'Susan Hawthorne is the author/editor of thirty books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Her latest book, Lesbian: Politics, culture, existence (Spinifex Press), interweaves her thinking about these subjects over a fifty-year period. She has worked in Indigenous education and has taught English as a second language to Arabic-speaking women. For fifteen years, she was an aerialist in two women’s circuses. She researched the torture of lesbians on which her novel Dark Matters is based.' (Introduction)