Bhakthi Puvanenthiran is a Melburnian of Tamil origin. She has written for Crikey and Arena, held a brief stint as the new media columnist for Voiceworks and regularly makes community radio on 3CR. In 2009, she edited Melbourne Uni's student paper, Farrago and maintained a blog about feminism. Aside from co-piloting the NYWF, Bhakthi will spend most of 2010/11 finishing her degree in Media and Communications/Law and earning her pennies at the State Library of Victoria.

Some-time comic and zine maker, most-time cultural producer. 2009/10 NYWF co-director. www.sarahhowellprojects.com

Projects Sarah has produced include: 3 street parties, 1 Hobart Fringe Festival, 1 international e-learning project about islands, 1 national touring exhibition about Australian comics, zine and comic workshops in 5 Australian states; and various youth and community arts projects in Tasmania.

You can often find Sarah somewhere over Bass Strait making her way to or from her new home of Melbourne.

link:
http://www.sarahhowellprojects.com

Talina McKenzie is a writer, designer and editor who has worked on various magazines in Brisbane and London. She was an editor of QUT’s Utopia magazine back in the golden pre-VSU days of student media, and a co-founder of Brisbane’s Vulture magazine. Her first love is fiction and she has recently given up the adrenaline-junkie’s life of monthly deadlines to be a book editor, something she presumes will involve tweed jackets and pipes.

Miles is a born and raised Melbourne local.

He's been involved with several projects: Deakin University's Exposure Season 2009, The Lifted Brow, and now the NYWF 2010 Festival in association with TiNA.

He's passionate about his communications media and online networking sites. If you're around on Facebook or Twitter, why not drop him a word or two!

Sarah Gory enjoys reading of all sorts, talking of all sorts, and riding her bike. Melbourne born and bred, she is completing a Masters of Gender Studies and works at Oxfam Australia. This is her second year as NYWF Festival Coordinator. She is also a latent writer herself.

Trevor works as a designer for the fashion industry, producing graphics for companies such as Fred Bare, Adidas, Gap and The Rolling Stones. He has also
co-written and illustrated three children¹s books.

Late in 2008 Trevor began to sketch on the streets of Newcastle. He focuses on everyday urban street furniture, signage and architecture that is usually
overlooked and often uniquely Australian. These drawings are collected in the zine "Newcastle Australia" now into issue 3.

Trevor is currently drawing 100 letterboxes around Newcastle http://tinyurl.com/100letterboxes

link:
www.trevordickinson.com

Benjamin Law (Secretary) is a Brisbane-based freelance writer. He is a senior contributor to frankie magazine, and his work has also been published in The Monthly, Qweekend, The Big Issue and The Courier Mail. Benjamin recently submitted a television writing PhD, which involved developing a black-comedy drama called The New Lows. Recently, his essays were anthologised in Growing Up Asian in Australia (edited by Alice Pung) and Best Australian Essays 2008 (edited by David Marr). He is also working on a collection of stories and essays for Black Inc.

Bethany Jones is a Melbourne-based entertainment lawyer at Media Arts Lawyers. Her main areas of practice are copyright and intellectual property law. Bethany has also worked as a Senior Arts Officer for Organisation at Arts Victoria. Hailing from Newcastle, she ran 'cold reads' for emerging playwrights for Performing Arts Newcastle and worked as an actor to developed scripts with writers. Bethany is actively involved in theatre and film production in Melbourne and is currently writing performance concepts and a film script.

Dion Kagan is a freelance writer, editor and cultural studies researcher whose work has appeared in Realtime, Traffic, Trouble Arts, I Eat I Drink I Work and MCV. In 2008 he edited a collection of creative non-fiction, poetry and short stories called The Death Mook (Vignette Press) and in 2009 he edited the first Emerging Writers’ Festival Reader. This year he’s in the final throes of a PhD on HIV/AIDS, queer identities and popular culture at Melbourne University. Parts of this research can be found in antiTHESIS (2009 “Exhibitionism”) and Literature Film Quarterly (forthcoming). He is also a Needle/Syringe program worker.

Jules Hewitt is a media and entertainment lawyer with Media Arts Lawyers and works with a variety of clients including Lisa Mitchell, the Presets, Big Day Out, Falls Festival, Fremantle Media, Spook Magazine and Operator Please.

Jules is also the co-founder of a micro-label called Cohen Cooper & Roberts, a music supervisor for various film projects, a lecturer in entertainment law, and he sits on the board of a number of public charities and events including the National Young Writers Festival (soon!) and the Wired Lab. He pens the odd self-serving article about how the Wire can be a metaphor for anything if you substitute the words “Chicken McNuggets” with “my idea”, and he also plays synthesizer in several bands and DJ’s badly. The last act he remixed was the Teenagers, who asked him to pull the saxophone solo out of his mix as it was “not appropriate”.

