The Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne is situated on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people & we acknowledge and respect their continuing connection with Country.

This year’s conference is on the theme of Movement & Stasis and our program of academic keynotes, plenaries, papers, panels and allied events reflects consideration of movement & stasis, including notions of physical, social, political, communal or artistic movement, but also arrivals, departures, walking on country, transformation, mobility and change. Placing movement alongside stasis, conference attendees will consider the two themes in relation: ambiguities, contradictions, tensions, as well as productive entanglements enabled by both/and thinking. The theme of stasis spans periods of inactivity or equilibrium through to stoppages and civil strife.  Stasis might also mean slowing down; it might mean stability.

Our conference program engages these themes in a manner relevant to the creative writing discipline, creative and professional writing practices and processes, research in creative writing, the teaching of writing and related issues.

Keynote speaker:  Associate Professor Janelle Adsit

Janelle Adsit is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, USA. Her research interests include the role of the arts in health, wellbeing, and advocacy.  Her most recent publication is Writing and Health Care: Creative and Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). She is editor of Critical Creative Writing: Essential Readings on the Writer’s Craft (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and author of Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) as well as Writing Intersectional Identities: Keywords for Creative Writers (co-authored with Renée Byrd, Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). Recent scholarly book chapters include “Educating the Faculty Writer to ‘Dance with Resistance’” (co-authored with Sue Doe, in The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program, edited by Courtney Adams Wooten et al., Utah State University Press, 2020) and “Pursuing Antiracist and Anticolonial Approaches to Contemplative Practices” (in Contemplative Practices and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogies for Higher Education, edited by Greta Gaard and Bengü Ergüner-Tekinalp, Routledge, 2022). Janelle’s poetry collection, Unremitting Entrance (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016) is a meditation on grief in relation to place and environment. She has been a member of the TEXT Advisory Board since 2023.

Enquiries

Please send your enquiries to AAWP-conference2025@unimelb.edu.au including any support requirements in order to participate fully.

For more information please visit the 2025 AAWP Conference webpage.