Alexia Normand
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.
Julie Burtinshaw
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.
Maria Sabaye Moghaddam
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.
Beverly Sandalack
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.
Brian Hoxka
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.
Darrin Hagen
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.
Danica Klewchuk
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.
Barbara Meneley
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.
Tara Dawn Solheim
January 2021
Tara Dawn Solheim works across genres, her original creations integrate poetry and melody in performance. Tara Dawn spent a year in the UK and later five years in Japan where she performed extensively and wrote for a number of music groups. Her experiences have led her to explore the physicality of the voice. She is currently working on a new collection of performance poetry pieces.