Janet McDonald – författare

The story of Aisha, teenage mother of two from the New York Projects, who is going nowhere. But when her welfare benefits are stopped, she has to find a job. Chill Wind charts Aisha’s struggle as she transforms herself from workshy teenager to TV star.Aisha is nineteen with two children and a no-good boyfriend. Her idea of the good life is hanging with friends, dancing and chilling to music. But things get a bit too ‘chilly’ when she receives sixty days’ notice of termination of her welfare benefits. No way is Aisha going to do menial work for WorkFare. Then she sees a TV advert for BigModels. Aisha is pretty enough, and big enough, is this the way out for her?

Selected by "The Los Angeles Times Book Review" as one of the best books of the year, "Project Girl" is the powerful account of a young woman's struggle to realize her dreams while remaining true to who she was before attending Ivy League schools and receiving impressive diplomas. It tells of the spectacular failures and unlikely comebacks of a ghetto kid whose academic talent opens doors onto a world of private schools, rich classmates, and plum jobs but who back home confronts a neighborhood of growing poverty, drug abuse, and crime. "Project Girl" is McDonald's story of her divided life and terrible battle to reconcile opposing worlds.

This is the first major collection to reimagine and analyse the role of the creative arts in building resilient and inclusive regional communities. Bringing together Australia’s leading theorists in the creative industries, as well as case studies from practitioners working in the creative and performing arts and new material from targeted research projects, the book reconceptualizes the very meaning of regionalism and the position – and potential – of creative spaces in non-metropolitan centres.

This handbook explores a diverse range of artistic and cultural responses to modern conflict, from Mons in the First World War to Kabul in the twenty-first century. With over thirty chapters from an international range of contributors, ranging from the UK to the US and Australia, and working across history, art, literature, and media, it offers a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of modern war, and our artistic and cultural responses to it. The handbook is divided into three parts. The first part explores how communities and individuals responded to loss and grief by using art and culture to assimilate the experience as an act of survival and resilience. The second part explores how conflict exerts a powerful influence on the expression and formation of both individual, group, racial, cultural and national identities and the role played by art, literature, and education in this process. The third part moves beyond the actual experience of conflict and its connection with issues of identity to explore how individuals and society have made use of art and culture to commemorate the war. In this way, it offers a unique breadth of vision and perspective, to explore how conflicts have been both represented and remembered since the early twentieth century.