LOU SMITH is a poet and writer of Welsh, Jamaican and English heritage whose work focuses on place, un/belonging, migration, and cultural memory. Lou has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne focusing on place and photography and sites as cultural memory. Lou has taught in the Creative Writing programme at The University of Melbourne and has also run creative writing workshops for high school students at Victoria University as well as being a guest lecturer in the Victoria University creative writing programme.

Lou is the author of the poetry collection riversalt (Flying Island Books). Her writing has been published both nationally and internationally in publications such as Liberation Begins in the Imagination: Writings on Caribbean-British Art, Australian Poetry Anthology, Rabbit, South Broadway Ghost Society, Moko Magazine , sx salon, Caribbean Quarterly, Overland and Sunday Mornings at the River. You can find more of her work at www.lousmith.net.

Lou has been involved in the writing, community radio, zine, and publishing communities since the early 1990s. She was co-founder of independent publisher Breakdown Press (2003–2014), publishers of books and poster series including How to Make Trouble and Influence People: Pranks, Protests, Graffiti & Political Mischief-Making from Across Australia; Adding Pimento: Caribbean Migration to Victoria, Australia; and YOU: the first five years. She has worked in many different jobs including as a writer, disability support worker, event co-ordinator, sustainable transport officer, editor, proofreader, in retail, and in hospitality. 

SUZANNE HERMANOCZKI is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction and non-fiction, and a teacher and academic specialising in Creative Writing. She was born and grew up in Brisbane, speaking Spanish to her Argentine and Hungarian parents. Suzanne is a qualified tertiary education teacher and for twenty years has coordinated, guest lectured, taught, supervised, and examined subjects for the Creative Writing programme at the University of Melbourne and Victoria University. She has also run specialised writing workshops for Warrnambool library and Writeability Victoria. Suzanne has taught ESL for RMIT, and professional education in teacher training programmes at The Hong Kong University of Education and The University of Qld.

Suzanne’s writing on death and photography, trauma and the immigrant journey, memory and postmemories, code-switching and bi/multi-cultural identity, Latinos, gringos and magic realism, have been published in local and international publications including, Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Meanjin, Overland, Panel Magazine, Puentes Review, TEXT and Verge Anthology. In 2022, she won the AAWP/ Westerly Magazine Life Writing prize for her essay “Doors”. In 2018, she was highly commended for the AAWP/ ASSF Short Story Prize, and won the 2014 Affirm Press Creative Writing Prize. 

Suzanne studied Creative Writing at The University of Hong Kong under the scholarship of Shirley Geok Lin-Lim, Gish Jen, and Xu Xi. She also holds a Masters of Arts (in Creative Writing), and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, where she was supervised by acclaimed award-winning writer, Tony Birch.