JCU Creative Writing Institute Launches Diodata Literary Magazine

The JCU Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation is pleased to announce the launch of its first literary magazine, Diodata.

The anthology, which features poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction from seventeen authors, is edited by Professor Susan Bradley Smith and JCU alumna Enrica Barberis. It is named after Diodata Saluzzo Roero (1774–1840), an Italian poet, playwright and author of prose fiction who was the first woman to be admitted to the Accademia degli Arcadi literary academy.

“I was taking Professor Susan Bradley Smith’s Advanced Poetry Workshop when it occurred to us to start a literary magazine to showcase the work of creative writing students and professors,” says Enrica, who was Editor-in-Chief of JCU’s student newspaper The Matthew as well as Vice President of the Women’s Leadership Initiative.  A Communications major and Creative Writing minor who graduated in May 2017, Erica pitched the idea to Professor Carlos Dews, Director of the Creative Writing Institute.

“I am thrilled that Susan Bradley Smith and Enrica Barberis founded Diodata this summer as the official journal of the JCU Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation.  And I hope it will continue for many years to come,” says Prof. Dews.

An award-winning author and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, Prof. Smith was a visiting professor at JCU during the 2017 Summer Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation. Her most recent books are memoir Friday Forever and the verse novel The Screaming Middle.

“With contributors from past and present JCU faculty and students, this publication offers unique, creative insight into the adventures of the writers writing in English in that eternally engaging city of Rome,” says Prof. Smith.

Read Diodata