Adam Stewart has an Honours in English and a BA in Music Studies Composition from Victoria University. This year he wrote a book of poetry for his MA in Creative Writing at the IIML.

Alex Mitcalfe Wilson lives in Wellington, where he works as a school librarian. He recently graduated from Victoria University, having studied Chemistry and Teaching. Alex has previously published in JAAM.

Andrew Nance is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He will be a visiting lecturer at the IIML in the summer of 2013. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Petri Press, The Quarterly Conversation, and Narrative Magazine.

Ashleigh Young's poems and essays have appeared in Sport, Turbine, Landfall, Booknotes, Great Sporting Moments (ed. Damien Wilkins, VUP, 2006), Best of Best New Zealand Poems (eds. Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins, VUP, 2011), and The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature (eds. Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, AUP, 2012). Ashleigh's first collection of poetry, Magnificent Moon, was published by Victoria University Press in November 2012. She works as an editor and blogs at eyelashroaming.com.

Bill Nelson lives in Wellington where he completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2009. He recently decided to reverse a life-time of unprofessional shower performances and took up singing lessons. ‘Hardboiled’ is inspired by one of the many baffling techniques he has enjoyed learning. Currently, he is working on a project involving the Courtenay Place Lightboxes.

Breton Dukes's first book, Bird North and other stories, was published by VUP in 2011. He is currently completing his second book, Empty Bones. He lives in Dunedin.

Bruce Costello studied foreign languages at the University of Canterbury, worked as a radio creative writer for seventeen years, then trained in psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy and spent 24 years in private practice as a counsellor in Dunedin. He has won the HER Magazine bi-monthly contest and been published in issues. Another story features in PINK. About a dozen of Bruce's stories appear in on-line journals including Snorkel, Flash Frontier, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Fiction 365, NIB, Cyclamens & Swords and Alfie Dog Ltd. He was shortlisted in the 2012 Victoria Cancer Council Art Awards.

Cushla Managh completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2012. ‘Garden of Eden’ is from a collection of short stories she wrote.

Evan James is coordinator of this year's Iowa Workshop, Prose Stream. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, Mother Jones, SF Weekly, and elsewhere. He has published fiction in The Sun, and is at work on a novel.

Frances Mountier completed her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2009. Her work has appeared in Sport, Takahē, Renegade House, Hue & Cry, JAAM, An Aotearoa Affair and Flash Frontier, and she is the recipient of the 2012/2013 Lavinia Fellowship at New Pacific Studio Mt Bruce. She is working on a novel about a Christchurch family.

Frankie McMillan is a short story writer and poet. She is the author of The Bag Lady's Picnic and other stories and a poetry collection, Dressing for the Cannibals. Recent poetry has appeared in Turbine, Sport, JAAM, Snorkel, Trout, The Cincinnati Review and Shenandoah.

Georgia Vaughan completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2012. She is a teacher in her other life. ‘Makara Beach’ is an excerpt from her novel.

Gregory Kan is a writer currently living in Wellington. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2012. His work has appeared in publications such as Brief, Percutio, Otoliths and Turbine. The optimal distance between his mattress and the ground is undecidable.

Hannah Mettner is a writer from Gisborne who lives and works in Wellington, and makes excellent shortbread.

Helen Innes spent many years travelling and working around the world and now dreams of living and writing on a replica 17th-century pirate ship that her partner says he will finish fixing up as soon as she stops doing writing courses and sending him out for ice cream and ink cartridges. ‘Jellyfish’ is an excerpt from her novel, Tatami Burns.

Holly Hoddinott is a teacher in the Wellington region.

James Brown’s ‘I come from Palmerston North’ first appeared in Turbine 03, before finding its home in The Year of the Bicycle (Victoria University Press, 2002). His newest book, Warm Auditorium, was also launched by Victoria University Press earlier this year.

