Stephen J. Williams is a writer, photographer and communicatiions consultant who lives in Melbourne (Victoria, Australia).
He is the author of two books, A Crowd of Voices and The Ninth Satire (PDF copies of these books are linked from the home page of this site). He is currently working on four other projects: a photographic exhibition, a novel, a book about David Hockney, and a book about dreams.
He has won the Fellowship of Australian Writers' Anne Elder Prize and the Association for Australian Literature's Mary Gilmore Award.
He has published many poems, short stories and reviews in Australia's literary magazine's and newspapers.
In the 1980s he was among the group of Victorian poets—with Joyce Lee, Barbara Giles, Philip Martin and Rosemary Nissen—who founded the Pariah Press, a co-operative company which published Victroian poets throughout the 1980s and 1990s. For several years he was the secretary of the Poets' Union in Victoria and published the first directory of Australian poets.
At Meanjin (University of Melbourne), a literary magazine founded by Clem Christessen in the 1940s in Brisbane, Stephen worked for Jim Davidson, made tea, typed letters, and sorted envelopes into postcode order. Heady stuff. (The pay was $9,000 per year!) Though he had published fiction in Meanjin before he started working there, Stephen's principal fiction-writing education was by osmosis, typing up the comments on stories submitted to the magazine made by A.A. Phillips (cultural cringe), who was the fiction reader at Meanjin for many years. (Stephen published stories at Meanjin under false names while he worked there, submitting them to the competitive selection process.) Stephen also worked for a time with Barrett Reid at Overland, another long-established Australian journal that published a lot of his early work.
In the early part of his communications career he worked as a publicist in the union movement, helping to improve communicatiions with members by improving design and introducing then new technologies (computerised fax machines and e-mail!). In the late eighties and early nineties working in the union movement was a wild ride. Disputes in the public sector in Victoria were very heated and were fought hard by both sides. The union newspaper he edited at the time, Public Perspective, had a monthly readership of over 30,000.
In 1996-1997 he was one of the usual suspects who organised the First National Poetry Festival held at the Chapel off Chapel in Prahran (supported by Stonnington Council).
Stephen was at RMIT University when the internet was invented and witnessed first-hand the dramatic changes in large organisations when responsibility for internet functions and content moved from IT to corporate (or marketing) departments. He started out as a writer and ended up as manager of a media, printing, design and web unit. He managed the university web site through several major transformations as technologies of the web changed. The university's newspaper, RMIT Openline, which he designed and edited, was widely considered the best university newspaper in Australia at this time and had a strong readership among staff, students and locally at the north end of the Melbourne central business district.
He has also worked as a communications consultant for the Victorian AIDS Council, the Department of Human Services in Victoria, and the Victorian Government Office of the Chief Information Officer.