David Brun chats to Stephanie Convery about her piece 'Pump', which appears in the latest issue of Overland.

'Basically, I've always been fascinated by the reactionary-xenophobic Tory aesthetic, which has had a huge influence on genre art (both the cloak-and-dagger spy thriller kind and its big-explosions action movie cousin).

Alyena Mohummadally is the latest essayist to have her work developed as part of the Overland Cal Connections project – an effort that focuses on publishing work from authors of underrepresented backgrounds and communities. Alyena is founder of the Yahoo! Group Queer Muslims in Australia and is chair of the Australian GLBTIQ Multicultural Council Inc.

Dean Biron is an independent scholar who has taught, researched and published in areas such as media studies, child protection and welfare, popular music, Australian film, sociology and criminology. In 2011 he was co-awarded the ABR Calibre Essay Prize for his work ‘The Death of the Writer’. He is also a former police detective. We chat to Dean today about his essay ‘The Aesthetics of Conservatism’, which appears in the latest issue of Overland.

I’d been writing about Burma for some years but it wasn’t until actually going there for the 2010 election and being with the people themselves that the full nature of their experience began to come clear.’

Kate Davison is a Berlin-based journalist, writer and activist. She obtained her Masters in English Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin, and is currently a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. We speak to Kate about her life in Berlin and her essay, ‘My German Question’, which appears in the latest issue of Overland.

Aaron Bady is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, specialising in African and post-colonial literature. He is editor-at-large of The New Inquiry, an online cultural criticism magazine, and he also blogs there regularly via Zunguzungu. Aaron talks to us about his essay ‘Zero Dark Geronimo’, which is featured in the latest issue of Overland.