Cassandra Atherton | |
|---|---|
Atherton in Tokyo, 2016 | |
| Born | Rose Park, Adelaide |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Education | University of Melbourne |
| Known for | Prose poetry Public intellectuals |
Cassandra Atherton is an Australian prose-poet, critic, and scholar. She is an expert on prose poetry, contemporary public intellectuals in academia, and poets as public intellectuals, especially hibakusha poets. [1] She is married to historian Glenn Moore.
Atherton completed her Bachelor of Arts (Honours in English and History), Master of Arts, Graduate Diploma of Education, and PhD at The University of Melbourne. She was supervised by Australian poet, Chris Wallace-Crabbe.
She was Harvard Visiting Scholar in English in 2015–16, sponsored by Stephen Greenblatt, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University, Tokyo, in 2014, and an affiliate of the Japan Studies Centre at Monash University from 2015. [1] She was an editorial advisor for Australian Book Review in 2012–15 and is currently Poetry Editor of Westerly Magazine. [2]
Her prose-poetry has been widely anthologised in publications such as The Best Australian Poems (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017), the Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (2016), the International Prose Poetry Project's anthologies Seams (2015), Pulse (2016) and Tract (2017) and Strange Cargo: Five Australian Poets published by Smith/Doorstop in the UK. [3] Her prose poetry has been published in international journals, including New Orleans Review , [4] Stoneboat Literary Journal, Wisconsin, Stride Magazine, United Kingdom, and Scrivener Creative Review, Montreal. [5] Readings of her poetry are collected on Penn Sound. [6]
Atherton was a judge of the Australian Book Review's Elizabeth Jolley Short Story awarding 2014; the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards: Prize for Poetry in 2015 and 2016, [7] the joanne burns microlit award in 2016 and 2017, and Melbourne's Lord Mayor's Poetry Prize in 2016 and 2017[ citation needed ]. [8]
She has been awarded many grants and prizes, including a VicArts Grant (2016), [9] an Australia Council Grant (2017), [10] and Australian-Korean Foundation Grant (2016) [11] [with Jessica L. Wilkinson and Dan Disney] and the Felix Meyer Fellowship. [12] She received the University of California, Davis Mary Schroeder Award for her interview with Howard Zinn, [12] the non-fiction Sanlane prize (United States) for In So Many Words and a Blanc Literary Prize (United Kingdom) for The Man Jar. [13]
She is currently an Associate Professor [14] in Writing and Literature at Deakin University where she received the Vice-Chancellor's Award for University Teacher of the Year. She is currently Head of Honours and Masters of Arts in Writing and Literature there. [15]
In 2017, Cassandra and Paul Hetherington signed an advance contract with Princeton University Press to write a book on prose poetry. [16]
William Carlos Williams was a genius. And he has my lover’s initials. Or rather my lover has his initials. I often eat the plums that were in the fridge. But I don’t expect to be forgiven. Not everything depends upon that. Or the wheelbarrow of promises that still lies at the bottom of his heart.
Cassandra Atherton, 2015. Plum(b). [17]
Atherton's prose poetry explores the reanimation of canonical texts against a backdrop of popular culture references. [18] She appeals to humour noir and the politicisation of the poet's private spaces. [19] Geoff Page writes: "Though many of the poems are anecdotal they also advance by sound associations and other aleatory devices. They tend to be seriously playful with a bent towards the satirical, even the self-mocking." [20]
Atherton is praised for her prose poetry, and is likened to masters of the form. Michael Farrell writes: "Cassandra Atherton’s nervy style is distinct from an earlier generation of prose poets (Joanne Burns, Gary Catalano, Ania Walwicz); it feels both post-punk and post-John Forbes." [21] While others, such as Chloe Wilson, have praised her for exploring the fundamental question of any poet: "They are works in which the speaker, moving back and forth between text and experience, continually asks an unanswerable question: 'How do I write the space between my heart and my pen?'" [22] While Atherton's prose poetry is informed by previous poets and investigates the anxiety of the artist, Ivy Ireland has observed dark humour in her collection of prose poetry, Exhumed: "Dazzling, vibrant and terribly witty, ... Exhumed does not give itself over entirely to the horribly serious, gruesome images invoked by its title." [23] Australian writer Kerryn Goldsworthy notes in a critique of Atherton's Trace (2015) that "The dense, intense prose is often funny, and incorporates all kinds of cultural allusions." [24]
"It seems that for Atherton experience can excavate uncanny resonances; for this writer-as-reader, the canon perhaps acts as a repository of thematic models, patterns, and ideals as if a searchable archive reconstituted in this book in a mode Majorie Perloff terms elsewhere (and in other contexts) as récriture. If these texts are indeed expressions of desire, as [Lisa] Gorton asserts, then here is a poet ventriloquizing a pantheon of archetypes in order to extend fragmentarily and formally into narrative, her catharses presented as participatory and multi-vocal prose-like inventions".
