Catherine is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Western Australia. She served as Editor of Westerly Magazine from 2015 until 2023, and now continues to support the magazine as Scholarly Editor. Her debut novel, The Salt Madonna (Picador 2020), was shortlisted in the 2021 WA Premier’s Book Awards. She is currently working on two new manuscripts - a second novel and a hybrid poetry/essay collection.

Catherine completed her PhD in creative writing at Monash University, looking at white Australian practices of writing landscape. Her research now continues to examine settler-colonial consciousness in Australian literature and in particular focuses on the writing of Randolph Stow. Her work has been published in an array of journals and magazines, as well as having been awarded the AD Hope Prize, the Elyne Mitchell Prize for Rural Women Writers, and shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award (2015). She has judged the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the ALS Gold Medal, the WA Premier’s Book Prize and the TAG Hungerford. 

Scholalry Editor, Westerly Magazine
Editorial Advisor, Journal for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 

I am currently working on creative practice and place-making in the writing of Randolph Stow.

Reading Creatively, Writing Creatively (ENGL1501)

Creative Writing: Theory and Practice (ENGL2501)

Poetry and Poetics (ENGL3001)

Shakespeare: Page, Stage and Screen (ENGL3602)

Victorian Dreams and the Technological Age (ENGL3604)

Studies in Creative Writing (ENGL4103)

Special Author Studies: Randolph Stow (ENGL4108)