Australasian Association of Writing Programs’ 30th Annual Conference
Movement and stasis
Hosted by the University of Melbourne, the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) 2025 conference will be held at the Parkville campus, situated on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people. The Wurundjeri People take their name from the Woiwurrung language word ‘wurun’ meaning the Manna Gum (Eucalyptus viminalis) which is common along ‘Birrarung’ (Yarra River), and ‘djeri‘, the grub which is found in or near the tree (1). Wurundjeri have lived on this land for millennia, and we respectfully acknowledge their continuous connection to the site of this beautiful campus, a short walk from central Melbourne.
Our conference brings together academics, graduate researchers, authors and independent scholars active in the field of creative writing studies for three days of scholarly and creative exchange.
The theme of this year’s conference is movement and stasis. Movement might conjure notions of physical, social, political, communal or artistic movement, but can also suggest arrivals, departures, walking on country, transformation, mobility and change. Placing movement alongside stasis, we have invited conference presenters to consider the two themes in relation: including ambiguities, contradictions, tensions, as well as entanglements of production and thought enabled by both. The theme of stasis might draw to mind a period of inactivity or equilibrium, a stoppage, a cessation, a form of civil strife. Stasis might mean slowing down; it might mean stability.
Conference Program
We’re excited to share our three-day conference program, which includes two extraordinary keynotes, a plenary session to celebrate the AAWP’s 30th birthday, and more than 150 discrete presentations from scholars, researchers and creative writing practitioners from around Australia and the world.
Conference Program for Wednesday 3 December
Conference Program for Thursday 4 December
Conference Program for Friday 5 December
Follow the links above for detailed program and venue information, including a full list of speakers, abstracts and presenter bios.
Scroll down the page for more information about our keynote speakers and pre-conference events.
Keynote speaker: Professor Sandra Phillips
Wakka Wakka and Gooreng Gooreng woman, Professor Sandra Phillips is Associate Dean Indigenous in the Faculty of Arts Office of the Dean and holds an ongoing professorship in Publishing and Communications in the Faculty’s School of Culture and Communication. After a long career in publishing and cultural leadership, Sandra’s completion of a PhD while raising three sons as a sole parent established her full-time career in academia. Sandra is Chief Investigator on two ARC Linkage-funded research projects, Community Publishing in Regional Australia (2023-2025) and Reading Climate – Indigenous literature, school English, and Sustainability (2025-2028) and CI on Casting the Net for What Matters: The ALIVE National Consortium for Equitable WellBeing and Mental Health Systems Transformation (2025-2030) funded by the NHMRC Medical Research Future Fund. Sandra’s peer-reviewed scholarship includes 2025 titles co-authored through these industry-engaged projects such as: ‘The Significance of Place: Insights from Community Publishing in Regional Australia’; ‘Reading beyond extraction?: More-than-Human Regions in Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby’; and ‘Reading climate: subject English beyond the colonial’. A strong leader, Sandra also brings vision and courage to systemic change and she is currently preparing a manuscript for her first sole-authored book with the working title, ‘Seeing Clearly: Six Decades of Publishing Indigenous Literature 1964-2024’.
Photograph credit for Sandra Phillips image: David Hannah.
Keynote speaker: Associate Professor Janelle Adsit
Janelle Adsit is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, USA. Her research interests include the role of the arts in health, wellbeing, and advocacy. Her most recent publication is Writing and Health Care: Creative and Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). She is editor of Critical Creative Writing: Essential Readings on the Writer's Craft (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and author of Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) as well as Writing Intersectional Identities: Keywords for Creative Writers (co-authored with Renée Byrd, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Recent scholarly book chapters include “Educating the Faculty Writer to ‘Dance with Resistance’” (co-authored with Sue Doe, in The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program, edited by Courtney Adams Wooten et al., Utah State University Press, 2020) and “Pursuing Antiracist and Anticolonial Approaches to Contemplative Practices” (in Contemplative Practices and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogies for Higher Education, edited by Greta Gaard and Bengü Ergüner-Tekinalp, Routledge, 2022). Janelle’s poetry collection, Unremitting Entrance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016) is a meditation on grief in relation to place and environment. She has been a member of the TEXT Advisory Board since 2023.
