David Brooks, poet, literary critic and academic, studied in the early 1970s at the Australian National University, where he fell in with a group of Canberra writers including AD Hope, Rosemary Dobson, David Campbell and Judith Wright and co-founded Open Door Press with Alan Gould. In the mid 1970s he left Australia to undertake postgraduate studies at the University of Toronto; on his return he taught at Duntroon and the University of Western Australia and became editorially involved with New Poetry and Westerly. His first collection of poetry, The cold front, was launched by AD Hope in 1983; soon after, he began editing Helix and published his first volume of short fiction, The Book of Sei (1985). He lectured at ANU between 1986 and 1991, during which several books of his poetry and prose appeared, including The necessary jungle (1990) and Sheep and the diva (1990). Since 1991 he has lectured in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, where he is now Associate Professor and editor of Southerly. His selections of poems by AD Hope and Bob Brissenden were published in 1992.
