Jeanine Leane was born in Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Australia. She has been writing since she was a child. She says that “I wrote mainly as a way of remembering.” After a long career as a secondary school teacher, she worked with Aboriginal students entering university programs and taught indigenous education to mainly non-Aboriginal student teachers. Her first volume of poetry is “Dark Secrets After Dreaming: AD 1887-1961.” Leane describes is as “sequential poetry inspired by anecdotal and family stories.” It won the 2010 Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry. Her second book is “Purple Threads,” which won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Indigenous story in any genre. It was later published by the University of Queensland Press. Her most recent book is “Walk Back Over” (Cordite).