Ali Cobby Eckermann (b. 1963), Yankunytjatjara/Kothaka author and poet, was born in Adelaide. Adopted as a baby, she, her mother and grandmother were members of the Stolen Generations. As a teenager she ran away to the desert in Central Australia, where she began to write poetry. After reuniting with her mother and reconnecting with her family and culture at the age of 34, she studied creative writing at the Bachelor College of Indigenous Tertiary Education in Alice Springs. Cobby Eckermann published her first collection of poetry, Little Bit Long Time, in 2009; the poem 'Intervention Payback' was published in the Robert Adamson-edited Best Australian Poems of 2009. Her first verse novel, His Father's Eyes (2011), explained the Stolen Generations to young readers and was published as part of the Yarning Strong series by Laguna Bay Publishing and Oxford University Press. Ruby Moonlight (2012), her second verse novel, won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry and the Deadly Award for literature and was named the book of the year at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 2013. Her memoir Too Afraid to Cry (2013) was followed by the award-winning poetry collection Inside my Mother (2015). Cobby Eckermann has presented internationally at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, Georgetown Literature Festival in Malaysia, Jaipur Literary Festival in India and the International Jazz Poetry Festival in Pittsburgh, and was the first Aboriginal writer to participate in the International Writing Program in Iowa. In 2017 Cobby Eckermann won Yale University's prestigious Windham-Campbell award for poetry and the following year received a Fellowship from the Australia Council.
