Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from southwest New South Wales. Her poetry, short stories, critique, and essays have been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Overland and the Sydney Review of Books. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative non-fiction.  Jeanine was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice (2017 & 2019. She was the 2019 recipient of the Red Room Poetry Fellowship for her project called Voicing the Unsettled Space: Rewriting the Colonial Mythscape. Jeanine teaches Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne. She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellowship for a project called ‘Aboriginal Writing: Shaping the literary and cultural history of Australia, since 1988’ (2014-2018); and a second ARC grant that looks at Indigenous Storytelling and the Archive 2020-2024). In 2020 Jeanine edited Guwayu – for all times – a collection of First Nations Poetry commissioned by Red Room Poetry and published by Magabala Books.  In 2021 she was the recipient of the School of Literature Art and Media (SLAM) Poetry Prize University of Sydney.

The Cove Park /. Varuna the National Writers’ House Residency Exchange was established in 2019 with support from The Bridge Awards. It provides opportunities for writers and former Cove Park residents to take part in the programme of Varuna, The National Writers’ House, Australia, and for writers connected to Varuna’s programme to be based at Cove Park for one-month. Former participants include the Scottish author Victoria MacKenzie, and the Australian author Roanna Gonsalves.

Image: Jeanine Leane.