Cirrus@Austlit

Kerry Kilner was the Director and General Editor of AustLit and Research Fellow at The University of Queensland from 2002 to 2020. She was the coordinator of BlackWords for a number of years after its establishment in 2006. 

Kilner was born in Singapore and lived there for less than a year. Her father, who was born in Fiji, the child of an Australian father and Samoan mother, was an officer in the Australian Defence Forces and as a result she lived in numerous places along the eastern seaboard of Australia during a peripatetic childhood.

Kilner began tertiary study as a mature age student in her mid-20s. She completed an Honours degree in literature (1992) and a Masters degree in Women's Studies at Monash University in 1994. Her Master's research investigated the role of women in the Australian little theatre movement of the 1920s and '30s and this area has remained a research interest leading to the establishment of the Australian Drama Archive. Kilner was with AustLit from its inception in 1999, acting as Content Manager until 2002 when she became Director. Prior to that she worked at the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University where she worked on the Bibliography of Australian Literature Project (BALP). She was Associate Editor of three of the four volumes of The Bibliography of Australian Literature (2001, 2004, 2007, 2008), has contributed to The History of the Book in Australia (2001) and The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999). She has also published on AustLit and digital humanities. At the end of 2020, she stepped down as AustLit Director having moved to Ireland during the Covid19 pandemic. 

Along with Angela Gardner, Kilner was involved in the specialist publisher, light-trap press, which produced limited edition artist's books that were usually collaborations between poets and artists. She was also involved in the poetry e-journal, Foam:e.