June 2023

Emilie Teresa Smith is an Argentine-born, Canadian-raised Anglican priest who has dedicated her life to the defense of our sacred planet home. Since the age of seven she has loved writing, crafting her first book (with illustrations) called The Poor Snake. Since then she has written several books, for adults and for children. She has also published numerous articles and essays, especially about her work in Latin America, where she has lived on-and-off for several years. Emilie believes that NOW is the time for us to take hold of what it means to be human creatures, part of this wide web of life, and to rediscover the power of radical love for one another.

September 2021

Maria Sabaye Moghaddam is the recipient of the 2021 Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts. Maria is a writer, storyteller, and arts educator from Ottawa.

Anne Laurel Carter grew up in Don Mills. She’s been a librarian, an ESL and FSL teacher, and milked cows in a dairy. The ideas for her 19 books came from her experiences, interviews of interesting people or from her imagination. She divides her time between Toronto Island and Nova Scotia and if she’s not reading or walking a beach, she’s out for a bike ride or playing the ukulele.

Victor Enns was born in Winnipeg and raised in southern Manitoba. He graduated from the University of Manitoba with a History/English major. A founding Board member of the Manitoba Writer’s Guild, he was the Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, and founder of Windscript magazine. He spent the next 20 years in arts administration, including 4 years as the Executive Director of the Manitoba Arts Council, while raising a family. He founded Rhubarb magazine. Lucky Man, (Hagios, 2005) was nominated for the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award.

Luanne Armstrong has written twenty books. She writes young adult books, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She has contributed to many anthologies and edited a Canadian non-fiction anthology called Slice Me Some Truth. She has been nominated or won many awards, including the Moonbeam Award; the Chocolate Lily Award; the Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize; the Red Cedar Award; Surrey Schools Book of the Year Award; the Sheila Egoff Book Prize and the Silver Birch Prize. Luanne presently lives on her farm on Kootenay Lake. Her previous book from Caitlin was The Light Through the Trees.

Nanci Lee is a poet and adult educator from Halifax working with savings groups in Africa and Asia. Her poems have been published in various journals including Matrix Magazine, Antigonish Review, the Fiddlehead, the Literary Review of Canada, Free Fall, Quills, Contemporary Verse2, Her Royal Majesty. In 2009 she won the Halifax CBC poetry face-off and in 2008 the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia’s unpublished manuscript prize for poetry. In May, 2010, she was the Wallace Stegner Resident in Eastend, Saskatchewan and attended Banff Writing Studio.

Leona Theis's most recent novel, If Sylvie Had Nine Lives (Freehand, 2020), offers her protagonist nine different chances to "get life right". Leona's first book, Sightlines, linked stories that form a portrait of a town, won two Saskatchewan Book  Awards. Excerpts from her novel The Art of Salvage were shortlisted for novella awards on both the east and west coasts of Canada. Her personal essays have been published in literary magazines in Canada and the United States, won creative nonfiction awards from the CBC and Prairie Fire Magazine, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Stories, and American Short Fiction, where her work won the story prize. She lives in Saskatoon, on Treaty 6 territory.

Shelley A. Leedahl is a prolific multi-genre writer. Her most recent books are The Moon Watched It All; I Wasn't Always Like This; Listen, Honey; Wretched Beast; and The House of the Easily Amused. In 2020 she was the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts' Digital Originals grant. Leedahl has been the recipient of a number of national and international Fellowships. The Saskatchewan-born and raised writer now lives in Ladysmith on Vancouver Island.

Peter Such was born in England and came as a youngster to Canada in 1953. He graduated from Victoria College, University of Toronto (M.A. 1966). He has written a CBC prime time tv series, Homefires; an award-winning film documentary, Free Dive; plays, opera librettos, academic works, poetry, short stories, nonfiction and 5 novels. He is a founding member of The Writers' Union of Canada and founding vice-president of CMPA. He is married to artist Joyce Kline. He is currently President of the Victoria College of Art, and Past President of the Victoria Arts Council.

