Kirk Marshall
General Manager
Kirk is a Brisbane-born writer, teacher and administrator. He worked for Oxfam Australia for seven-and-a-half years, and has taught creative writing, English and media at RMIT University. As well as holding various teaching positions in Queensland, Victoria and Tokyo, he has chaired and appeared on panels at the Emerging Writers’ Festival and the National Young Writers’ Festival, and has provided mentorship for TiNA’s Younger Young Writers’ Program. Kirk has written for more than eighty publications, both in Australia and overseas, including Award Winning Australian Writing, Island, Wet Ink and Going Down Swinging, and is the editor of Red Leaves, an English and Japanese bi-lingual literary journal. In 2017, a chapter from his hillbilly apocalypse novel secured a nomination for The Pushcart Prize.
Megan Anderson
Editor
Megan is a journalist and editor covering current events, politics, travel, lifestyle, opinion and the arts for publications such as The Saturday Paper, Al Jazeera, ArtsHub, Junkee Media (Junkee, AWOL, The Cusp), The Vocal, The Big Issue and The New Zealand Herald. She has performed creative work at Splinters, Newstead Short Story Tattoo and for The Suburban Review. Megan is currently a project manager and writer at Smudge Publishing in Melbourne.
Matt Harnett
Editor
Matt works in digital content and comes from an editorial background. He’s previously written for New Zealand and Australian magazines and websites, most recently VICE. As well as being the newest member of the GDS editorial team, Matt helps run NZ-based arts and culture website Pantograph Punch. He’s big into exploring the narrative potential of digital literature, and has previously enjoyed a bunch of comms and marketing roles.
Katia Pase
Editor
Katia is an editor, writer and producer, and has been with Going Down Swinging since 2012. She has held various editorial roles, from founding Brisbane literary collective Stilts to editing Australia’s premier graphic design magazine desktop, and she contributes words to places like the Australian Design Review, SPOOK and The Lifted Brow. Katia is currently a digital producer at Tundra Interactive in Melbourne, where she leads a team of designers and developers to help brands like Nike and organisations like Swinburne better tell their stories. Katia also gives occasional lectures for the RMIT Design Hub and Billy Blue College of Design, and she teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.
Jacqui Hagen
Digital Developer
Jacqui is a designer, editor and creative working broadly across the media landscape. Jacqui worked stints at the Wheeler Centre and Australian Poetry before joining local design studio Propeller, working closely on diverse projects involving exhibition design, publishing and service design. Jacqui shaped innovation lab The Field Institute from its inception as digital and publications coordinator, exploring technology and sustainability within the food system. Jacqui has edited a number of publications for both The Field Institute and Thames and Hudson, and is currently writing an exciting book about eating feral pests.
Geoff Lemon
Editor Mentor
Geoff arrived at GDS in 2010 after the long-serving Lisa Greenaway, from editorial roles at lit journals harvest and Voiceworks and at sports website The Roar. He has a spoken word background, including running performance night Wordplay for three years, managing its online audio archive and editing a Wordplay magazine. He’s a freelance writer and radio broadcaster for outlets including The Guardian, Wisden India and the ABC.
Elizaveta Maltseva
Special Projects Manager
Elizaveta Maltseva joins the GDS team from a visual arts and arts management background. She has been a practising artist for over ten years and has a masters in arts management from the University of Melbourne. Elizaveta recently returned to Melbourne from Edinburgh, where she is still an active member of the visual arts scene through a number of collectives and galleries. Elizaveta’s ‘day job’ is manager of a commercial photography studio and events space in Collingwood.
Rhys Tate
Associate Editor
Rhys joined GDS in 2013 after editorial stints at PAN and Verandah. He is an English and ESL teacher who focuses on game theory and the lexical approach of language learning, and a writer who has featured in The Victorian Writer and Crikey, and on ABC Radio. Much of his writing is aimed at children and young adults, but his short stories have won the Grace Marion Wilson prize and placed in other events. For the time being, Rhys lives in the country and enjoys shouting, “Hey, cow!” from his car window.
Alejandra Olavarria
Edition #38 – Editorial Team
Magenta Sheridan
Edition #38 – Editorial Team
Renata Carli
Edition #38 – Editorial Team