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.

Ben Jenkins is a Sydney based writer and performer. After winning the SMH Plain English Speaking Competition and the Young Playwrights Award at 17, he went on to be a Triple J Raw national finalist at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Since then he has written and performed in 3 MICF shows, edited Honi Soit, taught improvisation and sketch writing and co-wrote a play staged at the downstairs Belvoir St Theatre. Last year Ben created Story Club, a live storytellers night.

Emily is a fan of multitasking, gusto, red wine, and carrots, and is passionate about independent and fringe works. While studying a never-ending arts degree, she worked in various productions and events with artists, musos, theatre-types, writers, actors, students and general emerging folk. These include Mudfest, Melbourne University Student Events, Express Media, Emerging Writers Festival, St Kilda Film Festival, Melbourne Fringe Festival and with a number of local independent theatre companies. She has also sat on the Melbourne University Theatre Board and has helped establish a number of social enterprises. Emily dabbles in freelance writing, and is currently working in publishing for the not-for-profit sector.

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.

Caro Cooper is an editor at Text Publishing, a Melbourne-based independent publishing house. She works across fiction and non-fiction titles, both local and international. She is also a writer for Frankie magazine.

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.

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