On Loss, Grief and Healing

Lech Blaine is a writer from country Queensland. He is the author of the memoir Car Crash and the Quarterly Essay Top Blokes: The Larrikin Myth, Class and Power. Lech regularly contributes essays to The Monthly.

Amani Haydar is an award-winning artist, writer and advocate for women's health and safety based in Western Sydney. Her memoir The Mother Wound (Pan Macmillan) released 2021, explores the personal and political dimensions of abuse and inter-generational trauma and been shortlisted for the 2022 Victorian Premier's Literary Award. In 2021, Amani received the UTS Law Alumni Award and, in 2020, she was named NSW Local Woman of The Year for Bankstown in recognition of her advocacy against gender-based violence. Using visual art and writing to tell stories and activate empathy, Amani's work has been featured in several exhibitions and publications including the 2018 Archibald Prize, Sweatshop Women Volume Two, SBS Voices and ABC News Online.

Emma A. Jane — formerly published as Emma Tom — is an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney. Her research specialties are eclectic, and include sex and gender, misogyny on the internet, the future of work, and the social and ethical impacts of emerging technology. In 2021, Stanford University ranked her as being in the top 2% of researchers in the world based on citations of her academic work. Emma has presented the findings of her research to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian government's Workplace Gender Equality Agency, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, and unsuspecting Uber drivers (sorry about that). Prior to her career in academia, she spent nearly 25 years working in the print, broadcast, and electronic media, much of which was spent fielding burlesque electronic rape and death threats. Over the course of her working life, Emma has received multiple awards and prizes for her research, her teaching, her journalism, and her fiction. Diagnosis Normal is her eleventh book. On the weekends, she makes GIFs of her dogs, fools around with Excel macros, and reads books about how to read books by Wittgenstein. She was surprisednotsurprised when she was recently diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.

Sarah Holland-Batt is Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the Queensland University of Technology, and a Prime Minister's Literary Award-winning poet, writer and critic. Her most recent books are a collection of essays on contemporary Australian poetry, Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry (UQP, 2021), and her third volume of poetry, The Jaguar (UQP, 2022). She is presently the 2022 Judy Harris Writer in Residence at the University of Sydney.

Myles McGuire is a writer, editor and semi-professional conversationalist. After starting at BWF as a clown in 2022, he joined the team as Programs Coordinator in 2023. His writing has been nominated for prizes including the Queensland Premier's Young Publishers and Writers Award and the Peter Carey Short Story Award.