from the editor's desk
Our New Poetry Editor: Lucy Dougan
Here at Westerly, the external editor roles change regularly, to ensure diversity and freshness in the selection of pieces that we publish. This means that the time has come to say goodbye and thank you to Paul Munden for his dedication and generosity of time in the role as Poetry Editor. We are grateful for all that he has contributed in his time at Westerly and wish him well in his future projects.
This also means that it is time to welcome a new team member onboard. It brings us great joy to announce Lucy Dougan as our new Poetry Editor. Lucy has had a long association with the Magazine in various roles and it is wonderful to have her with us now in this new capacity. She brings a wealth of knowledge and vast literary experience, having previously worked as Poetry Editor of HEAT magazine and Axon: Creative Explorations. With both her exquisite skills as a poet and her sensitivity and perceptiveness as a reader of submissions, we are incredibly lucky to have Lucy joining our team.
Lucy is a highly regarded, award winning poet with a distinguished literary career. Her first book, Memory Shell, won the Mary Gilmore Award. The manuscript for her second collection of poetry, White Clay (Giramondo), won the Arts ACT Alec Bolton Award. And in 2016, her poetry collection The Guardians (Giramondo) won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry. With Tim Dolin, she is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWAP, 2017), and with Beverly Taylor, she is now working on a new edition of Anne Brontë’s poems for Cambridge University Press. Her latest poetry collection, Monster Field, is forthcoming with Giramondo in 2022.
Some of Lucy’s poems can be found within our digital archive, ‘Frangipanis‘ and ‘Young Boy with Daffodils‘ published in Issue 50.1 (2005), and ‘London, Misbooked‘ in Issue 59.2 (2014)—as well as several reviews which Lucy has provided to us over the years. She continued her editorial work in contributing ‘Ambushed by Hope: Extracts from Fay Zwicky’s Journal (Notebook XIII, August 2012)‘ to Issue 62.1 (2017).
We are thrilled to have Lucy join us as Poetry Editor and are excited to see her selections in our future issues of Westerly!