Jan Wagner

Jan Wagner is a German poet born in 1971 in Hamburg and currently living in Berlin. He has published the poetry collections Probebohrung im Himmel (A Trial Drill in the Sky, 2001), Guerickes Sperling (Guericke’s Sparrow, 2004), Achtzehn Pasteten (Eighteen Pies, 2007) and Australien (2010) and co-edited the comprehensive anthologies of young German poets Lyrik von Jetzt: 74 Stimmen (Poetry of Now: 74 voices, 2003). A selection of his essays, Die Sandale des Propheten: Beiläufige Prosa (The Prophet’s Sandal: Incidental Prose), was published in 2011. He represented Germany at Poetry Parnassus in London in July 2012. In September, following a four-week residency in Sydney, Australia, he visited New Zealand at the invitation of the Goethe Institut. Jan Wagner writes: ‘Quickly, in fact already while being in Australia, the city of Palmerston North came to be something like the golden thread of my journey to New Zealand, meeting people from there, people who had gone there and also people who said that they had never gone there and saw no reason for doing so either — so that when we finally arrived in Palmerston North I had the strong feeling that this might be the place fit for a poem. I found out soon, of course, that this poem already exists, leaving me no choice but to translate James Brown's ‘I come from Palmerston North’ into German.’ The poem was first published in Turbine 03.

Jane Blaikie completed an MA at the IIML in 2012 with a poetry folio titled ‘The Neurology Department’. Its opening section is about the Wellington artist, designer and gallerist Dave Kent who was diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease in 2009. Lines in the poems in italics are taken from notebooks that Dave has used to communicate with by writing after he became mute.

Jan Farr is an occasionally-published grandmother who lives in the Wairarapa.

Jared Wells is poet, critic and PhD candidate in English at Auckland University. His creative texts, as well as articles on art and experimental music, have appeared in numerous catalogues and journals, including Oculus and The National Grid. He blogs at Spratt’s Medium.

Jessica Hansell has just completed her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. She is a writer, comic/zine maker, and works as the musician Coco Solid. She is currently screenwriting for the online cartoon 'Hook Ups' and this April heads to Seoul for an art residency at Korea's Museum of Contemporary Art.

Johanna Aitchison lives in Palmerston North and works as a lecturer at IPC (International Pacific College). She was the 2012 Massey University Writer-in-Residence and is currently in training for her first marathon.

John Summers lives in Nanchang, China. His prose has appeared in Hue & Cry, JAAM, Takahē and the anthology, Land Very Fertile. He has also contributed travel writing to the Listener and the Christchurch Press.

Jo Morris is an English teacher from Hastings who has taken time out in 2012 to work towards an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. She has been published in Trout and Cordite.

Kerry Donovan-Brown is winner of the 2012 Adam Foundation Prize for best MA folio. His novella Lamplighter is about a village that sits at the edge of a vast wetland. There is a grandmother, a school of sea jellies and a talking dog. ‘Granna's Flat’ is an excerpt from the novella. His writing has previously appeared in Turbine 10.

Laura Sims is the author of three books of poems: My god is this a man (forthcoming, Fence Books, 2013), Stranger (Fence Books, 2009), and Practice, Restraint, (winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize), and of five chapbooks, including POST- (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2012). She has been a recipient of the Japan-US Friendship Commission's Creative Artists Residency, and she is a co-editor of Instance Press with poets Elizabeth Robinson and Beth Anderson. She has written book reviews and essays for Evening Will Come, New England Review, Rain Taxi, Boston Review, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. She teaches at NYU and lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and son. 

Leanne Radojkovich's flash fiction has appeared in Turbine, Flash Fiction World and Flash Frontier. Several stories are on YouTube, others are serialised on Twitter. She won the Lilian Ida Smith Award in 2009 and gained a Master in Creative Writing from Auckland University of Technology the following year.

Lee Posna grew up in New Jersey and lives with his wife poet Therese Lloyd in Paekakariki.

Lydia Wisheart is a writer living in Wellington. This year she completed an MA at the IIML with a collection of stories.

Lynn Jenner is working on a PhD about human actions in the face of loss at the IIML. ‘The poem about the candle’ is from this project. Her folio Dear Sweet Harry was awarded the Adam Prize in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2008 and the Jessie McKay Best First Book of Poetry prize in 2011.

M. Doyle Corcoran completed the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2012. She wrote a novel called Hello, My Clients Are Crazy about a woman who makes mistakes. She is fictional.

Manon Revuelta is a student living in Auckland city.

Michael Farrell's newest book is open sesame (Giramondo 2012). He has published poems in Brief, Poetry NZ, Jacket and others. He lives in Melbourne.

