ProfessorCassandra Atherton

Cassandra Atherton is an award winning scholar, poet and critic, and the leading international expert on prose poetry. She is also renowned for her work in the scholarly field of ekphrastic poetry and is celebrated for coining the terms dark poetry—for poetry that attempts to reanimate a dark event, and ballophrasis—for works based on dance. Cassandra was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University (2016) sponsored by Professor Stephen Greenblatt and a Visiting Fellow in Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo in 2014. She is an affiliate of the Monash Japanese Studies Centre. She has published thirty critical and creative books and has been invited to edit special editions of leading refereed journals. She has been awarded the Sanlane prize, a Blanc literary award, a Melbourne University award, the University of California Mary Schroeder award for best article and has been a successful recipient of national and international research grants and teaching awards including, most recently a Creative Victoria grant and an Australia Council Grant to work on prose poetry and the atomic sublime. She is a sought after interviewer after her widely publicized interviews with American intellectuals such as Harold Bloom, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Greenblatt, Camille Paglia and Howard Zinn. Cassandra received the Vice-Chancellor's Award for University Teacher of the Year and is currently Associate Dean, Research in the Faculty of Arts and Education. See www.cassandra-atherton.com for more information.

Cassandra's prose poetry has been widely anthologized both nationally and internationally in publications such as Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.) and Strange Cargo: Five Australian Poets (Smith|Doorstop, UK) and has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese. She is a commissioning editor for Westerly magazine, series editor at Spineless Wonders and she has her own imprint,  Farflug, at MadHat Press in the USA.