December 2023

Kyle Flemmer is an author, editor, and publisher from Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. He recently completed an MA in English Literature at the University of Calgary, where he researched digital poetics. Kyle founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Company in 2014 and served as Managing Editor of filling Station magazine from 2018-2020. He has published several chapbooks, most recently Little Songs by No Press and The Heavy Crown by nOIR:Z. Kyle's first book, Barcode Poetry, was published by The Blasted Tree in 2021. Please find more information at @kyleflemmer on Twitter or kyle_flemmer on Instagram

September 2023

Benj is the author of three best-selling books. Some have been translated into other languages. He writes for The Globe and Mail and various other publications in Canada and the United States. Six of his plays have seen the stage across Canada. He is a co-founder of one of Canada’s largest performance festivals, SummerWorks, started in 1991 and continuing to thrive. Speaking engagements, which he loves, have included Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Palm Springs, South Africa and many universities. Benj has traveled to over 35 countries, working in many of them. This included a stint with the Centre for International Studies and Cooperation (CECI) doing anti-poverty work in Nepal; teaching in Czechoslovakia soon after the Velvet Revolution and working in the Middle East and France. All the roads were a set-up to the Wallace Stegner House in Eastend, Saskatchewan!!!

November 2023

Ayaz’s books include Happy You Are Here, Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets and How Beautiful People Are. His work recently appeared in ARC Poetry Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Guest 16 and The Malahat Review. His books have been reviewed in The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, ARC Poetry Magazine, Qwerty Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The Ampersand Review, and HA&L Hamilton Arts and Letters.

August 2023

Laura Kassar holds an M.A in Philosophy from the University of Montreal and is now a Ph.D candidate in the department of Religious Sciences. Her doctoral research is funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She is a member of the Quebec inter-university feminist studies network (RéQEF). In recent years, she has also taught French as a second language in Germany and has been involved with an inclusive and alternative welding coop in Montreal called La Coulée, where she has learned to experiment with metalworking techniques. She is currently interested in reflecting upon the relationships between sculptural and interpretive practices.

August 2023

Félix Lamarche is a Montreal-based independent filmmaker exploring the possibilities of the documentary praxis. "Far Away Lands", his first feature, was released in 2017 and won the Pierre and Yolande Perrault award the same year for best first documentary feature. Since then, he directed and produced a string of short films which were screened at film festivals in Canada and abroad. In 2021, he participated in an intensive 11 days international workshop with filmmaker Werner Herzog, which led to the completion of a short fiction film. "A Night Song", his most recent documentary, had its world premiere at Dok Leipzig in Germany in October 2022. His work deals with relationships between humans and the landscape through an exploration of subjective visions, as well as the many strange facets reality can take. He is interested in both traditional and experimental film language and is currently working on his second documentary feature.

July 2023

Amanda Hale is a multi-genre Canadian writer with four novels, two collections of short fiction, and two poetry chapbooks published. She won the Prism International prize for creative non-fiction and has twice been a finalist for the Relit Fiction award. She is the librettist for Pomegranate, an opera to be toured by the Canadian Opera Company in 2023, based on her poetry collection - Pomegranate: A Tale of Remembering. For more information about Amanda check here: www.amandahale.com

June 2023

Emilie Teresa Smith is an Argentine-born, Canadian-raised Anglican priest who has dedicated her life to the defense of our sacred planet home. Since the age of seven she has loved writing, crafting her first book (with illustrations) called The Poor Snake. Since then she has written several books, for adults and for children. She has also published numerous articles and essays, especially about her work in Latin America, where she has lived on-and-off for several years. Emilie believes that NOW is the time for us to take hold of what it means to be human creatures, part of this wide web of life, and to rediscover the power of radical love for one another.

