In this edition of the Next Big Thing, glimpse works-in-progress from our first intake of 2018 Hot Desk Fellows – fresh from ten weeks of work on their projects inside the Wheeler Centre.
Featuring new writing from Amanda Anastasi, Ra Chapman, Triana Hernandez, Leah Jing McIntosh, Laura Jean McKay, Thuy On and Harry Reid.
Featuring

Amanda Anastasi
Amanda Anastasi is a Melbourne poet who has been published everywhere from the walls of Windsor’s Artists’ Lane to the Massachusetts Review in the US. Her debut poetry collection was 2012 and other poems and she recently co-authored The Silences (Eaglemont Press, 2016).
Amanda was awarded the 2017 Words in Winter Trentham Contemporary Poetry Prize, and is a two-time recipient of the Williamstown Literary Festival’s Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize. Her poems have also appeared in Verity La, Cordite Poetry Review, foam:e, FourW, REM: The Journal of Experimental Writing (NZ), the Short & Twisted anthologies, and Melbourne Spoken Word’s Audacious audio journal, among various other spaces.

Ra Chapman
Ra is an actress, theatre maker and writer. She has recently been selected for the 2018 Cinespace/Film Victoria StoryLab Program, and was a member of the 2017 Besen Writers Group at Malthouse Theatre.
Ra was adopted from Busan, South Korea at age four and was reunited her birth father six years ago. The challenges of maintaining this relationship with her motherland and biological father have had a huge impact on Ra’s identity, and has fuelled her interest in the role identity and family plays in one’s sense of belonging.

Triana Hernandez
Triana Hernandez is a music journalist, music video director and artist manager (Various Asses, Hexdebt). Triana's work consistently pushes for representation and opportunities for artists that challenge Australia’s white, straight and male-centric music industry. Her interviews with artists like Garreth Liddiard, Habits and Sevdaliza have been featured in publications including Noisey, iD and Swampland.

Leah Jing McIntosh
Leah Jing McIntosh is the founding editor of Liminal, an anti-racist literary project based in Naarm. In 2022, she co-edited Against Disappearance, an award-winning collection of essays on memory and the archive ...

Laura Jean McKay
Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe 2020) - winner of the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year and ...

Thuy On

