Meet the 2013 black&write! Indigenous OnScreen Trainee Editors

This week we have been honoured to have our three wonderful black&write! trainee editors for 2013 visiting Brisbane.  This is the second year of OnScreen trainee editor program which provides training in the editing of fiction manuscripts.  

This year our editors were selected from South Australia and the Northern Territory and while most of their training takes place over email and phone, the last week has been a chance to meet face to face and do  intensive training with some wonderful staff from the QUT Creative Writing Faculty.

So who are these amazing editors in training?

Marie Munkarra is of Rembarranga, Tiwi and Chinese descent and has extensive family throughout Arnhem land, the Islands of the Top End and Darwin. Born on the banks of the Mainoru River Marie Munkara spent her early years growing up on Bathurst Island. Her first Novel “Every Secret thing” won the David Unaipon Award in 2008 and the NT Book of the Year in 2010. Marie’s two children’s books “Rusty Brown” and Rusty and Jojo” will be published early next year with Laguna Bay Publishers. Her second Novel “A Most Peculiar Act” is due to be published in May 2014. Marie is currently working on another two novels and a film script. She lives in Darwin with her teenage daughter.

 Ali Cobby Eckermann is a celebrated poet and writer living in Koolunga, South Australia, where she has established an Aboriginal writer’s retreat. She identifies with the Yankunytjatjara / Kokatha people from the north-west desert country of South Australia. Ali won the ATSI Survival Poetry competition in 2006 and the Dymocks Red Earth Poetry Northern Territory Award in 2008. In 2011 Ali was one of the inaugural winners or the black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship competition with Ruby Moonlight. In 2012 she won the Deadly Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature. In 2013, Ruby Moonlight was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize and Book of the Year Award in the NSW Premier's Literary and History Awards.

Carissa Godwin

We are really excited to be working with such an incredible trio of talented women.  Just in case you were worried that the week has been all work, we did find time to go on a tour of the library and get involved in the Deadly Brothers exhibition in kuril dhaugn.