Hot Desk Edition #1

Amanda Anastasi is a Melbourne poet who has been published everywhere from the walls of Windsor’s Artists’ Lane to the Massachusetts Review in the US. Her debut poetry collection was 2012 and other poems and she recently co-authored The Silences (Eaglemont Press, 2016).  

Amanda was awarded the 2017 Words in Winter Trentham Contemporary Poetry Prize, and is a two-time recipient of the Williamstown Literary Festival’s Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize. Her poems have also appeared in Verity La, Cordite Poetry Review, foam:e, FourW, REM: The Journal of Experimental Writing (NZ), the Short & Twisted anthologies, and Melbourne Spoken Word’s Audacious audio journal, among various other spaces.

Ra is an actress, theatre maker and writer. She has recently been selected for the 2018 Cinespace/Film Victoria StoryLab Program, and was a member of the 2017 Besen Writers Group at Malthouse Theatre.

Ra was adopted from Busan, South Korea at age four and was reunited her birth father six years ago. The challenges of maintaining this relationship with her motherland and biological father have had a huge impact on Ra’s identity, and has fuelled her interest in the role identity and family plays in one’s sense of belonging. 

Triana Hernandez is a music journalist, music video director and artist manager (Various Asses, Hexdebt). Triana's work consistently pushes for representation and opportunities for artists that challenge Australia’s white, straight and male-centric music industry. Her interviews with artists like Garreth Liddiard, Habits and Sevdaliza have been featured in publications including Noisey, iD and Swampland.

Leah Jing McIntosh is the founding editor of Liminal, an anti-racist literary project based in Naarm. In 2022, she co-edited Against Disappearance, an award-winning collection of essays on memory and the archive ...

Laura Jean McKay is the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc. 2013), shortlisted for three national book awards in Australia. Her work appears in Meanjin, Overland, Best Australian Stories, the Saturday Paper, and the North American Review. Laura is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies. She is the ‘animal expert’ presenter on ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari. The Animals in That Country (Scribe 2020) is her debut novel.