monograph Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought was published in Rowman and Littlefield’s Performance Philosophy series in May of this year. As well as completing a third book of poems, The Collection of Space, Paul is CI with Paul Collis and Jen Crawford on We Come from the Past: Indigeneity, Orality and the Flow of Culture, which is funded through Imagining Futures Through Un/Archived Pasts (IF), a multi-disciplinary research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the UK Global Challenges Relief Fund (GCRF).

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