May 2023

I studied and practiced visual arts and creative writing alongside a 38 year career as a fisheries biologist in the Pacific Northwest. For 30 years, I have been a printmaker in Vancouver winning best local printmaker at the Biennial International Mini Print show in 2008. I exhibit new print art annually at our Granville Island studio. My photographic art has been shown in a number of publications and reviews of my printmaking have appeared in the Vancouver Sun, Galleries West/BC Living and Pacific Rim Magazine.

Wallace Stegner’s novels conjure memories of my family history immersed in prairie life. A stay at Wallace Stegner house appeals to me as a biologist, birder, printmaker, photographer and as a poet. I am especially grateful to be spending time at Eastend during a transition season to observe the environment as one season gives way to the next and spring bird migration begins. Here, where prairie and foothills meet, I can explore the unique geology, topography and biology of the area. I will adopt the ancient Japanese calendar of 72 seasons, making detailed observations across creative disciplines to explore a close connection to, and collaboration with, the landscape. I would like to speak to residents for their views on both seasonal change and any longer term changes observed. Knowing that Wallace Stegner was also an environmentalist resonates with me.

March 2023

Megan Cole is a tattooed food enthusiast with an obsessive reading habit. As a journalist Megan has worked for community newspapers, CBC Radio, and Canadian Press. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Puritan, Invisiblog, untethered, Hungry Zine, Chatelaine, and The Fiddlehead. Megan is working on her first creative nonfiction book titled Nice Boys Don’t Kiss Like That: Womanhood Explored through ‘90s Rom-Coms, MSN Messenger, and First Loves. When Megan isn’t writing, reading, knitting or cooking, she’s working as the director of programming and communications for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes. She lives and works on the territory of the Tla'amin Nation in BC. For more about Megan visit her website at megancolewriter.com

April 2023

Caroline Woodward writes for children and adults with nine published books to date, including her picture book for children, Singing Away the Dark, which is now published in French, Korean, Bulgarian, Chinese and Japanese. She grew up on a homestead in the Peace River region of B.C. which has inspired many of her books and for which she was awarded an honorary arts degree by Northern Lights College in 2016. Most recently she spent 14 years as a lighthouse keeper on B.C.'s west coast, about which she wrote in her best-selling book, Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper. For more information about Caroline please check here www.carolinewoodward.ca or woodwardonwords.blogspot.com

February 2023

Danny Peart was born in Port Dalhousie, Ontario and currently resides in Vancouver, B.C. He is supported by his wife, Janette Lindley, two sons, Max and Nick, and a Yellow Lab, Mila. He has worked as a Bartender, a Personal Trainer, and the Parts Manager for a farm equipment dealer in Ontario. He has published 4 books: Ruined by Love (poems), Stark Naked in a Laundromat (stories & poems), Another Mountain to Climb (poems), Not Quite So Handsome (poems). He is most comfortable reading and writing in a quiet café. (daily) Though he seeks the mountains often for hiking, skiing and snowshoeing.

January 2023

Gayle finds inspiration for her writing on her farm with her husband, dog, and horses in Treaty Six territory, Northeast Saskatchewan. Her career as a writer follows years of teaching in First Nations classrooms both in northern and southern Saskatchewan, Community College and as an English as a Second Language instructor with the Saskatoon Public School Division and Global Gathering Place. She published her short story “Snowbird” in the 2022 edition of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild magazine, Spring and is currently working to complete a historical fiction novel, The Will. For information about Writing The Will, you can refer to her website http://gaylenemeth.ca. Gayle shares the love Wallace Stegner had for the land and finds his writing to have considerable influence on her own.

December 2022

Marie has been working for several years on related poetry and creative non-fiction projects. She has taken part in several Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild self-guided and facilitated writing retreats and a long-term writing class with Candace Savage. She has been honing her writing practice with a stable writing group.

