Sydney-based creative producer, writer and curator working across literature, storytelling and Jewish cultural programming. Her work creates intimate artistic encounters through live events, performance and conversation. Her poetry was recognised in the Shalom Collective Australian Jewish Writers Awards in 2025.

Naomi has been performing spoken-word poetry since 2018 and has entertained at open mic nights from Bondi to Bankstown and beyond.

She loves entertaining Jewish audiences the most because they know what gefilte fish is!

Marcelle Freiman writes in Sydney on the custodial lands of the Gadigal and Birrabirragal people. Her fourth book Dislocations, a verse memoir of her family’s history during the apartheid years in South Africa, will be out in September 2026 with Puncher & Wattmann. Her first book of poetry, Monkey’s Wedding was published by Island Press Co-op, the second White Lines (Vertical) by Hybrid Publishers, and her most recent collection Spirit Level was published by Puncher & Wattman in 2021. Her poems have appeared in a range of Australian literary journals including Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Westerly, Meanjin, Meniscus, Mascara, Southerly and StylusLit, amongst others, and in Oystercatcher 2, Poetry of Change: The Liquid Amber Prize Anthology, The Grieve Anthology and Newcastle Poetry Prize anthologies.

Her recent work grapples with memory, its vagaries, and with the ongoing, experienced moralities and contradictions of home and identity. She identifies as a Jewish Australian and has never seen herself otherwise. Her Jewish background and identity has been integral to her work as a teacher and in particular to her creative writing; her latest book, returns to the origins of her birth in South Africa, her family’s role in that country and the Jewishness of her grandparents who migrated there from Lithuania and Latvia in the mid 1930s. Marcelle migrated from South Africa to the UK in 1977, and then to Australia in 1981.

Since the 1980s, in addition to her three so-far published books, she has published poetry in numerous Australian and overseas venues, including Jewish publications. worked as an academic at Macquarie University for over 23 years, teaching literature and creative writing, which became her research and practicing speciality. She is currently an Honorary Associate Professor at in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University, from which she retired in 2022.

Miriam Hechtman is a writer, producer and arts curator. She is the founder and creative director of Poetica, a live poetry, music and arts initiative, and the editor of The Alphabet of Women (Ginninderra Press 2022). Miriam is well known in Sydney for her community gatherings, her clear and kind leadership and her ability to create inclusive and creative events.

Throughout her working life, Miriam has partnered with artists and creatives to produce significant projects on screen, on the page and in real life. She lives in Sydney with her husband, two daughters, and Poppy the dog.

Beth Steiner is a writer whose first novel, Pearl Beach, was released in May 2026. Alongside her work as a writer, Beth is a primary school teacher whose most recent position involved establishing a public school radio station, teaching students to podcast, rap and write their own slams. Beth enjoys cold ocean swims, doesn’t leave home without a notebook and won the Culinary Award two years in a row in high school. To this day, she makes a mean choc chip cookie.