editors

founding editors

2015-2025

TATE FOUNTAIN

Tate Fountain (she/her) is a writer, editor, and creative producer based in London. She has held programming, producing, and marketing roles at various arts organisations, including Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival, Whānāu Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival, and the Barbican, and has also independently produced sold-out seasons of new plays in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work has appeared in Sweet Mammalian, In The Mood, and eel, among others, and her poetry collection, Short Films (Tender Press), was released in 2022. Tate was a member of the Starling editorial committee from 2021 through to 2025.

Maddie Ballard

Maddie Ballard (she/her) is a writer of mixed Chinese heritage from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work has appeared in outlets including Landfall, takahē, The Spinoff, and Wasafiri, where she was shortlisted for the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in 2023. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, where she won the Letteri Family Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her debut essay collection, Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking (The Emma Press), was published in 2024 and reissued in the US under the title Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary (Tin House, 2025). She currently lives in Naarm.

Louise Wallace

Louise Wallace holds an MA in Creative Writing from Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington. She is the author the novel Ash, and four previous collections of poetry. Her work has also featured in anthologies, including Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry (Massey University Press, 2019). She was the 2015 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago and the editor of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2022.

Francis Cooke

Francis Cooke is a Wellington-based writer.  He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2008 and his short fiction has been published in Landfall, Hue & Cry, JAAM and takahē.