Mascara’s Global South Salon: A Reading and Performance

Presented by Mascara Literary Review and hosted by the University of Sydney's Department of English

A special public event of the World Literatures and the Global South Conference hosted by the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney

This reading is a creative submersion into the colloquium themes from diaspora writers and translators who live and work in Sydney, and whose ancestries trace to the Global South. They have lived in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Africa, Mexico and Australia. They share resistant imaginaries.

Convened by Dr Toby Fitch with a brief introduction by award-winning poet Dimitra Harvey.

The writers:

• Mario Licón Cabrera is a Mexican-Australian poet and translator. He has published four collections of poetry, including Yuxtas, a bilingual edition with the support of the Australian Council for the Arts in 2009. In 2015 and 2016 he won the (Spanish) Trilce Poetry Prize. His most recent publication is the English translations of works by Mexican poets, Mijail Lamas, Mario Bojórquez and Alí Calderón, published by Vagabond Press.
  

• Anupama Pilbrow co-edits The Suburban Review. Her debut chapbook, Body Poems, was published in 2018 as part of Vagabond Press’ deciBels 3 series. Her poems, reviews and essays have been published in local and international journals and anthologies. Her work often deals with diaspora, dialogue, exchange and “gross stuff”.
  

• Lachlan Brown is a senior lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. His first book of poetry, Limited Cities, was highly commended for the Mary Gilmore Award. His second book of poetry, Lunar Inheritance, was published in 2017 and explored his Chinese-Australian background. Lachlan’s poems have been variously shortlisted, commended and awarded in prizes, including the Gwen Harwood Prize, the Judith Wright Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the Macquarie Fields Poetry Prize.

• Debbie Lim was born in Sydney and is of Chinese heritage. Her work has appeared regularly in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.) and in Contemporary Asian Australian Poets and Contemporary Australian Poetry (both by Puncher & Wattmann Poetry). Her chapbook, Beastly Eye, was published in 2012 (Vagabond Press). Her awards include the Rosemary Dobson Prize, the Inverawe Nature Poetry Prize and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She has recently returned from living in Germany.

• Michelle Cahill is of Goan heritage. Her book Letter to Pessoa, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing. She is the author of three collections of poetry, including Vishvarupa and The Herring Lass. She has received several prizes and grants in poetry and fiction from the Australia Council and the Copyright Agency Limited. She was Poetry Fellow at Kingston Writing School, London and Visiting Scholar at UNC Charlotte. She is completing a DCA at the University of Wollongong.

• Christopher Cyrill is the author of the novels, The Ganges and its Tributaries, Hymns for the Drowning and the forthcoming Quaternion. He has also published numerous short stories, articles and poems internationally, and broadcasted radio plays. For many years he was the fiction editor of HEAT Literary International and the fiction editor of Giramondo Publishing. From 2016 to 2019 he was the associate editor and fiction editor of Southerly Literary Journal. He has taught at various universities for 20 years.

• Dimitra Harvey (introduction) was born in Sydney to a Greek mother and grew up on Wangal country. She has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from the University of Western Sydney and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her poems have appeared in Southerly, Meanjin, Mascara Literary Review, Cordite, and Philament, as well as anthologies such as The Best Australian Poems 2017, and speculative poetry anthology The Stars Like Sand. In 2012, she won the Australian Society of Authors’ Ray Koppe Young Writer's Residency.

• Toby Fitch (convenor) is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. His book of poems, Rawshock, won the Grace Leven Prize in 2012. His creative PhD, consisting of a poetry collection Bloomin’ Notions and thesis, ‘Themparks: Alternative Play in Contemporary Australian Poetry’, won the 2017 Dame Leonie Kramer Prize in Australian Poetry. His latest book of poems is Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond Press 2019).

About Mascara Literary Review
A literary journal founded in 2007, Mascara is particularly interested in the work of contemporary migrant, Asian Australian and Aboriginal writers, and specialises in publishing platforms for subaltern writing and human rights, focussing on cultural cohesion and participation.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.