Adam Krause is from Minnesota. His stories and poems have appeared in Tammy, Catch, Cellar Door and the anthology Lit Kids. He blogs for Eduify and is honoured to be a 2009 summer teaching fellow at the IIML

Ashleigh Young is a writer and editor living in Wellington. Her work has appeared in Booknotes, Turbine, Sport, Landfall, and Best New Zealand Poems. Her essay collection Can You Tolerate This? won the 2009 Adam Foundation Prize, which is awarded annually to an outstanding  student of the Creative Writing MA programme at Victoria University; and an essay from the collection won the 2009 Landfall Essay Competition.  She is currently completing a miscellany of essays and a small, reluctant herd of poems.

Bernadette Hall lives in North Canterbury. She has published nine collections of poetry and received many awards for her work.  In 2006 she was Writer in residence at Victoria University. In 2007 she spent 6 months in Ireland on the Rathcoola Fellowship. Her resulting collection of poems, The Lustre Jug was launched as part of the 2009 Christchurch Arts Festival. She is a founding staff member of the Hagley Writer's Institute in Christchurch.

Breton did the MA at the IIML this year. He lives in Wellington.

Carol Cromie is a journalist and book editor, seaside landlady and licensed pawnbroker. She completed the Diploma in Creative Writing earning distinction at NMIT in 2008. 'Rat Point' is one of a series of family poems about isolation submitted as part of her thesis for the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2009. One of the poems, 'The Swarm', won the 2009 Bravado 'Special Prize for an Unpublished Poet'; another, 'The Anatomist', was highly commended.

Christopher Reid's most recent books of poems are A Scattering and The Song of Lunch (both 2009). The paperback of Letters of Ted Hughes, which he edited, was also published this year.

In the last year Chris Tse co-produced a play at Bats Theatre, directed a short film, and continued to write and record songs in his bedroom. He was the winner of the 2009 NZ Chinese Association/Listener Short Story Competition.

David Beach lives in Wellington. He has written two books of sonnets, Abandoned Novel and The End of Atlantic City, the first of which won the 2008 Prize in Modern Letters. He has ventured on agriculture as subject matter despite being a confirmed urban dweller and someone always quick to call a spade an implement to be avoided.

David Eggleton lives in Dunedin, where he is a poet, writer and arts journalist whose work has appeared in the Listener, Art New Zealand, New Zealand Books, Art News, Architecture New Zealand, Urbis, Landfall and many other publications. Soundings is a cascade of images that was triggered, curiously enough, by the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States at the end of 2008.

Elizabeth Russell currently lives in Wellington. In 2009 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. Her project was a novella manuscript called Sunny.

Emile Hofstede was born in Ontario, Canada to post-war Dutch immigrants in 1964.  She obtained an MSC in Ecology and a BA in Education and worked in both fields before leaving home to experience more of the world.  One day she landed in Golden Bay and has not left yet.  Her time there has been significantly marked by seasonal homesickness, life in an intentional community, and the death of her partner from cancer.  She is nonetheless, a contented resident of New Zealand.  This year she completed the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML.

Emma Barnes lives in Aro Valley with two cats, a lot of pottery and a very nice partner. The most constant thing in her life has been writing. In March of this year she released her own lit magazine Enamel and is currently working on round two.

Emma Kate Martin grew up in Dunedin, and has lived in Melbourne, Manchester, Edinburgh, London and Wellington. In previous lives she has worked as a film censor, taxi driver and circus performer. She has a PhD in philosophy, and completed the MA at IIML in 2009.

Fiona Mitford completed a collection of short stories for her MA at the IIML this year. Moon Babies is the title story. She left city life 13 years ago and now lives on a farm in the Gisborne ranges. There are two water crossings to traverse on the last 4K of the gravel road home, and in winter when the rivers rise, they are often too deep to cross.  She has very much enjoyed being in Wellington at the IIML for two days of each week this year.

Frances Mountier grew up in Christchurch. She began studying writing (at the School for Young Writers) aged 8. She completed the IIML Masters in Creative Writing in 2009.

Hannah Jolly completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2009.  She grew up in the Wairarapa and that is where most of her stories, including this one, are set.

Helen Heath lives in the sea-side village of Paekakariki, on the Kapiti Coast. She completed an MA in creative writing at Victoria University in 2009. Her poetry has been published in many journals in New Zealand and Australia. Most recently she's had a chap-book of poems published by Seraph Press called Watching for Smoke. Helen also blogs at Show Your Workings.