Registration
Registration fees*
- Registration for Graduate Researcher and Early Career Researcher Professional Development Day (Fully Online), Free (bookings essential here)
- Early bird ticket, 3 days, Full time salaried delegates (until 1 October) $425
- Early bird ticket, 3 days, Concession** (until 1 October) $225
- General admission 3 days, Full time salaried delegates $450
- General admission, 3 days, Concession* $250
- One day only, Full time salaried delegates $150
- One day only, Concession* $85
- Conference dinner (optional) $65
- Registration for First Nations participants, Free (bookings essential)
- Registration for the welcome drinks and book launches, Free for conference delegates (bookings essential); $6.50 pp for non-conference delegates*All conference tickets attract a 2% booking fee
*All conference tickets attract a 2% booking fee
**Concession rates apply to graduate researchers, full time students, sessional academics, part-time workers, casual workers and the unwaged.
Registrations for all events closes Tuesday 25 November 2025
Pre-conference events
Graduate Researcher and Early Career Researcher Professional Development Day: Tuesday 2 December (Online)
A discrete, fully online professional development program for Graduate Research (GR) candidates and Early-Career-Researcher (ECR) colleagues will run from 10am-4pm on Tuesday 2 December. Sessions include: how to manage isolation and maintain well-being during research work, how to navigate the academy from diverse identity positions, including queer/trans/disabled and neurodiverse subjecthood, and ways to publish in non-traditional outlets. The day will finish with a session on collaboration and finding joy.
Speakers include Katherine Firth, author of Writing Well and Being Well for Your PhD and Beyond (Routledge, 2023); Jo Case, deputy editor of Books & Ideas at The Conversation; Quinn Eades, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne, and Natalie Kon-Yu, author of The Cost of Labour (Affirm Press, 2022).
To register, go to AAWP Graduate Researcher (GR) & Early Career Researcher (ECR) Day 2025.
Creative Writing Workshops: Tuesday 2 December (On-site)
Three creative writing workshops are open to conference delegates who choose to arrive in Melbourne early. All three will run on-site and in-person on the Parkville campus on the afternoon prior to the main conference program. Book early to avoid disappointment. Fees are additional to conference registration fees.
Workshop 1 – Tony Birch
Walking and writing Carlton: moving through place
2-5pm Tuesday 2 December, Parkville campus, University of Melbourne
Tickets: $55
How do we breathe life into the settings of our work so that they might move, and be moved by, those who interact with them?
In this workshop, Professor Tony Birch takes participants on a walking and writing tour of Carlton, a place that grounds much of his life and work. As we walk the streets surrounding the University, Tony will share his own anecdotes and historical insights. Participants will have the time to stop and write from a series of prompts during the tour, considering how these layers of experience and perception might be translated to the page.
Bring a notebook and pen.
About Tony Birch
Tony Birch is the author of four novels: Women & Children, which won the 2024 The Age Fiction Book of the Year; The White Girl, winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing, and shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award; Ghost River, winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2012. He has also published two poetry books and four short story collections. Tony Birch is an activist, historian and essayist, and is currently the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne.
Workshop 2 – Nicola Redhouse
The Draft as the Dream: using ‘reverie' to develop your writing
2-5pm Tuesday 2 December, Parkville campus, University of Melbourne
Tickets: $55
How might we read our own developing draft work in a way that opens it up to what we might not yet have seen or noticed in it? And what might we do with what we now see?
In this workshop, Nicola Redhouse will help you read your draft material in a state of 'receptive observation' that draws on the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion's practice of 'reverie'. In doing so, you will become open to noticing what runs through the work affectively and emotionally: the way the word sounds make you feel, the associations you make to what is written, the repetitions and metaphors that leap out at you, where you feel bored or excited. The patterns and connections that arise from reading in this way might reveal something like what Vivian Gornick calls the ‘story’ (‘the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say,’ rather than the plot. The Situation and the Story, 2002) and can be used as a tool to draw the work in new or further directions.
Come to the workshop with some draft writing.
