Hot Desk Edition #3

Stella is the Wheeler Centre's Programming Coordinator.

An emerging arts manager and event producer, Stella was previously the Marketing and Events Coordinator for Readings, and the Festival Manager for the National Young Writers’ Festival, Australia’s largest gathering of young and innovative writers working in both new and traditional forms.

Drawn to both programming and operations, with a particular interest in education and support for young creatives, she has worked for Teach for Australia, Melbourne Writers Festival, Melbourne Comedy Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, Emerging Writers’ Festival and Melbourne Fringe Festival. She really likes festivals. 

Stella has a BA in Philosophy, Political Science and Literature and a Diploma of Italian from the University of Melbourne, but has definitely learnt more useful things working on the floor as a both a front of house manager and a bookseller for Readings since 2012.

Fiona Murphy is a poet and essayist. Her work has appeared in the Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Overland and the Big Issue, amongst others. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Dorothy Porter Award for Poets. In 2018, she was awarded an inaugural Writers Victoria Publishability Fellowship and has been longlisted for the Richell Prize.

Jem Tyley-Miller is a crime writer from Bacchus Marsh who sees life through a magical realist lens. You can read her fiction in Spike, the Meanjin blog, or in the upcoming Margaret River Press anthology, We’ll Stand in That Place and Other Stories. She has also written for Readings and the Digital Writers’ Festival Pen Pal Project. Her novel manuscript, Going Under is nearing completion. Jem works casually directing extras to fund her very serious writing habit and co-organises the Peter Carey Short Story Award in her spare time. 

Alistair Baldwin is a writer and comedian based in Naarm / Melbourne. He has written for ABC's The Weekly, Get Krack!n, Hard Quiz & At Home Alone Together. Published works include pieces for un. Magazine, Archer, Metro and Black Inc.'s Growing Up Disabled In Australia anthology. He is 1/2 of the experimental (and toxic) comedy duo Nemeses with Vidya Rajan.

Georgina Harriss is a Melbourne-based writer specialising in screen and theatre. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from the Victorian College of the Arts, where she majored in comedy writing. In 2016 her playlet The Best is Yet to Come was featured in Red Stitch’s annual showcase: Playlist. Georgina was subsequently offered a playwriting residency at Lonely Company and her work was chosen for inclusion in the inaugural Betafest: Theatre in Various States of Undress.

In 2018, Georgina was received a place in the Tessa Waters Mentorship Program as well as in the Australian Theatre for Young People’s Fresh Ink National Mentorship Program. In February, Georgina’s debut play Love Bird enjoyed a successful development season as part of The Butterfly Club’s summer curated program. Love Bird will be running again in October as part of La Mama’s Spring programming.

Shu-Ling Chua is a Melbourne-based (formerly Canberra-based) essayist, critic and poet, whose work has appeared in Peril magazine, Lindsay, Meanjin, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop, among others. Her debut essay collection, Echoes, was published in 2020.

Shu-Ling was shortlisted in the 2018 Woollahra Digital Literary Award, highly commended in the 2017 Feminartsy Memoir Prize and selected for the 2015 HARDCOPY manuscript development program. She has completed writing residencies at the Wheeler Centre and KSP Writers’ Centre.

Ella Skilbeck-Porter is a poet and writer from Sydney. She is interested in the relationship between image and text, chance operations and translation. Her work has appeared in Rabbit, Cordite, Southerly, UTS Writers’ Anthology, Otoliths and other publications.