August 2022

Caitlin McCullam-Arnal is a writer who grew up in Loree, Ontario. She draws inspiration from things that piss her off and make her smile. She lives in Treaty 4, Southwest Saskatchewan with her husband and eight rescue animals. She is published in the anthology, apart: a year of pandemic poetry and prose, Transition, and Spring magazines. She co-facilitated The Writing for Mental Health Workshops 2019-2020 at Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, Treaty 4, SK. Currently, she is working on a novel-in-progress, Dame.

August 2022

Lois A Unger grew up in rural Saskatchewan and learned about the value and joy of spending tme outside with my camera, and how photography is a means of communication. Lois has presented her work in solo and group art shows locally and beyond. A huge honour was when Tourism Saskatchewan chose her genre.

I love the sky and the many cloud formations. I feel there are hidden messages from the universe. My project would be titled THE SKY WITH NO LIMITS.

January 2022

Stuart Ian McKay is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and the League of Canadian Poets. He is a two time winner of CBC's Alberta Anthology. McKay lives in Calgary.

February 2022

Ashlyn George, an award-winning travel writer based in Saskatoon, SK. As one of the go-to travel experts in Saskatchewan, Ashlyn is writing her first book that chronicles her outdoor adventures in the province, including a “how-to” guide so others can be inspired to explore further in a province that often gets overlooked for epic adventures.

March 2022

Kate Finegan is a fiction writer whose work is supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. She is novel/novella editor for Split/Lip Press. She was winner of PRISM International's 2020 Jacob Zilber Prize for short fiction and was awarded The Fiddlehead’s 2017 fiction prize for a story. She grew up mostly in Tennessee and recently moved from Toronto to Saskatchewan with her spouse and two cats. While at the Wallace Stegner House, Kate will be working on fiction that explores the permeability of the body within its environments. Inspired by place and the complexities of home, she is looking forward to experiencing Eastend in the winter.

April 2022

Edward Peck studied photography, fine arts, conceptual art, historical technics, film, and literature at the University of British Columbia. Peck works collaboratively with other visual artists, exhibiting locally and internationally. Peck also edited and produced anthologies of Canadian Literature as well as assisted in the editing of a Canadian literary journal. This has led to his editing and production of artist books and exhibition catalogues.

April 2022

Phyllis Schwartz, a multi-disciplinary artist and curator, is an Emily Carr University of Art + Design graduate. Phyllis is the recipient of the Canon Photography Award. Her photography has been installed, exhibited and published locally, across Canada and internationally; her works are in corporate, public and private collections. We plan to use photography and writing to respond to the landscape, environment and community to produce a body of visual work and an artist book, while exploring elements of Stegner’s works, specifically Wolf Willow. See also Edward Peck.

May 2022

Shirley Mackenzie has a Bachelor’s degree in art and design, with a postgraduate degree in ceramics. She has enjoyed a career in teaching and is now retired. Mackenzie’s art work is intimate and tactile – not large scale. Her sketchpads are full of drawings capturing fleeting expression in portraiture and the ethereal and spiritual aspects in landscape. She is equally absorbed in the intricacies and repetitions of patterns which seem to her an aesthetic management of chaos. Mackenzie likes to capture transition, the in-between. Often she translates these drawings into clay, incorporating fabrics and metals to bring her ideas into the real world.

Alexis will be writing acoustic songs in French and English that explore her linguistic insecurities and francophone identity - themes that are connected to a documentary film she wrote and directed for the National Film Board this past August.

October 2021

Julie was born in Vancouver and has lived in many cities and towns both in and out of Canada. Julie is an award-winning author of seven books for young adults. Her last novel, Saying Goodbye to London was named one of the five outstanding books for children in the 2018, BC Book Prizes.

September 2021

Maria Sabaye Moghaddam is the recipient of the 2021 Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts. Maria is a writer, storyteller, and arts educator from Ottawa.

