Announcing the new Mascara team ….
Laura (she/her) is a disabled writer living on Wurundjeri country. She writes Plain and Easy English content for various organisations and has been published by The Big Issue, ABC Everyday, The Age and SBS Voices. Laura is also a member of the Victorian Disability Advisory Council.
लेश करण Lesh Karan: Poetry Editor
लेश करण (Lesh Karan) is a Naarm/Melbourne-based poet and essayist. Recent publications include Admissions, a Red Room Poetry anthology, Best of Australian Poems 2022, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Island, Mascara Literary Review and Rabbit, amongst others. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and is currently completing a Master of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. Lesh is of Fiji Indian heritage.
Monique Nair: Marketing Manager
Monique Nair is a Melbourne/Naarm based writer of Indian-Italian-Polish heritage. She was a participant of the West Writers program with Footscray Community Arts and is a screenwriter for an upcoming anthology feature, My Melbourne, produced by Mind Blowing Films and supported by VicScreen and Screen Australia. She has performed her work at Emerging Writers’ Festival and other events and her writing is published in Peril, Voiceworks, Kill Your Darlings and The Indian Weekly.
Carielyn Tunion: Multimedia
Carielyn is a multimedia artist, content producer & cultural worker, working from a decolonial perspective to promote the social & holistic wellbeing of marginalised peoples & communities. Drawing on her background in video and screen production, Carielyn uses videopoetry to explore the impacts of colonialism, intergenerational trauma and recovery. She also dabbles in writing, illustration, pin-making and works as a professional arts model. Carielyn occupies space as an immigrant-settler woman of colour in the matrix of coloniality – and identifies as a Tagalog daughter of the archipelago beyond the gender binary. She currently lives on unceded Darkinjung country.
Michelle Cahill: Artistic Director
Michelle Cahill (she/they) is of Goan Anglo-Indian heritage living on unceded Guringai lands. An award-winning novelist and poet, their collection Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo) won the UTS Glenda Adams Award and was shortlisted in the Steele Rudd Award. Cahill was awarded a Red Room Poetry Fellowship and was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the ABR Peter Porter Prize and the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize. Daisy & Woolf is published with Hachette. Cahill’s essays have appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, The Weekend Australian and Wasafari