2009 Launch

PROFILE: Fran Gresley

Fran has worked for Disability Services Commission Accommodation Services for 16 years, initially in direct care.  Her substantive position is Local Area Manager for Area 8, based in Accommodation South.  She has also taken on the roles of Acting Manager Accommodation Services for South and more recently North.

In her various roles she has been involved in many community arts projects, including Cockburn Connections, Artists by the River and “Adopt-A-Stop”  in partnership with City of Melville and the Lost Generations Project in the Southern Corridor in partnership with DADAA (WA).  In 2006 she was the recipient of a Ray Young Scholarship, which allowed her to travel to New Zealand to explore various creative spaces and other community based projects that are coordinated through Arts Access Aetaeroa for people with intellectual disability and mental health issues.

PROFILE: Liana Joy Christensen

Liana is a Fremantle-based writer, who has contributed to Creative Connections since its inception, because she believes deeply in the philosophy and vision of this inclusive project. Not to mention recognising it as a fabulous opportunity for creative inspiration.  As well as writing and publishing poetry and prose she teaches at two universities.   This keeps her very busy, but she loves it all.  Any spare time is filled with her favourite activities:  reading, dancing, camping and sleeping! 

Her work appears in anthologies and literary journals in Australia (Southerly, Indigo, Arena, PAN, The Word is Out, Creatrix, Thirst), North America (Ascent, Organisation and the Environment: Arts and the Environment), India (Prosopisia) and Taiwan (The Tamkang Review). She was the original editor of Western Australia’s wildlife and nature magazine Landscope, and explores these themes in some of her poetry. She was an invited poet at Perdu, the national poetry venue in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in June 2006. She was also guest poet at the second International Animals and Society Conference held in Hobart in June 2007. Her first chapbook Wild Familiars was launched at the Spring Poetry Festival in Perth in September 2006. It was awarded one of five Honourable Mentions in the Writers Digest International Self Published book awards (from a field of 138). Wild Familiars was reviewed in PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 4, 2007. She has recently won a 2010 Emerging Writers residency for the Fellowship of Writers Western Australia and the Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre, and a Different Voices residency at Varuna in October 2009.

PROFILE: Dr Glen Phillips

Born in Western Australia in 1936, in the remote gold-mining town of Southern Cross, Glen Phillips was brought up mainly in outback wheatbelt areas where he developed not only a strong identification with the Australian landscape but an early love of Australian literature. He has been teaching in the tertiary sector in Australia and overseas for nearly fifty years.

Glen’s poetry has won prizes and appeared in more than 50 American, British, Italian, Thai, Singaporean, Chinese, Korean, Indian and Australian journals and/or anthologies.  His poetry collections include Intersections, (Perth, 1972), Umbria-Australia, Green and Gold, (Perugia, Italy, 1986, with Walter Cerquetti), Poetry in Motion (Perth, 1988 with three other WA poets who had formed in 1985 the well-known "Poetry in Motion" performance group), Sacrificing the Leaves (Bangkok, 1988), Lovesongs, Lovescenes (Perth, 1991), Spring Burning (Perth, 1999) Singing Granites (Salcombe, UK, 2008, with Anne Born) and Shanghai Suite (Perth, 2009).  The Moon Belongs to No One (Salt Publishing, 2009) is in press currently. His poetry has been featured on national radio and television. Glen’s short stories also have been published in Australia and overseas. He is working on several novels and other projects. He has joint-edited anthologies of poetry, prose and essays of Western Australian authors and judged many literary competitions for writers’ organizations and universities.

Glen is a West Australian writer and is an adjunct Associate Professor of English at Edith Cowan University, Perth and Director of the University’s International Centre for Landscape and Language.