Melissa Petrakis is a poet, playwright and academic. She is also a busy mother of two children under five. In 1999 she was the most prolific she has ever been as a writer, before or since; writing 4 poems a week, attending 2 or more readings a week; and contributing not only to establishment journals such as Meanjin and Overland; but also to Centoria, Deadline, Farrago, Moving Out Moving On: Poems of Dislocation, The Second Worst Thing: poems on surviving the death of a child, tiny epics: short stories and poems by young Australian writers; and later Dan Poets, Flaming Nibs: an accidental anthology, Going Down Swinging, Red Lobster, Said The Rat and The Other Side.