Tara Baena- Hawkins

Tara was born in Toledo, Philippines, a sleepy little town with nothing to do, which fed her enthusiasm for reading. Her first brush with books came in the form of illustrated fairytales and comic books, which spurred her great love for Batman. She greedily devoured the works of Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, Enid Blyton, T.S. Eliot and R.L. Stine before discovering Arthur Conan Doyle’s enigmatic detective, Sherlock Holmes. She began writing nonsense poetry at the age of 9 and short stories at the age of 11.

In 2003, her short story, Halo was shortlisted for the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year Award. Also in 2003, she discovered Postmodernism and the works of Italo Calvino, Roland Barthes and Ernest Hemingway, who greatly influenced her inability to write conventional narratives.

She studied a Bachelor of Arts in Communications (Writing and Cultural Studies) at the University of Technology, Sydney where she learnt how to write Crime Fiction, Children’s Writing and Poetry. She is a compulsive drafter with an insane fear of throwing out drafts. She is captivated by the mundane and the everyday life. During her brief stint as a copywriter she succumbed to the highly addictive life of blogging where her drafts are immortalised in digital space for eternity.

She has written various short stories for Vibewire portal. Two of her stories, Aphorisms in a Teapot and The Dying Art of Sleeping, were published in the 2010 first and second Vibewire Quarterly anthologies. In May 2010, she was named as Vibewire Portal Contributor of the Month. Tara began writing for Mood of Monk, an online arts journal, in 2011 where she published two literary music (not) reviews.

Crushed by her bleak prospects in the publishing industry, she joined Catena Collective, a collection of editors, writers and visual artist, in 2013 to launch the online literature and culture magazine, One Page: Brisbane.

Tara currently lives in Brisbane, Australia where she completed a Master of Arts (Writing, Editing and Publishing). A prolific blogger, dreamer and poet, she collects Alice’s adventures in wonderland in between learning languages and defending Hip Hop.