Ali Cobby Eckermann

Ali Cobby Eckermann is an Aboriginal poet and visual artist from South Australia. Her debut collection of poetry, Little Bit Long Time, was published in 2009 as part of the New Poets Series of the Australian Poetry Centre. Since then, she has produced a substantial and formally innovative body of work, including the award-winning 2015 collection Inside My Mother. Eckermann has described Inside My Mother as an “emotional timeline” of the Stolen Generations, the thousands of children of indigenous descent—among them Eckermann herself, as well as her mother and son—taken from their families by the Australian government. In his review of the collection, David McCooey praises Eckermann’s use of nature to render the beauty of Aboriginal family bonds, as well as the pain and violence of their breaking: “[For Eckermann] family is a broad but vital network involving both the living and dead, and, importantly, their interrelatedness with the environment.” Eckermann’s other books include the prose memoir Too Afraid to Cry (2013) and the verse novel Ruby Moonlight (2012), which was named the New South Wales Book of the Year and also won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry. In addition to her work as a writer, Eckermann is also the founder of Australia’s first Aboriginal writers retreat, and has edited a special issue of the journal Southerly on Aboriginal writing.