NZSA Mentor Programme recipients of 2026
Vivienne Bailey
Vivienne Bailey is a Wellington based freelance writer, journalist and broadcaster. She has a Diploma of Creative Writing, Whitireira NZ (2019), and her award-winning short stories have been published in online literary journals and in anthologies including Fresh Ink: A Collection of Voices from Aotearoa NZ (2019). She has been placed or commended in the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA) Graeme Lay Short Story Competition and the Northland Short Story Competition, most recently in 2025.
Her flash fiction has appeared online in Flash Fiction: An Adventure in Short Fiction and has been nominated for the Best Short Fiction Award (2024). Cricket Crazy, her children’s novel, was published by The Cuba Press in 2021.
Excited and happy (although somewhat terrified) to receive a NZSA mentorship, she is honoured (and grateful) for the opportunity to progress, to work towards completing her historical crime novel.
Angela Barnett
Angela Barnett is a mother, daughter, aunty and sister, based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She has written non-fiction essays and features for different publications in Aotearoa and interviewed people far more interesting than herself. Her short stories have been recognised in the 2013 Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards and the 2024 Te Tauihu Short Story Awards. In the 90s, she got a BCom from VUW and in 2025 she finished a Masters of Creative Writing from UoA. A long-time advocate for storytelling, Angela created Like Bodies Like Minds with illustrator Ruby Jones, a multi-disciplinary project exploring mental health, identity, and body image through the voices of eleven rangatahi. Last year it became an exhibition, opening at Tūranga in Christchurch. She’s also co-developed the Y25 alongside the YWCA. She’s lived in Taradale, Wellington, Zambia, New York, and a Redwood forest in Northern California and has finally settled on the wild west coast in Piha, with her partner and two teenagers. Angela’s deeply grateful for the mentorship to work on a novel she began during her MCW year.
Cassandra Barnett
Cassandra Barnett (Raukawa, Ngāti Huri, Pākehā) is a multi-genre writer, artist, scholar, educator and māmā exploring indigenous, queer and ecological futures. Some recent publications include the long poem ‘Steppes’ for Performing Punctuation (2026), the chapbooks Te Whakaora (with Kelly Joseph, 2025) and How | Hao (2022) with The Chronicle of <____>, the fictocritical essay ‘Taken In’ for Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear (Te Tuhi, 2023), and a book of Māori artists and art pedagogies, Ki Mua, Ki Muri (with Kura Te Waru-Rewiri, 2023).
Cassandra has a doctorate in art writing and an MA in fiction, but as a poet is self taught, experimental and wayward! The book of kauri/rāhui poems she will be working on during her mentorship was started four years ago in Anawhata, Waitākere, before faltering amidst hectic life and self doubt. She is incredibly grateful to be gifted the support of an experienced mentor to help her resolve these poems of trees and insects – and hopefully, finish the book.
Catherine Bennett
Cath is a writer who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau with her husband, three children, and rescue dog. She holds a Master’s in English Literature and History from The University of Edinburgh and was a showbiz columnist for a Scottish tabloid before emigrating to New Zealand two decades ago. A reporter and feature writer for the Sunday News and Sunday Star-Times, Cath also edited magazines including New Idea, The Australian Women’s Weekly, and Food. Redundancy during the Covid pandemic prompted her to pursue a childhood dream of becoming an author, and in 2024, she enrolled in the Master of Creative Writing at The University of Auckland. The 46-year-old will use the mentorship to complete Tasman Beach, a domestic thriller she began for her thesis. She is immensely grateful for the opportunity.
Michelle Cheever
Originally from Massachusetts, Michelle Cheever is a writer and communications advisor living in Te Tau Ihu, the Top of the South with her partner and toddler son.
She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and a BFA in Writing, Literature & Publishing from Emerson College.
Her short stories and essays have appeared in the Austin Review, The Huffington Post, and Pank magazine, among others. She is the 2018 recipient of the Chamberlain Award for Creative Writing through the University of Michigan Hopwood Awards.
Her work often explores the tension between independence and community. She is at work on a novel centering on an introverted woman who folds her life and home into a neighbouring hippie commune in order to keep the love of her family.
Michelle is honoured and delighted to have the opportunity to work with a mentor while completing this novel.
Marcus Hobson
Marcus lives on the slopes of the Kaimai Range near Katikati. Many years ago he studied Ancient & Mediaeval history in London, but more recently gained a Masters in Professional Writing from the University of Waikato. The novel he submitted for his thesis wove personal memoir with works of art from around the world. He is still inspired by history and myth.
