Grace Yee is a poet whose debut book Chinese Fish won the 2024 Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her new book Joss: A History pays tribute to the author’s ancestors, illuminating how they survived – and thrived – amid longstanding colonialist stories that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century.

Dianne Dempsey is the author of Saving Dragons: The Life and Times of Russell Goldfield (Louey Yeung Man) Jack, which offers insight into how, growing up under the shadow of the White Australia Policy, in a conservative, homogeneous city, Russell Jack negotiated a foothold for his people using dragons as his trojan horses.

Grace and Dianne will explore what it means to write about the Chinese diaspora and read from their works.