Conference Speakers

Dr lisa emerson

Associate Professor, School of English and Media Studies, Massey University

At present, Lisa is involved in researching attitudes to communication and interpersonal skills amongst science students and employers of science students. She also researches issues relating to plagiarism and educational webtools as they pertain to the teaching of writing.

Lisa has published widely on academic and science writing, student-centred learning, online pedagogy and online writing. She is author of the Writing Guidelines series and she still finds time to run the Writery, an online community for creative writers which won the “People’s Choice” web award in 2004.

In 2008, Lisa won the Prime Minister's Supreme Award at the Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards.

Lisa's keynote speech at the 2010 TWN Colloquim will be titled "Looking back, looking forward: Writing instruction in New Zealand".

dr john macalister

Senior Lecturer, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. President of the Applied Linguistics Association of NZ.

John teaches and researches in the fields of second language reading and writing, writing and identity, and curriculum design. He is co-author (with Professor Paul Nation) of Language Curriculum Design, and is very interested in the application of curriculum design principles to writing courses.

John is also editor of the New Zealand English Journal.

 

gregory o'brien

Poet, painter, editor and journalist

Gregory O’Brien is one of New Zealand’s most prolific contributors to both arts and literature. His poems and short stories are widely anthologised, and he has published several acclaimed volumes of poetry.

Among O’Brien’s other work is a collection of interviews with twenty-one New Zealand writers, Moments of Invention (1988, with photographs by Robert Cross), a monograph on the painter Nigel Brown (1991), and a collection of profiles of New Zealand painters, Land and Deeds (1996). He was also founder editor of the deliberately short-lived literary quarterly Rambling Jack in 1986–87. He held the Sargeson Fellowship in 1988 and was writing fellow at Victoria University in 1995.

Welcome to the South Seas won the Non Fiction Category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2005 and the Elsie Locke Award at the LIANZA Children’s Book Awards 2005.

 

dr anne surma

Senior Lecturer, English and Creative Arts, Murdoch University, Australia

Anne teaches in the areas of professional writing, public relations and literary studies, and has also worked in private industry as an editor, writer, and communications consultant. She has a special research interest in the imaginative and ethical uses of discourse and rhetoric, which is reflected in her scholarly articles and in her monograph, Public and professional writing: ethics, imagination and rhetoric (Palgrave Macmillan 2005). Anne is currently working on another book, The power of professional writing: Effecting social change in a global culture.

Anne is also an editorial board member of the journals TEXT, Journal of Communication Management and PRism.