Dr Stuart Glover is a writer and editor who teaches at the University of Queensland. He was founding Director of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival and is current member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council.

Amy grew up in the Barossa Valley in South Australia where she learned to appreciate the fine skill of boozing up. She then moved onto study acting at The University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba where needless to say she honed her skills. Since graduating she has done continuous work as a performer/ director and creator with Switchboard Arts out of the Judith Wright Centre in Brisbane. She has also worked with Backbone Youth Arts on projects such as the 2high Festival. As well as being one of the new directors for the NYWF, this will also be her first year in attending where she plans to display her hard found skills obtained in the Barossa Valley to her best ability.

Daniel Evans is a writer, listener, libertine and pop aficionado.

Partial to the fantastical and absurd, Daniel has written numerous works for the stage. His familyâ??s favourite is the one about the talking avocado who wants to be magician. Daniel is mad keen about a) creating work with and for young people, b) bringing the stories of lifeâ??s Others to the fore, and c) collaboration.

To earn a crust he edits, teaches, designs and performs â?? sometimes all at once and often with no hands.

In 2008, he joins the National Young Writers Festival as co-director and could not be more stoked.

Kelly Chandler (Chair) is a Melbourne-based writer and editor currently working in communications for the not-for-profit sector. Her not-quite-non-fiction is published variously in the Death Mook, the Slow Guide, the Weekend Australian’s travel magazine, NZ Herald, The Age, Griffith REVIEW and more. A former editor and editorial advisor of Voiceworks magazine, she also spent a year as a writer, sub-editor and journalist trainer in Vanuatu at The Independent newspaper, in communications at Fred Hollows NZ in Auckland, and with the editorial team at the Big Issue. She was involved as submissions editor for the recent National Young Writers’ Festival anthology Herding Kites, and first came upon This Is Not Art in 2002 while editing Voiceworks magazine and volunteering for music publication Global Eyes.

Kelly Lee Hickey (27) is a writer and community development worker, currently living in Alice Springs, working with indigenous communities in the North Western desert of Central Australia. She has a long history of involvement with the National Young Writers’ Festival, culminating in her co-directorship of the 2007 festival. She has extensive experience in arts management, with roles including director of the 2008 Darwin Fringe festival, Chair of Red Hot Arts, editorial committee member of Voiceworks magazine and project manager and facilitator of writing and theatre groups for marginalised communities in Melbourne’s inner western and southern suburbs. Her key areas of interest are the exploration and interrogation of the white Australian identity through the arts, and the production of large scale interarts installations and events.

Originally a kiwi, Nic has spent the last five years making mischief in Melbourne. As well as co-directing the National Young Writers' Festival and writing for various Australian publications, he makes interventionist installation art for festivals around the country, runs a web/graphic design practice (DISLOCATED), is co-editor and designer of the Nomadology travel writing project and in his more lucid moments sits on the curatorial board of the Next Wave arts festival. He is also currently finishing his first novel as part of a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

link:
DISLOCATED

Ronnie Scott's writing has appeared in Torpedo, HEAT, Bookslut, and many other publications. He writes regularly for MBV, the Music Blog Voltron, and edits The Lifted Brow, a biannual attack journal from Brisbane and Melbourne.

link:
http://www.theliftedbrow.com/

Dr Sally Breen is lecturer in writing and publishing at Griffith University and has worked in the university sector in creative writing and the broader creative arts community for over ten years. She has a background in the music industry and events management having directed the multi-arts centre and nightclub The Arc on the Gold Coast in the early stages of her career. She was associate editor of the Griffith REVIEW from 2006-2008 and is a widely published fiction and non-fiction author. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications and collections including The Australian, The Age, The Courier Mail, Wet Ink, Best Stories Under the Sun, Griffith REVIEW, Travellers Tales, Media International Australia, Philament and Best Australian Stories 2007. Sally’s doctoral manuscript Ante Up was shortlisted for the Queensland Premiers Literary Awards in 2005 and her major essay on labour conditions in the Middle East ‘Field of Dreams’ appeared in Griffith REVIEW 20 Cities on the Edge. Sally also heads up the Brisbane based writers collective BURN whose major project Writing the Fringe Festival is a sister event to the annual Brisbane Writers Festival. Sally was the recipient of the Harper Collins Varuna Manuscript Development Award in 2008 for her forthcoming manuscript The Casuals.

Sonya is a girl, writer and maker-of-things. She embraces all of the girl-writer clichés including consuming copious amounts of caffeine, oversized shirts, moleskin diaries and The Beatles and has written for The International Herald Tribune in Seoul, Dazed & Confused AUS/NZ, SydneySide magazine and currently edits the Arts section of Vibewire.net.

Sheâ??s also responsible for leaving matchboxes containing tiny presents around each week, as part of her Matchbox project, in the hope that an unsuspecting strangers will find and open them.

link:
The Matchbox project