Thom Conroy

Thom Conroy grew up in the woods in America and often spent too many hours by himself making up stories. From there, it wasn’t really very far to writing fiction and teaching creative writing, and that’s what he has been up to since starting at Massey in 2005.

Writing under the name Thomas Gough, Thom has been the recipient of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction as well as the People’s Choice Award and the First Runner-up in the 2009 Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition. His short fiction has been published in various journals in New Zealand and America, including Sport, Landfall, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Kenyon Review Online. His scholarly interests focus on writing fiction, craft theory, and American literature.

His undergraduate teaching is grounded in encouraging students to grow as writers and artists, not necessarily by wandering aimlessly through the forest. He teaches on 139.123 Creative Writing, and coordinates 139.105 Fiction: The Long and Short of It, 139.329 Advanced Fiction Writing and the Postgraduate Creative Writing Paper, 139.761 Writing Contemporary Fiction. He has supervised work focused on Creative Writing or the intersection of Creative Writing and Literature.

You may read his short fiction at

http://www.kenyonreview.org/kro_full.php?file=gough.php

and

http://www.bu.edu/agni/fiction/online/2008/gough.html

Angie Farrow

Angie Farrow has been writing plays for theatre and radio since she was a student in the UK. Now a citizen of New Zealand, she continues to write, direct and produce theatre works. She has managed to combine theatre with teaching through most of her career.

Angie is the author of two anthologies of plays, Plays for Physical Theatre: Three Plays for Young Adults with Notes for their Production (Dunmore Press/Thompson Learning) and Plays for Physical Theatre II: Six Plays for Young Adults with Notes for their Production (Dunmore Press). She has won several prizes for her plays including The Pen is a Mighty Sword International Playwriting Competition for Despatch, The Playwrights’ Association of New Zealand One-Act Playwriting Competition for Amnesia and an Edinburgh Fringe First Award for Privitus. This year she achieved 'Best Script' and 'Best Production' at the Singapore Short and Sweet Festival for her play Lifetime.

Angie coordinates four undergraduate papers, 139.104 Drama in Performance, 139.223 Creative Processes, 139.209 Speaking: Theory and Practice, and139.224 Making Plays for Theatre. She also coordinates a graduate paper, 139.763 Community Theatre. Angie has won several Awards for her teaching and service at Massey University. These include three University Teaching Excellence awards, a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award, and two Outstanding Contribution Awards for her services to Performing Arts.

Stuart Hoar

Stuart Hoar is an experienced playwright, screenplay writer, radio dramatist and novelist. He has been Playwright in Residence at the Mercury Theatre (1988/89) and was awarded the Bruce Mason Award for Playwrights in 1988. In 1990 he was Literary Fellow at The University of Auckland and in 1993 he was Burns Fellow at University of Otago.

Some of the works Stuart is known for are Lovelock, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry (screenplays), The Hard Light (novel), Rutherford, The Facemaker, Bright Star, Backwards in High Heels, Squatter (stage plays), Attitude, American Girl, The Big Melt (radio plays).

He was Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2000 and was the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Fellow for 2007.

Ingrid Horrocks

Ingrid Horrocks is a poet and travel writer, and teaches on Massey’s Wellington campus.

She is the author of two collections of poetry, Mapping the Distance (VUP, 2010), and Natsukashii (Pemmican Press, 1996), as well as a travel book, Travelling with Augusta, 1835 and 1999 (VUP, 2003), an innovative blend of research and personal memoir. In 2009 she edited JAAM  27, around the theme, of ‘wanderings’. A wanderer herself, she is interested in all sorts of wanderings – both literal and textual. She is currently working on a Marsden Fast-start funded scholarly project on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary wanderers.

She teaches the Wellington version of the introductory paper called 139.123 Creative Writing, a second year paper on the writing of memoir, biography, and autobiography called 139.226 Life Writing, and in 2011 will introduce a new third year paper, 139.327 Writing Creative Nonfiction. She doesn’t blog, or publish frequently, as she likes to store her work for at least a year (and sometimes ten) before presenting it to ‘the public’.

Jack Ross

‘Not all the contents are evil but the spirit of darkness certainly prevails,’ was the verdict of one reviewer on Jack’s first novel Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000). Since then he has gone on to produce two more novels, The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus Books, 2006) and E M O (Titus Books, 2008); a novella, Trouble in Mind (Titus Books, 2005); and a book of short stories, Monkey Miss Her Now (Danger Publishing, 2004). Another book of short stories, Kingdom of Alt, is due out from Titus books in September 2010.

His first love (and main focus) remains poetry, though. Jack has published three full-length books of poems: City of Strange Brunettes (Pohutukawa Press, 1998), Chantal’s Book (HeadworX, 2002), and To Terezín (Massey SSCS, 2007), as well as a growing number of chapbooks of poems and translations. You can find a full listing on his blog The Imaginary Museum, at: http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

Jack’s work as an editor includes the anthologies Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past & Present (Cape Catley, 2004) [with Graeme Lay]; Myth of the 21st Century: An Anthology of New Fiction (Reed, 2006) [with Tina Shaw]; and, with Jan Kemp, the trilogy of audio / text anthologies Classic, Contemporary & New NZ Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2006-8). He also edited three anthologies of student work from the Massey Life Writing paper.

Jack has been teaching the paper 139.123 Creative Writing on Massey’s Auckland campus since 2005, and 139.326 Travel Writing since 2007.

His research interests include modern Fantasy and Science Fiction writing, and ancient non-European fictional traditions (the 1001 Nights, the Chinese and Japanese novel, the Icelandic saga, and the Medieval and Classical Romance).

Bryan Walpert

Bryan Walpert abandoned journalism for poetry when he started writing more poetry than news stories on the job. He was silly enough once to say he would happily follow poetry to the ends of the earth, but as a man of his word he left his native US in 2004 for Palmerston North, where he set about naming his chickens after women poets, learning to strip paint, and researching heating systems (research is ongoing).

Bryan is the author of a book of poems, Etymology (Cinnamon Press) and a collection of short stories, Ephraim’s Eyes (Pewter Rose Press). His poetry, short stories or essays have appeared widely in journals in the US (e.g. AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Fiction Weekly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Tar River Poetry) as well as in New Zealand (Bravado, The Listener, Poetry NZ, Takahe) and in the UK (Envoi) and have won a number of prizes, among them the NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Competition, the Royal Society of NZ Manhire Award in Creative Science Writing, and the James Wright Poetry Award (US). His scholarly interests focus on the intersection of poetry and science.

Bryan teaches an introductory paper called 139.123 Creative Writing, a second year poetry writing paper on the ode, elegy and love poem called 139.229 Love, Loss and Looking Around and a postgraduate paper, 139.760 Writing Lyric Poetry: Blurring the Boundaries, which calls into question everything he stated so confidently in the previous two. He has supervised theses in both poetry and fiction. Bryan has been the recipient of a national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award. He blogs, though not often or well enough to generate sufficient site traffic to sell ads, at http://bryanwalpert.com