Seminar Series
Melissa Lucashenko in conversation with Associate Professor Sandra Phillips. Credit: Sally Tsoutas
Hybrid Seminar Series 2024
The Writing and Society Research Centre seminar series, continues in 2024 in a hybrid format. We welcome in-person seminar attendance at our Parramatta City campus and online attendance continues via Zoom.
All seminars will be held on Friday mornings, 11am-12:30pm, at the Parramatta City campus, Peter Shergold Building, Level 9.
Our seminars are free and all are welcome to join. If you want to come along to one of our seminars simply RSVP to s.gapps@westernsydney.edu.au for in person attendance, or register via the Zoom link below for online attendance.
Contact writing@westernsydney.edu.au if you would like to be on our seminars and events mailing list.
Recordings are published on Vimeo and in our Seminar Archive.
Our Next Seminar & Keynote: Maxine Beneba Clarke 'Writing Ourselves Home'
Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent, and the author of over fifteen published books for children and adults, including the critically acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, which she has recently adapted for theatre in an acclaimed run at the Malthouse, the ABIA and Indie award-winning short fiction Foreign Soil, the poetry collection Carrying The World, which won the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and, most recently, It's the Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people. She is the inaugural Peter Steele Poet in Residence at The University of Melbourne.
In ‘Writing Ourselves Home,’ Clarke will discuss what it means to be an artist, writer, educator and creator of Afro-Caribbean heritage, in a country where the history of the African continent, and of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, remains largely untaught.
All welcome!
This seminar is the keynote presentation for the day-long symposium Callaloo & Wattleseed: Caribbean Culture in Australia which features a number of eminent Australian writers, musicians, actors, and educators from a range of Caribbean backgrounds. For full details, and to register for the full symposium follow the links on the symposium webpage.
DATE: Friday 3 May (chaired by Ben Etherington and Sienna Brown)
TIME: 9am to 10:30am
VENUE: Level 9, Conference room 1 in the WSU Peter Shergold building, 169 Macquarie St Parramatta
IN PERSON attendance, morning tea provided: please rsvp to Suzanne Gapps, s.gapps@westernsydney.edu.au
All welcome!
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Jamaican-born SIENNA BROWN writes historical fiction that centres on the Caribbean Experience in Australia. Her novel Master of My Fate (Penguin Random House, 2019), won the MUD Literary Prize at Adelaide Writers Week for the best debut novel and was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize. In 2021, she was commissioned by ABC Radio National to create Caribbean Convicts in Australia. Since 2022, she's been a Research Associate at Western Sydney University as part of the ARC project ‘Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia.’
BEN ETHERINGTON is an associate professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. His teaching and critical work concerns poetics and decolonisation. Previous work includes the book Literary Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2018), and he’s currently writing a history of poetry in West Indian Creole languages from the end of slavery to the period of decolonisation. Ben has also produced several audio features including a documentary for ABC Radio National on Gangallida activist Clarence Walden, co-produced with Waanyi author Alexis Wright.
Writing and Society Research Centre EQ.G.40 Parramatta South Campus P: (02) 9685 9377 https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/writing-society www.facebook.com/writingandsociety/ --------- |