August 2021

Dr. Beverly Sandalack is a Professor at the University of Calgary (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape) and a practicing landscape architect and planner. She writes, draws and paints.  Her PhD thesis and several subsequent papers dealt with a methodology for urban analysis and design, with three prairie towns (including Eastend) as case studies. As part of a research process she completed abstract paintings of the three towns, and the painting of Eastend emphasized the river and the landscape.  

July 2021

Brian Hoxha is a painter of light whose work explores the natural world and the beauty and solace that he has found in the sunlit silence of nature. Serenity and solitude are his rewards, and he welcomes the viewer into this world through his landscape prints. While on location, Hoxha works either in oils or watercolours. In the studio, these works are translated into etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts. Hoxha often facilitates his travels by pursuing various residency programs in places where he would like to paint. These journeys have taken him to Montana, Newfoundland and Ireland.

June 2021

Hagen has created over 40 plays, some of which have toured across Canada, and produced in the U.S. and Europe. His focus is LGBTQ history, uncovering hidden histories through extensive research, combining archives, evidence and eyewitness accounts with imagined scenes to tell stories of injustice against the LGBTQ population.

April 2021

Danica Klewchuk is based in Edmonton, Alberta. In 2020, she was a mentee of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Mentorship program. Her work has appeared in Event and The Gateway Review, and is forthcoming in Crazyhorse.

February/March 2021

Barbara Meneley is a prairie-based intermedia artist. Her art practice operates through performance, media, cartography, writing, installation, and dialogic engagement. Through these forms, she engages with the landscapes and foundations of contemporary society and culture to develop site-responsive projects that investigate Canadian national imaginaries and her own position as a contemporary settler/settler descendent/treaty person on this land.

Carpenter began writing as a reviewer and translator before turning to writing fiction in the mid-1980s. Since 1985, he has published five novels and three collections of novellas and short fiction.

I began as a practising artist in Winnipeg, MB, where I graduated from the University of Manitoba, School of Art in 1972 and continued my practice in Winnipeg until 2004 when I moved to Victoria, BC, where I maintain a studio at Rock Bay Square, a old building catering to artist and artisans. Winnipeg, Toronto and Victoria are places where my art has been exhibited.

Kim Fu is a Canadian-born writer living in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of two novels and a collection of poetry. Her first story collection, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, will be published by Tin House Books in 2022.

Deborah Willis was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. Her first book, Vanishing and Other Stories, was named one of the Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2009, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. She was a bookseller at Munro's Books in Victoria, BC, a writer-in-residence at Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver, BC, the 2012-2013 Calgary Distinguished Writers Program writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, and the Writer in Residence at MacEwan University in Edmonton. She currently works for Freehand Books in Calgary and is a proud volunteer at The Women’s Centre of Calgary.

Katherin Edwards, former maid, gardener, floral designer and racehorse groom is now currently employed as a home support worker. A two-time winner at Eden Mills for poetry, her work has been published in The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review and ARC poetry magazine. Katherin’s nonfiction can be found in the anthology “In the Together” and in 2016, she was longlisted for CBC’s short fiction contest for “The Sound of his Fall.” She has also won the Malahat Review’s Far Horizon Award for fiction. She lives in Kamloops, B.C.

Anne Laurel Carter grew up in Don Mills. She’s been a librarian, an ESL and FSL teacher, and milked cows in a dairy. The ideas for her 19 books came from her experiences, interviews of interesting people or from her imagination. She divides her time between Toronto Island and Nova Scotia and if she’s not reading or walking a beach, she’s out for a bike ride or playing the ukulele.

Victor Enns was born in Winnipeg and raised in southern Manitoba. He graduated from the University of Manitoba with a History/English major. A founding Board member of the Manitoba Writer’s Guild, he was the Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, and founder of Windscript magazine. He spent the next 20 years in arts administration, including 4 years as the Executive Director of the Manitoba Arts Council, while raising a family. He founded Rhubarb magazine. Lucky Man, (Hagios, 2005) was nominated for the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award.

