Representation, Voice and Agency

Grace Heifetz grew up between Sydney and the Blue Mountains and has lived in London and San Francisco. Grace returned to Australia in 2002 and began working at Curtis Brown where she worked in a number of roles until mid-2019. In July 2019 she joined forces with fellow literary agent, Gaby Naher, to create Left Bank Literary where she represents clients such as Emily Maguire, Chris Hammer, Bri Lee and Nakkiah Lui.

Grace is also on the board of the Blue Mountains Writers Festival and the National Young Writers' Festival.

Crystal Mahey-Morgan began her career as a freelance journalist at the age of 16 writing for publications such as The  Guardian and The Face Magazine. While still 16, she promoted a series of open mic events which were a fusion of hip hop and more conventional forms of poetry and was a performance poet herself. At the age of 19 Mahey-Morgan became Marketing Manager for Raindance Film festival and soon after embarked on a career within Publishing, firstly working as Literary Assistant at Peter, Fraser and Dunlop (PFD), then joining Random House in 2009 working across contracts, sales, marketing and digital.

Mahey-Morgan left Penguin Random House in 2014 to realise a long-held vision of bringing fresh voices and new stories to market in representative, inclusive and pioneering ways. In 2015 she founded OWN IT! – a storytelling lifestyle brand across books, music, art and film – which she runs with Creative Director Jason Morgan.

Emma Paterson is an agent at Aitken Alexander Associates. She joined in 2018 after five years at Rogers, Coleridge & White and began her career at The Wylie Agency. She became a member of the Booker Prize Foundation Advisory Committee and was made a Director of the agency in 2020.

Rachel Bin Salleh is descended from the Nimunburr and Yawuru peoples of the Kimberley region of WA. Rachel is passionate about Indigenous people telling their stories and started her career in publishing at Magabala Books in the 1990s. In 2014 Rachel became Magabala’s Publisher and in 2018 she wrote her first book Alfred’s War, a poignant account of the contribution made by Indigenous servicemen.

Joy Francis is Executive Director at Words of Colour Productions, a Creative Development Agency for writers, artists, creatives and entrepreneurs of colour and collaborates with organisations and institutions who are ready to actively commit to systemic transformation programmes that inspire and facilitate inclusion and action. Her diverse career covers journalism, policy development, academia, literature, digital enterprise, curation, production, film, PR and creative entrepreneurship, both here and abroad.

Joy is also co-founder and lead of Digital Women UK which facilitates female creatives, emerging and established entrepreneurs and women in tech to fully engage with digital entrepreneurship, run in partnership with entrepreneurship academic Dr Angela Martinez Dy and Loughborough University London.

She worked with the Media Diversity Institute to create the world’s first Diversity and the Media MA at the University of Westminster and was the inaugural project manager for the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowships.

Joy is an Eastside Community Heritage’s ‘Woman of Colour Trailblazer’ 2019, and she was selected for the UK’s first Museum of Colour’s People of Letters Digital Gallery 2019 as a literature influencer, alongside literary legends such as Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Busby.