This year, we introduced our brand-new Writers Residency Program, supporting writers in their professional development through dedicated studio space, a generous honorarium and mentoring from ACF staff and tenants.
Allow us to introduce —
Luke Beesley is a writer, artist and singer-songwriter. His latest book In the Photograph was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally and has been translated into several languages. Luke performs under the moniker Cornflake Sunset. His debut album Double Portrait was released in late 2024. He lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung land, Naarm/Melbourne.
Luke will work on a singular prose piece (up to 8,000 words) based on his daily routine as a resident artist at the Convent. Luke’s recent prose poetry stretches quotidian moments into surreal, surprising, often meta-written ways, and within this linguistic action, he strives for an ethical, aesthetic mode of listening. The project will incorporate the history, architecture and landscape of the convent and weave this into the writing.
www.lukebeesley.com
www.cornflakesunset.com
Michael Dulaney’s writing focuses on humanity’s links with the rest of non-human nature in the climate crisis, and has been published by The Monthly, Literary Hub, Griffith Review, and the BBC, among others. He has been a journalist for over a decade and has won the Overland Fair Australia Prize and been named a 2024 Climate Futures Fellow by the State Library Victoria. His first book, Sentinels, will be published internationally by Scribe in 2026.
Michael is writing his debut environment book titled Sentinels, which examines how human impacts on the environment and a warming climate are driving more infectious diseases to jump from animals to humans than ever before. Each chapter looks at a different (and each, in its own way, emblematic) species from around the world to ask what they can tell us about the growing threat of contagions in the age of climate change. In these stories, infectious microbes are the starting point for exploring the complex and surprising ways that human and animal lives are inextricably linked.
Mia-Francesca Jones is a writer and researcher, and the recipient of the 2025 Mick Dark Flagship Fellowship for Outstanding Environmental Writing by Varuna National Writers’ House. Her writing has been highly commended for the Peter Blazey Fellowship for auto/biographical writing, and listed for the Desperate Literature Prize, the Rachel Funari Prize, the Overland VU Short Story Prize, and the Richell Prize by Hachette Australia.
Through her residency, Mia will be working on Objects of Light: a work of creative nonfiction that explores light and darkness in literature, medicine, and the environment at a time where eighty percent of the world’s population live with light pollution. The work interweaves a personal narrative of loss with lyrical writing about the midnight sun, tired moths, disoriented birds, dark skies, blue light, and celestial patterns. It responds to the questions: How do we find the light in grief? How do we find the light on a dimming planet?
Cat Yen is a writer of memoir. She is interested in unearthing the complexity of gendered and working-class experiences of everyday life, especially those of people of colour. She was the winner of the SBS Emerging Writers’ Competition in 2021 and a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow in 2024. Proudly the daughter of factory and retail workers with no creative credentials, she is a data analyst for her day job.
Heart Constellations is Cat’s debut memoir about piecing together contentment after trauma, told from the perspective of a 20-something woman living in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. The memoir begins in a migrant household troubled by financial precarity, domestic violence and addiction, but its core is the power of chosen family to change the trajectory of a life. Through an exploration of community, the work intends to challenge tropes of individual exceptionalism often dominating migrant stories, to expand the narratives of joy available to working-class people of colour in the Australian literary landscape.
