WesterlyMagazine

General Editor: Daniel Juckes

Daniel Juckes is a writer from Perth, Western Australia. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at UWA, and he holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Curtin University. His creative and critical work has been published in journals such as Axon, Life Writing, M/C Journal, TEXT and Westerly, and his research investigates seamlessness in prose style and the potential of objects in stories about the past.

Associate Editor: Shalmalee Palekar

Shalmalee is an academic in English and Literary Studies at The University of Western Australia. She has previously taught at renowned Indian and Australian Universities, and has won national awards for excellence in teaching. She writes on South Asian literatures and Indian cinemas and is also a published poet. Shalmalee has co-written original scripts and performed shows nationally and internationally with three women and a cello, collectively called Funkier than Alice.

Web Editor: Melissa Kruger

Melissa, also known as Maiken, (she/they) is a queer writer, editor, performance artist, playwright, and vocalist who lives, works, plays and studies on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. Melissa holds a Bachelor of Arts with a double major in English & Creative Writing and Theatre & Drama from Murdoch University and a Bachelor of Performing Arts with First Class Honours at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) in Performance Making. Passionate about the Arts, she prefers a multi-disciplinary approach in her own practice, with a special interest in how art can combine with activism. They enjoy experimenting with multiple genres on the same subject with the aim to showcase the importance and value of art in shaping society. Melissa is co-Artistic Director of Split Lip Productions. She was born in South Africa and has lived in New Zealand and the UK as well as Australia, with Perth being home since 2016. They are interested in continuing to learn and draw from the multiple cultures they’ve been fortunate enough to be welcomed into with respect, honouring the knowledge and wisdom of each. She considers herself a lifelong student.

Administrative Editor: Sarah Yeung 楊静雯 

Sarah Yeung 楊静雯 is a queer Cantonese editor, researcher, and sessional tutor living and working on unceded Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. She co-edited Zou Mat Je 做乜嘢, a transnational collection of Cantonese literary and visual artworks, and is currently co-editing the upcoming poetry collection Hello Keanu!. Sarah’s poetry and reviews have been published in Right Now, Red Pocket Press, and Westerly’s Editor’s Desk. She is currently completing a PhD on literary representations of haunting at The University of Western Australia.

Fiction Editor: Julie Koh

Julie is the author of two short-story collections, Capital Misfits (2015) and Portable Curiosities (UQP, 2016). The latter was shortlisted for several literary awards and led to Julie being named a 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Her short stories have appeared widely, including in the Best Australian Stories and Best Australian Comedy Writing. Outside Australia, her fiction has been published in eight countries and translated into Chinese, Indonesian and Bengali. She has written radio plays for ABC Radio National and the libretto for the opera Chop Chef.

Julie has represented Australian literature at Parliament House, as well as internationally at the invitation of the Australian Embassy in Beijing and the Australian Consulate-General, Chennai. She has mentored emerging writers through Kill Your Darlings, the Deborah Cass Prize and WestWords, and runs a short-fiction clinic for Writers Victoria. She has also judged twelve literary prizes, including the 2018 Stella Prize and the 2022 University of Southern Queensland Steele Rudd Award.

Creative Nonfiction Editor: Stefanie Markidis

Stefanie is a writer and researcher in the field of nonfiction writing. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, and her work spans creative nonfiction, life writing and creative-critical arts practice.

Stefanie has had a longstanding editorial career—her writing has appeared in major Australian magazines, journals and on stage. She has edited nonfiction books in travel and culture, and was the founding creative writing editor at Ramona Magazine.

 Poetry Editor: Lucy Dougan

Lucy Dougan is a widely published and award-winning poet. Lucy’s books include Memory Shell (5 Islands Press), White Clay (Giramondo), Meanderthals (Web del Sol) and The Guardians (Giramondo), and her prizes the Mary Gilmore Award, the Alec Bolton Award and short-listings for the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry (2015), the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the WA Premier’s Book Award for Poetry (both 2016). She has worked in arts administration, as a tertiary teacher of creative writing and literature, and as poetry editor of HEAT magazine and Axon: Creative Explorations.  She has had poems commissioned for the Southern Forest Sculpture Walk at Northcliffe and the Busselton Jetty. With Tim Dolin, she is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWAP, 2017). With Beverly Taylor, she is working on a new edition of Anne Brontë’s poems for Cambridge UP. Her new poetry collection, Monster Field, is forthcoming with Giramondo in 2022.

First Nations Editor: Casey Mulder

Casey Mulder is a Ballardong Noongar woman with Dutch and English heritage. She is an English teacher and school leader, and has a Master of Leadership and Management in Education. In 2020 Casey joined the team at the School of Indigenous Studies at UWA where she taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Voices and co-hosted First Nations Writers’ Circles in collaboration with Westerly Magazine. She recently joined the board of Night Parrot Press and is currently completing editing mentorship at Night Parrot Press with the support of Magabala Books. Casey is currently working on a memoir with the support of a Centre for Stories Writing Fellowship, and aspires to continue to advocate for First Nations storytellers within the publishing industry.

Commissioning Editor: Cassandra Atherton

Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning poet and Associate Professor at Deakin University. She was a Harvard Visiting Scholar in poetry in 2016, and has been the successful recipient of fifteen national and international grants and awards, most recently a VicArts grant and an Australia Council Grant to work on a book of prose poetry on the atomic bomb. Cassandra has published twelve books including seven poetry collections, most recently Pikadon (2018), and is writing a critical book on prose poetry for Princeton University Press. She has been invited to judge several awards and prizes, including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards: Prize for Poetry, the Lord Mayor’s Prize for Poetry and the joanne burns microliterature award.

Scholarly Editor: Catherine Noske

Catherine Noske is an academic and writer at The University of Western Australia. She was General Editor of Westerly from 2015–2023.

Creatively, her short-form writing has appeared in Meanjin, Antipodes, Meniscus and Plumwood Mountain, as well as several anthologies, and has been twice awarded the Elyne Mitchell Prize for Rural Women Writers. Her debut novel, The Salt Madonna (Picador, 2020), was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Book Awards, and she is delivering the Randolph Stow Memorial Lecture for 2024. Catherine is grateful to reside on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar.

Comics Editor: Per Henningsgaard

Per Henningsgaard is a senior lecturer and the major coordinator for the Professional Writing and Publishing major at Curtin University. His research interests include editing, publishing, Australian literature and comics. He has published more than twenty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters across six countries, including several about the publishing of Australian comics. He was also the guest editor of Westerly’s online special issue 15, which is titled “Graphic Narratives: New Comics from Western Australia” and was the first issue of Westerly to include comics.

Per is an IPEd accredited editor with in-house experience in both trade and educational publishing, as well as experience as a freelance editor. He is also the founder and publisher of Elephant Page Publishing, a newly established publishing house that is powered by students and guided by a team of publishing professionals; its purpose is to uplift new voices and talents on both sides of the publishing process.