Dan Disney, Antipodes, vol. 30, issue. 1, June 2016, pp. 236-7.
Atherton most often collaborates with artist and writer Phil Day and scholar and poet, Paul Hetherington. She is currently engaged in collaborating on Sketch Notes 4 and 5 with Day and a series of artist's books with both Hetherington and Day.
She was awarded a VicArts Grant (2016) [25] to collaborate on writing a prose poetry graphic novel with Day and scholar/poet Alyson Miller, titled Pika-don.
Stephanie Bolster is a Canadian poet and professor of creative writing at Concordia University, Montreal.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.
David McCooey, poet, critic, musician, and academic. He moved to Perth, Western Australia, with his family in 1970. He studied at University of Western Australia (1985-1988), and completed his doctorate at Sydney University (1990-1993).
Alvin Pang was named 2005 Young Artist of the Year (Literature) by the National Arts Council Singapore. He holds a First Class Honours degree in English literature from the University of York and an Honorary Fellowship in Writing from the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (2002). In 2020, he was awarded a PhD in Writing from RMIT University, and appointed to the honorary position of Adjunct Professor of RMIT University in 2021. For his contributions, he was conferred the Singapore Youth Award in 2007, and the JCCI Foundation Education Award in 2008. He is listed in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English.
Anna Couani is a contemporary Australian poet and visual artist.
Sarah Holland-Batt is a contemporary Australian poet, critic, and academic.
Gary Catalano was an Australian poet and art critic.
Michael Crane is an Australian poet, writer and compere of poetry events in Melbourne.
Felicity Plunkett is an Australian poet, literary critic, editor and academic.
Michael Brennan is an Australian poet. He is editor of the Australian sector of Poetry International Web and is the co-founder of publisher Vagabond Press.
Maria Takolander, born in Melbourne in 1973, is an Australian writer of Finnish heritage.
Ivy Alvarez is a New Zealand-based Filipina Australian poet, editor, and reviewer. Alvarez has had her work featured in various publications in Australia, Canada, England, the Philippines, New Zealand, Ireland, Russia, Scotland, Wales, the US, South Africa, and online.
Eileen Chong is an Australian contemporary poet.
Paul Kane is an American poet, critic and scholar. Awards for his work include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, a Fulbright Award, and an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University in Australia. He is also considered an Australian poet. Kane teaches at Vassar College and lives in Warwick, New York.
Paul Hetherington is an Australian poet and academic, who also worked for 19 years at the National Library of Australia. He is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra where he heads the university's International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) which he co-founded. He is an editor of the international journal Axon: Creative Explorations and co-founder of the International Prose Poetry Project.
David Michael Lowe is an Australian biographer and historian of modern international affairs, and of Australia's role therein, especially with reference to Asia and the Pacific.
Stuart Barnes is an Australian poet.
Lisa Gorton is an Australian poet, novelist, literary editor and essayist. She is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, Hotel Hyperion, and Empirical. Her novel The Life of Houses, received the NSW Premier's People's Choice Award for Fiction, and the Prime Minister's Award for Fiction (shared). Gorton is also the editor of Black Inc's anthology Best Australian Poems 2013.
Anne Frances Elvey is an Australian academic, editor, researcher and poet.
Megan Joan Fleming, is an Australian/New Zealand poet, non-fiction writer and academic.
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