About me

I’m a people and project manager, editor, publisher, teacher, writer and critic. I’m most interested in storytelling and literary works and projects that are artistically daring and culturally critical.

Currently I work full-time at SBS Australia, managing a team of editors working on subtitling and captioning free-to-air and on-demand tv series and films, and overseeing other major accessibility projects.

I’m also a freelancer / contractor, specialising in the appraising, development and editing of book manuscripts, as well as occasionally reviewing books for newspapers, editing for government and not-for-profit entities, writing and editing grant applications for individuals and organisations, career coaching for emerging authors and consulting for the publishing industry.

You can see examples of my various publishing and related work, and examples of my own published writing.

If you want to enquire about me working on something for / with you, give me a hoy.

I’m a member of the NTEU and the MEAA. I believe deeply in the need and the power for collective organising of workers, and encourage everyone to join their union.

From 2012–20 I ran the not-for-profit independent publishing organisation TLB. In my time there I published 32 issues of celebrated quarterly literary magazine The Lifted Brow, created and ran the independent book publishing imprint Brow Books and ultimately published 18 titles, oversaw the regular posting of pieces of commentary and criticism for a daily website, staged many events, awarded writing prizes, and did a whole lot more.

I was Publisher-in-Residence at RMIT University for a few years, assisting various faculty members and students throughout the university with an assortment of publishing activities, and I taught as a sessional lecturer and tutor at RMIT in the creative writing and publishing programs. I’ve also taught many semesters at the University of Melbourne, Deakin University, Victoria University and the University of Sydney. I hold a bachelor's degree in writing and a master's degree in creative writing and cultural practice.

For more than a decade I’ve been a freelance writer and a literary critic, with work published in The Guardian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, Island, Going Down Swinging, Seizure, Australian Book Review, The Rumpus, a Sleepers Almanac, and as a founding member of the McSweeney’s Silent History geofiction project. I’ve also long been a freelance editor, having commissioned and/or edited work for a variety of other Australian publishing houses and publications in the past, including journals Overland and Griffith Review and Australian publishers Giramondo, Sleepers Publishing and Momentum Books. 

I’ve sat on a couple of editorial advisory boards, chaired for years the RMIT Creative Writing Program Advisory Committee, and I once undertook a professional residency with McSweeney's Publishing in San Francisco. I’ve experienced the joy of helping kids make literary magazines at 100 Story Building in Footscray, and have hosted events and chaired panels at the Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Emerging, National Young, and Ubud writers’ festivals, as well as at The Wheeler Centre and at various writers' centres around the country. I’ve been a judge of the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Prize, the Victorian Premier’s Non-Fiction Prize, the Walkley's Young Journalist of the Year Awards, and the Lord Mayor’s Narrative Non-Fiction Prize. Several times I’ve assessed grant applications for the Australia Council, Creative Victoria, and the Copyright Agency.

I’ll be forever in huge debt to Voiceworks magazine and Express Media for revealing to me a path in the literary/publishing world, and I love that I get to continue occasionally work with Express Media to this day. I took part in the Small Press Network’s inaugural mentorship program, and also spent a year immersed in the Australia Council's 'Future Leaders' professional development program. I’ve visited India as part of the Australia Council's India Literature Exploratory Delegation, and I undertook a secondment at Graywolf Press in Minneapolis. I researched not-for-profit trade publishing models by meeting with presses in the US, UK, and Europe, and I participated in the inaugural Foundry658 Accelerator bootcamp program run by the State Library of Victoria and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) as part of the Victorian Government’s Creative State strategy. I was an Australian Book Industry Awards finalist in the ‘Rising Star’ category.

I was a member of the UNESCO Melbourne City of Literature’s Strategic Planning Group, a recipient of the AMP Foundation ‘Tomorrow Maker’ fund, and am currently a member of the Freelance Editors’ Network. I’m always interested in working on projects that give me the chance to help shape and share other people’s ideas and stories.