Poetry Editor
Aidan Coleman is a Senior Lecturer at Southern Cross University. He has published three collections of poetry, Avenues & Runways (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005), Asymmetry (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2012), and Mount Sumptuous (Wakefield, 2020), and has been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Award, the John Bray Poetry Award and the WA Premier’s Book Awards. His research interests include Shakespeare, Australian Literature, 20th and 21st Century poetry and ecocriticism. He reviews regularly for various publications and is writing Thin Ice: A Life of John Forbes, which is to be released by Melbourne University Publishing in 2024.
Poetry Submission Guidelines
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Please send 1-3 poems in a single document (.doc or .docx) with a 1-2 sentence biography to [email protected].
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Your poems should be in a sans serif font (e.g. Arial, Calibri, Helvetica…) with 1.15 or 1.5 spacing and a fresh page for each new poem.
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We particularly want to see poems of 20 lines or shorter but will consider longer work.
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There is no payment but contributors will receive a PDF copy of the issue in which their work appears.
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We will attempt to respond to submissions within 30 days. Please refrain from emailing until the end of that period.
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Please be aware that we can only publish a fraction of the work we receive.
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If your work is accepted please wait one year before submitting again. If your work is not accepted, please wait four months before submitting again.
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Before you submit your work, consider reading the poetry in a recent issue of Social Alternatives and work in prominent Australian literary journals (ABR, Island, Meanjin, Overland, Rabbit, Westerly etc.). Wide and deep reading is crucial to good writing.
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We will endeavour to give feedback where possible, if the contributor indicates they would like this.
Short Story Editor
Dr Thu Hoang is a Vietnamese-Australian writer and specialist Mathematics and Physics teacher, having graduated from the University of New South Wales with Honours in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1995. Thu won a national writing competition in Vietnam as a student and published a collection of short stories titled Người Đi Tìm Bóng Tối (The Seeker of Darkness) in Hanoi in 2006. She has over 60 individually published works in Vietnamese, mostly short stories with some poetry and essays, appearing in anthologies and literary journals in Australia and overseas; some of Thu’s work has been used as teaching examples in contemporary Creative Writing in Vietnam.
Thu qualified for an M.A in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide in 2012 and completed her PhD at the same university in 2017 with a novel titled “Embers of Time”, a magical realist story inspired by a Vietnamese fable. The novel reimagines the seismic rupture of Vietnam’s 4,000 years of cultural heritage following the French occupation of Vietnam in the 19th century. Thu has been interviewed by SBS Radio for her contributions to Vietnamese literature and excerpts from some of her works have been featured in two programmes titled Hoang Ngoc Thu and the Magical Realism and Hoang Ngoc Thu on the Wing of Imagination.
Growing up in Vietnam in the post-Vietnam War years, Thu’s family has lived experience of political oppression; her father and older brothers were among the earliest boat people to arrive in Australia. With over three decades as an immigrant, Thu has a passionate interest in social and political injustice of all kinds and in the value of intercultural experiences.
Dr Thu Hoange: [email protected]
An example of a short story that has been published by the Social Alternatives: “Beautiful Husband” by Nike Sulway.
Book Review Editor
If you find that the book concerns work which might compromise your objectivity, please let us know immediately. In such a case, we would appreciate any suggestion you can make for a suitable reviewer who has no connection with the study or the authors.