About Nicola Redhouse
Dr Nicola Redhouse is Lecturer in Publishing and Editing at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD in Creative Writing (RMIT) focused on the psychoanalytic clinical technique of Wilfred Bion known as 'reverie', and its potential use to creative writers. Her nonfiction book Unlike the Heart: a memoir of brain and mind (UQP, 2019) explores the field of psychoanalysis and its emerging intersections with neuroscience, via her personal story. Her journalism, essays, short fiction and poetry have appeared in The Conversation, Griffith Review, The Monthly and The Age. She has worked as a book editor for a wide range of Australian publishers.
Workshop 3 – Andy Jackson
Interrupted Poetry: Writing through Crisis, Precarity and Mutual Continuity with the Breathing-Space of the Line-Break
2-5pm Tuesday 2 December, Parkville campus, University of Melbourne
Tickets: $55
What can poetry do in these times of cacophanous crisis? In this workshop, we'll explore the spaciousness of the line-break and the page, the affirmative quiet of the caesura, and the many ways in which other lives can enter our poetry, through response, collaboration and solidarity. We'll read poems together, breathe into them, and we'll write new poems alongside each other.
Bring your preferred writing materials, and one favourite poetic quote.
About Andy Jackson
Dr Andy Jackson’s debut collection of poems, Among the Regulars (2010), was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. The thin bridge (2013) won the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. Music Our Bodies Can't Hold (2017) was shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award. His most recent book Human Looking (2021) won the 2022 ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. Andy's PhD thesis "Disabling Poetics: Bodily Otherness & the Saying of Poetry" was awarded a Doctoral Research Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement from the University of Adelaide. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.
Information for presenters & delegates
The 2025 conference is designed to run as an on-site conference: all presenters must attend and present in person.
Selected keynote and plenary sessions will be live-streamed and open to the public (book here if you’d like to join the keynote and plenary events online.)
Only current AAWP members are eligible to present. Presenters, please make sure your membership is up to date. You can find membership details, prices, and online sign-up options here.
Free registration is offered to First Nations delegates (however booking is essential via our Humanitix site).
Quiet spaces: we will be providing a neuroinclusive conference environment through the provision of quiet spaces that will be available throughout our time together.
If you require an Auslan interpreter or have other accessibility needs, please let us know.
We are committed to sustainable conference practices, such as vegetarian catering, eradication of printed material, and deliberate regionalisation.
Conference convenors will host a special welcome event (including book launches) on campus on the evening of Wednsday 3 December. This event is free for conference delegates but bookings are essential for catering purposes.
Getting Here
The University of Melbourne's Parkville campus is only a few minutes from the centre of Melbourne and has many public transport stops within walking distance.
You can enter your current location and travel destination into the Public Transport Victoria Journey Planner for personalised instructions for tram, train and bus connections fortravelling to any University of Melbourne campus.
Our main conference venue is the Arts West (North Wing) Building (148A). You can find a map of the Parkville campus, and our venue here.
Where to stay
The University of Melbourne is located close to the Melbourne CBD. A full range of hotels are within walking distance of campus venues, or just a short tram ride away. You may prefer to use your favourite accommodation booking app to find a place to stay: here are a few places we recommend.
Hotels offering discounts to conference delegates
The following hotels have offered discounted accommodation especially for AAWP Conference attendees. Please mention our conference when you book on or around our conference dates of 3-5 December 2025.
Veriu Queen Victoria Market (Melbourne CBD)
Set in the heart of the iconic Queen Victoria Market, Veriu is conveniently located to Melbourne’s vibrant shopping precinct and only short tram ride away from the university. Registered conference attendees are eligible for a 15% discount on best available rates at the Veriu. Please contact the hotel directly to book and mention the AAWP Conference to claim your discount.’
The Best Western Plus Travel Inn (Carlton)
Located in Carlton just a short walk from the university, The Best Western offers comfort, great service and easy access to the cafes, book shops and cinemas of Lygon Street. Registered conference attendees are eligible for a 15% discount on the best available rates at the Best Western. Please click here, select access corporate code and enter AAWP
Budget accommodation
University College Accommodation at the University of Melbourne
One of the university’s colleges, International University College is offering discounts for AAWP Conference delegates. Accommodation with this discount is available between Dec 3 to Dec 10, 2025. Book through UniversityRooms Use code: AAWP2025.
Please note Check in is strictly between 2:00 pm and 9:00 pm.
Check out is strictly before 10:00 am. The room rates include breakfast only. Lunch and dinner tokens can be purchased from reception during business hours.