Hi! I’m Dr. Karen Lowry and a I’m a speculative fiction writer and poet currently working on my first two books. My upcoming poetry collection will explore trauma and memory, focusing on childhood sexual abuse. I’m also researching the impact of govermentality on representations of female protagonists in speculative fiction. My own novel explores female identity in the highly politicised spaces of the speculative fiction novel. I currently work as a sessional academic at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where I teach creative writing. While I live in Australia, I am a New Zealand citizen and am a member of Ngai Tahu (a South Island Maori tribe).
I’ve got a lot of experience in the writing industry, having presented my work at conferences and festivals around the world, including The Great Writing Conference in London, the Electronic Literature Organisation Conference in Orlando and Coimbra, The Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival in Western Australia, and the National Young Writers Festival in Newcastle NSW. I’m very passionate about the arts industry in Australia, having spent over 11 years managing festivals and events. These include the 2012 and 2013 Perth Poetry Festival for WA Poets Inc, and the Literary Youth Festival for Propel Youth Arts.
Publications
I’ve been published extensively, with my latest poem appearing in The Hunters Writer’s Centre’s Grieve Volume 10 and a recent short story appearing in Growing up in Country Australia by Black Inc. I also have a flash fiction story, a scene from my first novel, published in the inaugural edition of Writing WA’s the little journal. My non-fiction articles and reviews have been published in The Digital Review, The Guardian, Fringefeed , ArtsHub, X-Press Magazine, and The Conversation. Other creative work has also appeared in numerous literary journals, including Australian Poetry Journal, dotdotdash and WRIT Poetry Review. I was highly commended in the earlier 2013 Poetry d’Amour Love Poetry Competition for “Hinge”.
In 2017 I was approached by author David Thomas Henry Wright, to collaborate and create a digital interface for his novella Paige & Powe. Our work went on to be shortlisted for the 2017 Queensland Literary Awards. In 2022/2023 I was part of a team headed by David Thomas Henry Wright that was awarded an Australia Council of the Arts grant to Develop a digital literary adaption of Wright’s A Condensed History of Australian Camels. This involved collaborating with Louis Pratt and Chris Arnold as well as Wright. This work went on to be shortlisted for the 2023 New Media Writing Prize. A workshop on this process was also presented at the Electronic Literature Conference in Coimbra in 2023.
Training and Education
I have a PhD in electronic literature from Curtin University where I was recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award and Curtin Research Scholarship. As a top 20 finalist for AMP’s Bright Sparks Competition, I also received training on financing research and public speaking. As well as my PhD, I also hold a Postgraduate Certificate in Marketing and have twelve years experience as a freelance writer and journalist, eight years experience in UX design and front-end web development, and four years experience in film and motion graphics.