An avid book collector (or hoarder), Marcus also writes book reviews for the NZ Listener magazine and NZBooklovers. He has been published in the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and the Mayhem Literary Journal.
Last summer he tried to open an English language bookshop of the West coast of Sweden. Next summer he may try again, but only if the books he shipped have arrived by then.
Marcus will use the mentorship to hone and complete a story voiced by a figure on a Greek vase, the Achilles Painter and himself.
Margaret-Mary Hollins
Margaret-Mary is a storyteller with a rich background in devised theatre, creating work from the ground up. As a director, actor, and script editor, she collaborates with creatives in a rehearsal-led process, in which the script emerges as the final stage of development.
Her work is grounded in lived-experience storytelling, and her project Threshold evolved through completing a Master of Creative Performance Practice: Toi Whakaari NZ Drama School (Distinction), 2024-2025. She is deeply grateful for this mentorship, “a vital outside eye”, as Threshold continues through its development process. Photo credit: Andi Crown
Annelies Judson
Annelies is a children’s poet and writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Alongside her writing for children, she is also a freelance writer for The Sapling and the New Zealand Association for Environmental Education, and has been published in Set, the journal of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. In her non-writing life, she is a primary school relief teacher, volunteer early learning teacher, stay-at-home parent, and chronic wearer-of-too-many-hats.
Annelies’s debut picture book, Turkey Hurly-Burly, won the 2024 Storylines Joy Cowley Award, and was published by Scholastic NZ in 2025. She also has poems published on the websites Tyger Tyger Magazine and The Dirigible Balloon, and in Little Thoughts Press magazine.
Annelies has been awarded a 2026 NZSA Mentorship to work on a verse novel for young adults that explores the complex nature of sex and consent. More information about Annelies can be found at anneliesjudson.wordpress.com or @annelies_judson_writer on Instagram.
Phil Luke
Phil Luke writes mythopoeic fiction. Not the retelling of myth, but the making and understanding of it.
Born in Asia and shaped by Wellington, he came to writing not as craft but as confrontation. With inherited stories that never quite fit, legacies that didn’t hold, and a silence where answers should have been.
His fiction wrestles with broken inheritance, failed meaning, and the kind of questions certainty gave up on long ago. He is grateful for the mentorship, and he is ready to do the work.
Jemma Richardson
Jemma Richardson is a writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington. She lives with her partner and two cats, one of whom keeps trying to eat her bookmarks.
Her short stories have appeared in takahē, Turbine | Kapohau, circular, Salient and At the Bay I Te Kokoru, for which her story was Highly Commended in the 2025 Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose Competition. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University | Te Herenga Waka.
Jemma is grateful to be part of this mentorship programme, and is excited to work with her mentor as she develops her first novel.
Lisa Stanley
Lisa Stanley (samoan/pākehā) is an emerging poet based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work is published and forthcoming in numerous NZ journals including Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026, Turbine / Kapohau, Landfall Tauraka, a fine line, and internationally. Lisa was buzzing to discover the world of microfiction when takahē nominated one of her pieces from their August 2025 issue for Best Microfiction 2026.
Lisa is a proud māmā, and committed to serving her people and community. She is humbled and hugely thankful for the mentorship under which she will be working on a hybrid collection of poetry and microfiction with the aim of contributing to pasifika and pākehā literature. She will simultaneously explore her practice in conceptual art in conversation with this work.
Kirsteen Ure
Kirsteen is a writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland and her short stories and creative non-fiction have been published in Landfall, ReadingRoom, Takahē, Headland and in various collections.
Kirsty Wadsworth
Kirsty was born in the UK, but has lived in New Zealand her whole life. She is an author and part time primary school teacher, living in New Plymouth with her husband, two children and their cat, Pippin. Her children love books almost as much as she does, and she looks forward to sharing all of her favourites with them as they grow. When they’re not reading together, Kirsty and her family love exploring the parks, museum, library and zoo.
Kirsty has been writing stories since she could read, and in 2019, she achieved her dream of publishing her first children’s book – ‘The Promise of Puanga: A Story for Matariki’. She loves writing in all genres, including picture books, plays, poetry and short stories. Kirsty’s next big project is a junior fiction novel set (of course) in a library. She is delighted and extremely grateful for this mentorship, and is excited to see how her novel progresses under the advice and guidance of a seasoned mentor.