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CHRIS
MANSELL
Chris Mansell was born in Sydney, Australia.
She has lived in Lae, New Guinea and attended schools in New Guinea
and New South Wales, Australia. She has a Bachelor of Economics from
the University of Sydney and studied at the Playwright's Studio at
NIDA. For most of her working life she has been involved in writing,
performing, print production, editing, and in lecturing about writing.
Chris Mansell
is widely published in literary journals in Australia and overseas.
She has also given many live and recorded readings of her work.
In 1978 she founded the literary magazine Compass poetry & prose which
she edited until 1987.
Her first
small book of poems, Delta, appeared in 1978; her second
book, Head, Heart, & Stone, in 1982. While at Curtin
University as writer in residence she completed Redshift/Blueshift which
was published by Five Islands Press in 1988. The following year
saw the release of Raptors Blue, her first audio recording
with music by Rob Cousins.
Chris Mansell's
collection of poems, Shining like a Jinx, won the Amelia
Chapbook Award, USA. In 1993 she won the Queensland Premier's Award
for poetry for ‘Yarmul’ which later appeared in her Mortifications & Lies.
From 1987
until early 1989 she lectured in creative writing at the University
of Wollongong. In 1988 she attended the National Institute of Dramatic
Arts (NIDA) Playwright’s Studio. In 1989 she lectured in
creative writing at the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur.
She took a break from lecturing in 1990 when she was writer in
residence at the University of Southern
Queensland, Toowoomba, and then, after a National Book Council tour in Queensland,
she was writer in residence with Kaleidoscope Community Arts Company in Hobart,
and later with Gambit Theatre Co in Launceston, Tasmania. In 1992, she was
editor in residence at the Royal Australian Historical Society in Sydney, and
was writer in residence at the Katharine Susannah
Prichard Centre in Perth and then returned for a year to the University of
Western Sydney as lecturer.
In 1993
she took up a Writing Fellowship from the Literature Board of the
Australia Council. The following year she was awarded an Australia
Council Community Writer's Fellowship in the Shoalhaven district
of New South Wales. In 1995 she was a Community Artist with Shoalhaven
City Council and wrote, with Mad Talent Theatre Group, their new
play, Her play Some Sunny
Day written for the Australia Remembers project was commissioned and performed
in 1995.
Her collection
of poems Day Easy Sunlight Fine was published in Hot
Collation by Penguin Books in 1995 and was short-listed for
the National Book Council's Banjo Awards. In 1996 her children's
book, Little Wombat was published by New Holland. In 1997
she was writer in Residence with Flightpaths (Next Wave) in Wagga
Wagga.
Since then
she has been a mentor to nine poets within Australia under the
aegis of the Australian Society of Authors, the Northern Territory
Writers Centre and the South Coast Writers Centre.
A collection
of poems called The Fickle Brat which was published on
CD in audio + text version by Interactive Publications (Brisbane)
in 2002. She is publisher of PressPress which also issued her Stalking
the Rainbow in 2002. She was co-director of the Shoalhaven
Poetry Festival in 2002 & 2003 and 2005.
In 2005,
Kardoorair Press published Mortifications & Lies.
Kardoorair will publish her love poems shortly and Interactive
Publications will put out a new dvd of her visual poems Cafe
Sun.
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information
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