editors

founding editors

2015-2025

TATE FOUNTAIN

Tate Fountain (she/her) is a writer, editor, theatremaker, and production coordinator based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her poetry collection, Short Films (Tender Press), was released in 2022. She has been published in Sweet Mammalian, In The Mood and eel, among others, and regularly covers theatre and live performance for bad apple. She has also held coordinating and digital marketing roles at various arts festivals, including samesame but different, Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki | Auckland Arts Festival, and Whānāu Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival. Tate was a member of the Starling editorial committee from 2021 through to 2025.

Maddie Ballard

Maddie Ballard is a mixed Chinese writer from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her work has appeared in outlets including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, 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, was published by The Emma Press in 2024 and will be published in the US under the title Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary by Tin House in 2025.

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.