Cassandra Atherton

Cassandra Atherton is an international expert on the prose poetry form and an award winning prose poet. She also specialises in atomic bomb literature and the nuclear sublime. Cassandra was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University sponsored by Professor Stephen Greenblatt and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University in Tokyo. Cassandra has authored and edited over thirty critical and creative books and is the recipient of several grants including Australia Council, Copyright Agency Limited and VicArts Grants for her work on prose poetry, atomic bomb poetry and a forthcoming book of poetic biographies of Older Australians with Associate Professor Jessica Wilkinson. She co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne UP, 2020) with Professor Paul Hetherington.

Cassandra is a sought after interviewer after her widely publicized interviews with American intellectuals such as Harold Bloom, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Greenblatt, Camille Paglia and Howard Zinn was published in the her book: So Many Word: Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals (2016).

Cassandra's prose poetry has been widely anthologised both nationally and internationally in publications such as Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.), Strange Cargo: Five Australian Poets (Smith|Doorstop, UK) and The Best Asian Poetry (Kitaab). Her prose poetry has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Cassandra is commissioning editor for Westerly Magazine and series editor for Spineless Wonders annual microliterature anthologies and associate editor at MadHat Press (USA). She is a Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University where she received the Faculty Research award for Excellence in Postgraduate Supervision and the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for University Teacher of the Year.