Writing & Society Research Centre, Room To Listen online seminar series

From Inside the Desk Drawer is a sneak peek into a developing collection of poems that creatively explore and reclaim a distinctly multilingual (Greek-Slavic-English) voice from obscurity. The focal point of the poems lies in the experiences and stories of my mother who was dislodged from her birthplace (Roupel) in 1946-7 by a Hellenising Greek government. Her displacement over several years and across various southern villages in the Northern Central Greek region of Macedonia, where the use of a Balkan dialect was suppressed by government officials, led to my mother's emigration to Australia in 1970.

HELEN KOUKOUTSIS is an Associate Lecturer in Literary Studies in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. She was awarded a PhD from Macquarie University and a commendation from the Vice Chancellor for a thesis of exceptional merit. She specialises in nineteenth-century American literature, especially Emily Dickinson and her cultural milieu. Helen's current research project on Dickinson and nineteenth-century Buddhism has been recently funded by a Researcher Development grant at Western Sydney University.