Authors

Jake Bailey is an internationally acclaimed educator on resilience, the author of the number one bestseller What Cancer Taught Me and, as a Commonwealth Study Conference alumnus, has been recognised as one of the most promising emerging leaders across the Commonwealth.He has developed resilience strategies for corporations, governments, schools and sports teams across the globe, educating a range of audiences on evidence-based tools that enable us to most effectively overcome the challenges we all face in life. Jake lives in Arrowtown, New Zealand.

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Judy Bailey (ONZM) is a writer and former broadcaster living in Auckland. She fronted primetime news for twenty-six years, becoming one of the most recognised faces in New Zealand. On leaving TVNZ, she co-presented Māori Television's ANZAC Day programme for many years. She is a founding member and patron of Brainwave Trust Aotearoa, and an active patron of organisations including the National Collective of Women's Refuges, Hospice North Shore, Skylight Trust, the Grief Centre and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. She is married to producer and director Chris Bailey, with whom she has three children and seven grandchildren.

Martin Bailey is highly regarded by major publishing houses in New Zealand, Australia and the United States and has written and/or illustrated more than 100 children's titles including many for the education sector. He has written books for a diverse range of publishers including Wendy Pye Publishing, Scholastic, Pearson and Murdoch.

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Scott Bainbridge is one of New Zealand's foremost investigative true crime authors. His fascination with missing persons cases was born out of overhearing a conversation between his parents about the case of teenage hitchhiker Mona Blades. Since then, he has spent many thousands of hours investigating the cases of missing people, with his work leading to several cold cases being reopened. His most recent book, The Missing Files, was released in July 2018. This is his seventh book.

Rosemary Baird

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Brigs (Brigitta) Baker has been in reunion with her birth family since 2008. Her professional experience ranges from leadership and advisory roles in the private and public sectors, to senior level consulting positions within human resources, leadership development and organisational development. She is a qualified coach and experienced workshop facilitator - skills she now uses in mentoring and supporting adopted people. Jo Willis longed to know the truth about her birth family when she was growing up and was reunited with them with the help of Jigsaw. The journal she kept from the age of 16 helped her process her experience and navigate the impact of adoption. The journal was the beginning of a collaborative work that became Adopted. She is a passionate supporter of adopted people and advocate for legislative change.

HINEMOANA BAKER is a poet, musician and creative writing teacher. She traces her ancestry from Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Te Āti Awa and Ngāi Tahu, as well as from England and Germany (Oberammergau in Bayern). Her previous poetry collections are mātuhi | needle (co-published in 2004 by Victoria University Press and Perceval Press), kōiwi kōiwi (VUP, 2010) and waha | mouth (VUP, 2014). She has edited several online and print anthologies and released several albums of original music and more experimental sound art. She works in English, Māori and more recently German, the latter in collaboration with German poet and sound performer Ulrike Almut Sandig. She is currently living in Berlin, where she was 2016 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer in Residence, and completing a PhD at Potsdam University.

Dr Kirsty Baker is an art historian, curator and writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara where she currently works as a curator at City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. She completed her PhD in art history at Victoria University of Wellington—Te Herenga Waka, where her thesis ‘Constituting the “Woman Artist”: A Feminist Genealogy of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Art History 1928–1989’ was awarded a place on the prestigious Doctoral Dean’s List for 2020. Alongside this academic research, Baker’s writing on contemporary women artists in Aotearoa has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Art New Zealand, The Pantograph Punch, Artist Profile, Femisphere and Art and Australia. She has also written essays on women artists and feminist art histories for a range of publications including Flora: Celebrating Our Botanical World (Te Papa Press, 2023), The Dialogics of Contemporary Art: Painting Politics (Kerber Verlag, 2019), Embodied Knowledge / Can Tame Anything (The Dowse Art Museum, 2019), Jacqueline Fahey’s Suburbanites (New Zealand Portrait Gallery, 2019) and All Lines Converge: Some Lines Through the Archive (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2017).

Tīhema Baker (Raukawa te Au ki te Tonga, Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira) is a writer and Tiriti o Waitangi-based policy advisor from Ōtaki. He has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, for which he wrote this novel. He has previously published a trilogy of sci-fi novels, including Watched (Huia, 2014).