CHIEF INVESTIGATOR

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.

Photo by Esther Carlin

CHIEF INVESTIGATOR

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).

Photo by Felix Trinh

PARTNER INVESTIGATOR

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.

CHIEF INVESTIGATOR

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.

CHIEF INVESTIGATOR

Melody Ellis is a writer and academic based in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University where she manages the Honours program and is a member of the non/fictionLab research group. Her interdisciplinary writing and research is interested in subjectivity, art, movement, the politics of value and writing as a method for critical, ethical enquiry. Her work is informed by fictocritical writing, thinking and making.

PhD CANDIDATE

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.

Photo by Victoria Scott

PROJECT COORDINATOR

Emma is a historian and essayist. Before joining the team at RMIT, she worked as an editor in the Federal Press Gallery and at Demos Journal, as a research assistant in the School of History and at PARADISEC (both at the Australian National University), and as an administrator in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History. She was a 2022 Huayu Enrichment Scholar, spending three months studying Chinese language in Taiwan.

ARTIST FELLOW

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.

ARTIST FELLOW

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 .