Anne Heeney attended Sir George Williams University (Montreal) Fine Arts in 1971-'72, and enrolled also in Fine Arts at the University of Victoria from 2006 to 2008.. When the animation industry digitized at the end of the millennium, she retired to a full-time private studio practice first in Moose Jaw and subsequently in Victoria. Her paintings have been shown at the Mendel, the MacKenzie, and are in the permanent collection of the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery. Wolf Willow is a secular kind of scripture.

Luanne Armstrong has written twenty books. She writes young adult books, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She has contributed to many anthologies and edited a Canadian non-fiction anthology called Slice Me Some Truth. She has been nominated or won many awards, including the Moonbeam Award; the Chocolate Lily Award; the Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize; the Red Cedar Award; Surrey Schools Book of the Year Award; the Sheila Egoff Book Prize and the Silver Birch Prize. Luanne presently lives on her farm on Kootenay Lake. Her previous book from Caitlin was The Light Through the Trees.

Gerald Hill published his 7th poetry collection, Crooked at the Far End, in 2020. He created a launch in the form of a series of videos to accompany poems from the book. The first of these, Invocation, is set at the Stegner House. A two-time winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry, he was Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan in 2016.

Matthew (Matt) Hughes writes fantasy, space opera, and crime fiction. He has sold 23 novels to publishers large and small in the UK, US, and Canada, as well as 90 works of short fiction to professional markets. He has won the Endeavour and Arthur Ellis Awards, and has been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, Endeavour (twice), A.E. Van Vogt, Neffy, and Derringer Awards. He has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Hall of Fame.

Nanci Lee is a poet and adult educator from Halifax working with savings groups in Africa and Asia. Her poems have been published in various journals including Matrix Magazine, Antigonish Review, the Fiddlehead, the Literary Review of Canada, Free Fall, Quills, Contemporary Verse2, Her Royal Majesty. In 2009 she won the Halifax CBC poetry face-off and in 2008 the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia’s unpublished manuscript prize for poetry. In May, 2010, she was the Wallace Stegner Resident in Eastend, Saskatchewan and attended Banff Writing Studio.

Mari-Lou Rowley has published eight previous collections of poetry, most recently Suicide Psalms (Anvil Press), which was shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award, and Transforium (JackPine Press) in collaboration with visual artist Tammy Lu. Her work has appeared internationally in literary, arts, and science-related journals. She is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Saskatchewan in new media, neuroplasticity, and empathy.

Cynthia Flood is a Canadian short-story writer and novelist. The Animals in their Elements appeared in 1987, followed by My Father Took a Cake to France (1992), both from Talonbooks. A novel, Making a Stone of the Heart (Key Porter) appeared in 2002. Short fictions that grew into a linked sequence, The English Stories, appeared with Biblioasis in 2009) and Red Girl Rat Boy appeared in 2013.

Gerald Hill published his 7th poetry collection, Crooked at the Far End, in 2020. He created a launch in the form of a series of videos to accompany poems from the book. The first of these, Invocation, is set at the Stegner House. A two-time winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry, he was Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan in 2016.

Leona Theis's most recent novel, If Sylvie Had Nine Lives (Freehand, 2020), offers her protagonist nine different chances to "get life right". Leona's first book, Sightlines, linked stories that form a portrait of a town, won two Saskatchewan Book  Awards. Excerpts from her novel The Art of Salvage were shortlisted for novella awards on both the east and west coasts of Canada. Her personal essays have been published in literary magazines in Canada and the United States, won creative nonfiction awards from the CBC and Prairie Fire Magazine, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Journey Prize Stories, and American Short Fiction, where her work won the story prize. She lives in Saskatoon, on Treaty 6 territory.

Shelley A. Leedahl is a prolific multi-genre writer. Her most recent books are The Moon Watched It All; I Wasn't Always Like This; Listen, Honey; Wretched Beast; and The House of the Easily Amused. In 2020 she was the recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts' Digital Originals grant. Leedahl has been the recipient of a number of national and international Fellowships. The Saskatchewan-born and raised writer now lives in Ladysmith on Vancouver Island.

