leah jing mcintosh

founding editor / liminalmag.com

In late 2016, I founded Liminal, an art project responding to racism permeating the Australian arts sector. Beginning as an interview project, Liminal now commissions and publishes art, writing, literary criticism and long-form conversations with talented Asian Australian artists.

In the past eight years, Liminal has published over 220 interviews and portraits of Asian Australians, raising the bar for diverse representation in the arts. We have also commissioned award-winning art and writing, and in 2019, I created the first Australian literary fiction prize dedicated to writers of colour, which eventuated in the anthology Collisions (Pantera Press, 2020). In 2021, we presented the Liminal & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize, one of the largest prizes for nonfiction writing in the country, and the first major literary prize just for nonfiction written by First Nations writers and Writers of Colour. We published Against Disappearance, a collection of these essays, in September 2022. Most recently, we launched the inaugural Liminal Festival, which will take place at The Wheeler Centre, 2-4 August 2024.

As part of this work, I continue to advocate for racial equity within the arts industry. I love programming poetry readings and literary events for our community. Liminal has collaborated with organisations such as the Hyphenated Biennial, NIDA, New York Times, Australian National University, Writers Victoria, Writers SA, Emerging Writers Festival, and the Melbourne Writers Festival amongst others to further elevate artistic excellence.

Liminal is digitally archived in the National Library of Australia, and has been awarded grants by organisations such as Australian Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, the City of Melbourne, and Multicultural Arts Victoria.