Dr Shelley Davidow | UniSC | University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Shelley Davidow is an international author and educator. For the past twenty years she has written and taught on five continents in kindergartens, primary schools, secondary schools, a medium security prison in the USA and at universities. Having lived in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, America and Australia, Shelley is an advocate for social justice, transformative pedagogies and mitigating the effects of stress in the classroom. Her research on stress and children, on teaching literacy through creative writing and on decolonising the classroom through arts form the basis for her professional development courses and guest speaker events around Australia.

She is a prolific author of over 50 books (non-fiction and fiction). Her non-fiction books include the recently released Write Now, (Amba Press, 2025), Grounded: The off-road guide to parenting in an unstable world (Amba Press 2024), along with Writing the Radical Memoir (BLM Academic 2023), memoirs Runaways (Ultimo Press 2022) and Shadow Sisters (UQP 2018), Fail Brilliantly (Familius 2017), Whisperings in the Blood (UQP 2016), the Creative Writing textbook Playing with Words (Palgrave Macmillan UK 2016), and Raising Stress-Proof Kids (Exisle 2014, Familius, 2015).

Also published in 2024, is Shelley’s latest fiction novel The Girl with the Violin (HarperCollins 2024). Her young adult novels have been shortlisted for international awards (Freefalling for the Maskew Miller Young Africa Award in 1991, and In the Shadow of Inyangani for the Macmillan Writers Prize for Africa in 2003) and her educational readers for Macmillan are sold across the world, from Africa to the Caribbean, many of them for youngsters impacted by war, disease and social struggle.

Shelley is a core member of the UniSC Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre (ITRC).