Peter Such was born in England and came as a youngster to Canada in 1953. He graduated from Victoria College, University of Toronto (M.A. 1966). He has written a CBC prime time tv series, Homefires; an award-winning film documentary, Free Dive; plays, opera librettos, academic works, poetry, short stories, nonfiction and 5 novels. He is a founding member of The Writers' Union of Canada and founding vice-president of CMPA. He is married to artist Joyce Kline. He is currently President of the Victoria College of Art, and Past President of the Victoria Arts Council.

Philip L. Fradkin shared the Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and was western editor of Audubon magazine. He is the author of ten previous books, including A River No More: The Colorado River and the West. He lives on the coast north of San Francisco.

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honourary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser Universities. Her books have received numerous national awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry. Lorna Crozier lives on Vancouver Island.

Born in Bistroff par Grotsenquin, France, Liza Potvin has lived in Denmark, Korea, India, Japan and Southeast Asia. With a Ph.D from McMaster University in 1991, she has taught at Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo. Her first book White Lies (for my mother) is an autobiography about incest and the victim's longing for her mother's help. White Lies won the Edna Staebler Award in Creative Non-Fiction.

Elaine Breault Hammond, the author of the best-selling The Secret Under the Whirlpool, Under the Waterfall, and Explosion at Dawson Creek, has lived in six provinces as well as in the United States. She and her family lived on Prince Edward Island. Now she divides her time between PEI in the summertime and Kingston, Ontario, the rest of the year, where she is close to four of her seven grandchildren.

Barbara Klar’s first book, The Night You Called Me a Shadow, won the Gerald Lampert Award. The Blue Field, her second book, was nominated for the 1999 Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry. Klar is also the author of the chapbook, Tower Road, from JackPine Press. Cypress is her third collection. She recently relocated from west-central Saskatchewan to Eastend, where she is working on a new poetry manuscript and a collection of essays.

Joan Skogan has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the CBC Literary Essay Competition and the Western Magazine Award.

She is the author of The Good Companion, Voyages at Sea with Strangers, The Princess and the Sea Bear and Other Tsimshian Stories, Grey Cat at Sea and Skeena: A River Remembered.

She lived on Gabriola island, B.C. until her passing in 2017.

Beryl Young writes novels, picture books and biographies for children of all ages. She has an upcoming picture book biography of Tommy Douglas. Among her many award nominations she has won the Chocolate Lily Best Book Award, the Silver Moonbeam medal (US) and the Reader's Choice Award at the Rainforest of Reading.

Terry Jordan is an award-winning fiction writer, musician, essayist and dramatist whose stage plays have been produced across the country, in the U.S and Ireland. His book of stories It's a Hard Cow won a Saskatchewan Book Award and was nominated for the Commonwealth Book Prize. He currently resides in Saskatoon.

Seán Virgo was born in Malta, and grew up in South Africa, Malaya, Ireland and the U.K. He immigrated to Canada in 1966 and became a citizen in 1972. Virgo has published a number of works of both poetry and fiction, most recently, A Traveller Came By (2000); nonagon fugue ( 2007); and, Begging Questions (2007). He has read his work around the world, and has worked as a writing teacher, actor, and television host.

Born in Craik, Saskatchewan in 1972, Johnson grew up in Eastend, Saskatchewan. The Eastend area has deeply influenced her and has become, as she says, a template for her sensibility. Johnson has had poems appear in a number of Canadian literary magazines.

Gregory Nelson is an award-winning writer and producer for television, theatre and radio who has dedicated his career to creating characters and stories that are uniquely Canadian. A prolific playwright, Nelson’s works for the stage have been published and produced across Canada and have won multiple awards, including two Alberta Book Awards and first prize in the Canadian National Playwriting Competition.