Alyssa Curtayne is a Tasmanian-born, Perth-based multi-passionate creative who is a writer, storyteller, and researcher. In 2024, she graduated from Emerson College’s (U.K.) flagship course, Storytelling Beyond Words and hosts a storytelling-specific podcast. Alyssa was a part of the AFTS Salonline project from 2021-2022 and discovered a deep love of fairy tales recorded before the Grimms, particularly those overlooked gems and their original storytellers, enriching her appreciation for the depth and diversity of narrative traditions. This passion contributed to her creative thesis in a Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing (Deakin). 

Helen Hewitt is a self-taught artist/fantasy illustrator, currently living in Curlewis on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria. Her art predominantly reflects her love of the “natural” world, fantasy and story-telling.  Helen also enjoys writing, but especially creating poems to match the stories portrayed in her artworks, otherwise known as ekphrastic poetry.

Helen is motivated by an inherent urge to create and cannot imagine a life without creativity and the never-ending pleasure it brings to her.

Diane Curran is a writer of reimagined fairy tales with a twist of gay, along with young adult fiction and stories about women with attitude, who are navigating the contemporary dating landscape and finding themselves through creative pursuits. Along with dabbling in paintng and mixed media, she sometimes finds time to create collage poetry by cutting words from magazines and assembling into poems. At other times, she can be found at home just hanging out with her favourite procrasti-CAT, Mojo, on the beautiful Mid North Coast. She is currently a servant of the public but feeds her love for culture in various voluntary positions.

Jo Henwood is always telling stories in some form.

She is an Accredited Storyteller with Australian Storytellers, AFTS Secretary, and an accredited Professional Guide with the Institute of Australian Tour Guides, leading tours around many Sydney heritage sites as a Tour Guide and Education Officer.  Jo is a museum theatre creative, workshop leader and public speaker on literature, history, creative writing, intangible culture, and storytelling.   She has been a FEAST mentor to heritage sites Storytellers.

Her qualifications include BA (Library Science), Tour Guiding Cert III, Grad Dip Museum Studies, Grad Cert Gifted Ed, and M. Cultural Heritage.

Devahuti (“Debs”) Rai Chaliha is a PhD student by day, AFTS volunteer by night.

Serene Conneeley is a writer with a fascination for history, travel, ritual and the myth and magic of ancient places and cultures. She is the author of the Into the Mists and Into the Storm Trilogies, original faery tales The Swan Maiden and The Snow Queen’s Daughter, plus the non-fiction books Faery Magic, Mermaid Magic and Witchy Magic, and Seven Sacred Sites, A Magical Journey, and the meditation CD Sacred Journey: A Meditation to Connect You to the Magic of the Earth. 

Patricia Poppenbeek is a writer, freelance editor, and chair of the anthology committee that published ‘South of the Sun’. Her work includes a retelling of Cinderella in the Romance Writers of Australia anthology, Little Gems, ‘The Magician’s Boy’ in online magazine Timeless Tales, the essay ‘Virus Wonderland’ in 2020 Vision and ‘The Timely Chocolate Shop’ in Issue 10 of the AFTS ezine. In the tradition of Dick Whittington, her writing group, the Cartridge Family, won a City of Melbourne grant to publish Melbourne Subjective, an anthology that included three of her stories, one of which was historical fantasy.

Nola Wernicke has enjoyed fairytales for a while now. Over the past few years her poetry has been influenced by them. She’s had some haiku and free verse published in various places, such as Page Seventeen (Victoria) Free Xpression (New South Wales) and The Mozzie (Queensland).

She lives in regional Victoria among trees and hills, ripe places for fairytales to be written.