Hinemoana Baker (Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa, Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Kiritea — England, Bavaria) is a writer, musician, producer and teacher of creative writing. Hinemoana's first poetry collection, mātuhi | needle (2004), was co-published in New Zealand by Victoria University Press and in the US by Perceval Press. 2010 will see the release of her second collection kōiwi kōiwi. The two poems published here are part of a series called The Adventures of Kore-rawa on the Moon, written while she was based in Brisbane as 2009 Arts Queensland Poet in Residence. Find out more at www.hinemoana.co.nz. Hinemoana would like to acknowledge Arts Queensland, Queensland Writers Centre, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts and Queensland Poetry Festival.

Holly Painter recently completed her MFA in creative writing at Canterbury. She has lived in Detroit, Los Angeles, Auckland and Dunedin, and now wanders between them at irregular intervals. As a result, Holly is always at home and also not at home. There's something of that in her poems here.

The poem Looks/Snapshots is part of an experimental exploration just published by Oystercatcher Press in the UK. See Iain Britton's website for further publications and collections.

James Purtill was born in South Africa and has lived in Wellington, Perth and New York. He returned to Wellington in 2009 to complete an MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Joan Fleming lives in a little shack in Onekaka, Golden Bay. She is now writing about the colour red and the colour blue. Her poems have appeared in Sport, Snorkel, Best New Zealand Poems 08, JAAM, The Lumiere Reader, Blackmail Press, Hue & Cry, Moving Worlds and Takahe.

Jo Davy left Cornwall six years ago and studied for a PhD in coral disease ecology in Brisbane before settling in Wellington in 2007. She completed the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2009. This excerpt is from her novel-in-progress, which was inspired by her first trip to Otago and an article about the WWII codebreakers based at Bletchley Park.

Jo Thorpe is a Wellington poet whose first book of poetry Len & other poems was published in 2003 by Steele Roberts.  She gained her MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University in 2001 and is currently working on her second collection.  Jo is also a dance writer and critic and teaches Dance History at the New Zealand School of Dance. 

The Warrior Ethos was written after visiting the 'Terracotta Warriors' exhibition held in Wellington's St James Theatre earlier this year. 'Jade Cicadas' takes its form from Michael Ondaatje's book Handwriting.  When I wrote the third section I was thinking about Cicero, who wrote 2000 years ago: 'Those who don’t know history remain children.'

Kay Corns has just completed the MA in creative writing at the International Institute for Modern Letters. Her poems have previously appeared in 4th Floor Literary Journal.

Kerrin P. Sharpe is a teacher of creative writing. She has recently published in Best NZ Poems 08, Turbine 07, Snorkel, Bravado, Takahe, NZ Listener, Poetry NZ, Junctures, Sport and The Press. 'A Possible Journey': one morning I was startled to find a deer's head impaled on an iron fence. I tried to write a poem that would put the deer back where he belonged. 'The Train Wakes Horses' was written on the train between Picton and Christchurch in response to fields of horses fleeing the train.

Kirsty Gunn was a student of Bill Manhire in the late seventies and attended his important classes on Modern American Poetry and Writing. She was a Randell Fellow in Thorndon earlier this year, working on a book about Katherine Mansfield her influence upon her own work. She has a Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee.

Lauren Barrier Gould received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Clementine, Makeout Creek, Los hermanos chang, The Southern Poetry Anthology and elsewhere. She works for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. These four poems are selections from a collection of 100-word prose poems. Each poem comprises a small part of a larger narrative.

Lindsay Pope paints roofs to get closer to the sky. He writes poems to get closer to the truth.

Lynn Jenner studied writing at Victoria University in 2008, where her folio, Dear Sweet Harry, a mixed genre work concerning Harry Houdini, won the Adam Prize. Lynn’s poems have appeared in JAAM, Turbine, The Fourth Floor and Best New Zealand Poems 2008.

Maria Zajkowski was born in Lower Hutt and currently lives in Melbourne. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies in New Zealand, Australia, USA and the UK. 'Inside the Whale' was written in response to Fiona MacGregor's Strange Museums, a travel memoir about Poland.

Megan Knott did a Masters in Creative Writing in 2009 at the IIML. This excerpt is from her folio novel, Lines of Flight.