Michele Leggott was the Inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate 2008-09. Her most recent publications are northland (Pania Press, 2010), Mirabile Dictu (Auckland UP, 2009) and a CD of selected poems, Michele Leggott / The Laureate Series (Braeburn/Jayrem 2009). She coordinates the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) with Brian Flaherty at the University of Auckland.

Nancy Fulford completed the MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2012. She is working on a memoir entitled Surviving Paradise.

Nick Williamson lives in Christchurch. His first book of poems, The Whole Forest, was published by Sudden Valley Press in 2001. ‘Broken Light’, a poem from that book was selected for Best New Zealand Poems in that year. In 2005 his poem, ‘Learning a Language’, won the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Poetry Competition.

Rebekah Holt is a psychotherapist and writer. She grew up in the South Island and currently lives in West Auckland.

Ross Brighton is a New Zealand poet, formerly of Christchurch, now based in Auckland. He is the author of Lullaby for David Mitchell (Forthcoming from Electio Editions, Australia), Temporal Maze Denture (above/ground press, Canada, as part of the 5th Dusie Kolektiv, 2011), A Draft from Birds (&then&then, Auckland, 2010) and A Pelt a Shrub a Soil Sample (Neoismist Press, Lyttleton, 2009). His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Potroast, Side Stream, Brief, Catalyst (all NZ), Otoliths (Aus), Meat Confetti, Reconfigurations, No Tell Motel, Action Yes (all US), Bad Robot (UK) Dusie (Switzerland), and Cruce (Puerto Rico). He is former reviews editor for the US-based journal Tarpaulin Sky, and completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Auckland in 2011. An as-yet untitled volume of his conceptual writing is forthcoming from In Edit Mode Press, in Sweden.

Samantha Byres is from Whanganui. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML and is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Sarah Jane Parton resides in the Aro Valley in Wellington. She writes and makes art and likes directing stuff and is in a band (but she is not a musician, more of a 'participator'). She also has two rambunctious kids and one honours degree in fine arts and two friendly cats and an antisocial rabbit and a weakness for sweetened condensed milk straight out of the tin. She completed an MA in Creative Writing in 2012. ‘art’ is an excerpt from her untitled novel.

Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts NZ, 2011) and the book of literary interviews, Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010). She's also the editor of Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House NZ, 2009). Recently her poems have been published in Asheville Poetry Review (US), Evergreen Review (US), Five Poem Journal (Ned), Landfall, Meanjin (Aus), Poetry New Zealand, Stand (UK), Structo (UK) and Tuesday Poem (NZ/US). She's the Poetry Editor of Takahe and Coordinator of National Poetry Day (NZ). In 2011, she was runner up in the Landfall Essay Prize and Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. As part of the 25 New Zealand Poets Project, her Poet's Page was recently launched on The Poetry Archive (UK).

Sue Francis's short stories have been published in Best New Zealand Fiction # 6 and broadcast on National Radio. She won the Sunday Star-Times short story award in 2009 for her story ‘The Concentrators’. In 2012, she completed her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML with a novel called Oakwood about an antiques specialist and a woman who loves horses. ‘An Introduction to Appreciating Antiques’ is an excerpt from her novel.

Sugar Magnolia Wilson is from Fern Flat, a valley in the Far North region of New Zealand. She completed her MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2012. She has had work published in Minarets and has upcoming work in JAAM 30 and Shenandoah. Sometimes she feels like a jellyfish on the creative tides. Sometimes she feels like a shark. But mostly a jellyfish.

Wendy Nolan grew up in Puerto Rico, Canada and the US. She moved to France as a teenager where she's lived on and off for the past 20 years. She has a doctorate in 19th-century French literature and has worked as a university lecturer, art historian, French teacher and translator. Her first novel, Rue du Calvaire, was short-listed for the HarperCollins/Varuna competition in Australia and twice for the Varuna publishers’ fellowships with Random House and PanMacMillan. She is currently working on a new novel set in contemporary France and 1970s America. ‘Palmistry for Beginners’ is an excerpt from her novel.

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle is a writer from Auckland, currently living in Wellington. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2012. Her work has appeared in publications such as Landfall, Sport, Minarets, Colorado Review, and St. Petersburg Review. She has been the featured poet for Poetry NZ and a fine line.