Announcing the new Mascara team ….
Laura Pettenuzzo: Junior Commissioning Editor
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.
Beau Windon: First Nations Commissioning Editor
Beau Windon is a neurodivergent author of Wiradjuri heritage based in Naarm. He writes quirky stories about quirky people (including his quirky self) and poetry about all of the dark goo washing over his mind. He has been awarded a 2021 Writeability Fellowship, a 2022 residency from the City of Melbourne, and an arts grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Beau’s further creative non-fiction has had him shortlisted in three categories for the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards: winning the Self-Told Stories by Writers Living with Disability category and getting runner-up for the Indigenous Life Stories category. Recently, he was one of the winners of Griffith Review’s Emerging Voices 2023 competition. Beau has had personal essays published in Griffith Review, Island, Archer, Mascara’s Resilience Anthology, VICE, Dear Lover, and Writer’s Victoria. You can find out more about him at: www.beauwindon.com
Katie Hansord: Senior Researcher
Katie Hansord is a writer and researcher living in Naarm (Melbourne). Her book Colonial Australian Women Poets: Political Voice and Feminist Traditions (Anthem 2021) examines nineteenth century women’s poetry in the contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and their relationships to gender. Her writing has been published in ALS, Hecate, Mascara, AJVS, and JASAL, as well as Journal and the Long Paddock, Southerly Journal.
Jenny Hedley: Non-fiction
Jenny Hedley is a neurodivergent writer, PhD student and Writeability mentor whose work appears in Archer, Cordite, Crawlspace, Diagram, Mascara, Overland, Rabbit, TEXT, The Suburban Review, Verity La, Westerly, and the anthologies Admissions: Voices in Mental Health and Verge. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son. Website:
jennyhedley.github.io/
Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn: Commissioning Editor
Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn is a writer and editor living in nipaluna/Hobart. Her recent work has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, The Age, Sydney Review of Books and others. Her short stories and essays have been awarded the Ultimo Prize and Scribe Nonfiction Prize. She is the previous editor of Voiceworks youth literary journal and a current commissioning editor at Moonland, an online publishing platform that seeks to elevate voices connected to regional and remote areas of lutruwita/Tasmania. She is currently working on a novel with the support of a grant from Arts Tasmania.
Duane Leewai: Graphic Designer
Duane Leewai is a Dharug-based graphic artist, illustrator and art director. Born in Fiji he is of Indian, Chinese and iTaukei descent. Duane studied at TAFE Queensland (Southbank Campus) and graduated with certificates in Visual Arts and Animation, Printing and Graphics. He works for Sweatshop Literacy Movement.
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