Melissa Day Smith was born in America in 1971 and moved to New Zealand in 1995. She lives in Days Bay with her husband and daughter.

Pat White is a writer and artist who lives in the Wairarapa. He was a student in the 2009 MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. At present he is on the Robert Lord Cottage residency in Dunedin, and is to be the 2010 Randell Cottage Writer in Residence. He is working on a biographical work on the life of Peter Hooper, West Coast author and conservationist.

Pip Adam lives in Wellington where she is working toward her PhD Creative Writing at the IIML. The Whole Time is a story about love told in the language of soil mechanics. She has had work published in Sport, Hue & Cry and Blackmail Press.

Rachel Bush lives in Nelson. She has written three books of poetry. The most recent, All Patients Report Here (Wai-te-ata Press) was written after a short time as poet in residence at Wellington Hospital. The Unfortunate Singer (1997) and The Hungry Woman (2002) are published by VUP.

Rachel O'Neill is a writer and artist living in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2008 she completed an MA in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters and in 2005 she completed a BA/BFA conjoint degree at The University of Auckland. She has exhibited visual work in group and solo exhibitions and has had a selection of work published in New Zealand in Brief #38, Blackmail Press Issue 25, Turbine 08, and Hue and Cry Issue 1. To find out more you can visit her blog here.

Ruth Payne calls two peninsulas home: Miramar in Wellington where she lives with her husband and daughters; and Portland in Dorset where she goes back to visit her English family. She has completed modules towards a Diploma in Creative Writing from Whitireia Polytechnic and recently attended the 'Writing the Landscape' workshop at the IIML.

Samiha Radcliffe's Indian heritage sprawls through Persia, Russia and Pakistan. Her Pakeha ancestors came from France and The Isle of Man. She was born in Canada in 1979 and spent the first two years of her life on a Cree Reservation. She has lived in Aotearoa/New Zealand ever since. In 2008 Samiha was an MA student at the IIML. These two poems were included in her final folio, The great heart feeds you.

Sam Sampson was born in Auckland, and grew up in South Titirangi, next to Little Muddy Creek. Everything Talks, his first collection of poems, was published by Auckland University Press (NZ), and Shearsman Books (UK) in June 2008. It won the Jessie McKay NZSA Best First Book of Poetry at the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. For more information visit his website.

Flushed From A Tidal Retreat: The oldest unequivocal document of origami is a short comic poem composed by Ihara Saikaku in 1680. It reads: Rosei-ga yume-no cho-wa orisue (The butterflies in Rosei’s dream would be origami). The Rosei in my poem is lifted from this source. In the second and third stanzas, there is a blended, embedded, and overlapped assortment of found fragments cut from National Geographic magazines by artist Peter Madden. The title is one of these fragments.

Sarah Jane Barnett is a writer and tutor who lives in Wellington. Her work has appeared in a range of literary journals such as Landfall, Sport, Takahe and JAAM and on the e-zines Blackmail Press and Snorkel. During 2006 Sarah completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters. She is currently working on short-story-poems and a series of poems about being executed. You can find out more about her at The Red Room.

Susannah Goodman was born in Cambridge, England. At the moment she wants to be a journalist - but that could change. The Cat is based on a story told to her by her dad about their first house.

Tim Upperton’s poetry and fiction are published or forthcoming in AGNI (US), Bravado, Dreamcatcher (UK), Landfall, New Zealand Books, New Zealand Listener, North & South, Reconfigurations (US), Sport, Takahe, Turbine and Best New Zealand Poems 2008. He is a former poetry editor for Bravado, and tutors creative writing, travel writing and New Zealand literature at Massey University. His first poetry collection, A House On Fire, was published by Steele-Roberts in 2009.

Vana Manasiadis is a Wellingtonian living in Crete. Her first collection of poetry Ithaca Island Bay Leaves will be published in December 2009 by Seraph Press. 'Was it Only a Scratch?' and 'Essay' are from a series of short prose pieces and poems that will form part of a collaborative piece for theatre provisionally called The Lighthouse. The quote in 'Essay' is from text written for the Guggenheim Museum by Sarah Bancroft, (James Rosenquist: A retrospective, 2003), in which she says: 'Drawing on Einstein’s theory of relativity—in which a stationary spectator sees an event or fixed point differently from a spectator travelling at the speed of light—The Stowaway addresses the limited 'vision' available to the viewer of an artwork.'