Author

You can find interviews here:

Kids Book Review Interview

Interview with Queensland Writer’s Centre

Interview with ReadiLearn

Interview with Ali Stegert on Spilling Ink

 

I tell stories through a mixture of media including: poetry, photographs, storytelling, song, written words and video.

Since moving to Brisbane I’ve become an active member of  the wonderful Write Links. This group focuses on writing for children and young adults.

I’m working on several picture book manuscripts, poetry collections, and chapter books inspired by nearly a decade of living in North Queensland. In 2015/6 I won an ASA mentorship to work with a mentor on one of my picture books.

I regularly share work at the Australian Children’s Poetry Blog.

Previously I’ve had over 100 articles, interviews, short memoir pieces, poems, stories, and reviews published in a diverse range of online spaces, magazines, anthologies, guest blogs, walls (by permission of course), libraries, and journals. I co-edited Under One Sky, and a collection of After Yasi stories with photographs I had taken in the wider community.  I’ve been paid to read my poetry at the Pacific Wave Festival (2002?) and Tasmanian Poetry Festival (1996).

My cultural background, is multicultural, with Indigenous PNG Mekeo background through my mother, and English Australian through my Father, and Baha’i and Tasmanian in my upbringing.  Now I would identify strongly with being a Queenslander.

Yet, mostly I would want to be considered a world citizen who honours all of her cultural connections, but is not limited or pigeonholed by them. I do connect and feel affinity with the writers of diaspora, and Pasifika background because of the similarities in some of our themes and concerns and these days. I love connecting with writers who write for children and young adults with a sensitivity to diversity, but  I also want to write to universal themes we can all connect with and treat them with a sense of the identities that have made me who I am.

I’ve had a diverse range of jobs, as writers often do and maybe should to help them find more stories about the world.  So I’ve worked as a university tutor, writing group coordinator, dramaturg, teacher aide, storyteller, youth mentor, group blogger, guest blogger, commissioned photographer, gallery attendant, cultural development officer, researcher, workshop facilitator and arts project coordinator and facilitated  community engagement projects like Ripple, The Smile Within, and women’s storytelling projects. I was a contributor to the ABC Open’s Aftermath project and that’s when I began telling lots of cyclone recovery stories.

I completed my doctorate on the Empowerment of Indigenous women through writing in 2004. That’s the short version.  The long version is that this was a massive challenge in life, done with three beautiful and active children patiently tagging along on field trips and growing up fast and crawling all over me whilst I typed it up.  On top of that their Dad was studying for his PhD as well.

Magic Fish Dreaming was successfully kickstarter funded in 2016 and published in October of that year.

In 2012 I was awarded an Australia Day senior cultural medal for services to community based on my  writing and contributions to ABC Open from the Cassowary Coastal Council and was thrice nominated for a regional service award for Queensland.  Thanks to whoever nominated me for these awards, it’s not often you find people who truly appreciate your efforts, but the Cassowary Coast artists and writers made me feel that way and I will always remember them.

I am currently tutoring creative writing students at, QUT (Queensland University of Technology.)

I am delighted to be a member of the following groups or directories.

  

You can find me at  Twitter    Facebook    Vimeo    Pinterest

I am a regular photographic contributor to Nineteen Months.

Visit my website to find out more  June Perkins