Elinor Florence
June 2024
Elinor Florence grew up on a farm near North Battleford, Saskatchewan and worked as a journalist for the next thirty years, at newspapers including the Western Producer in Saskatoon, the Red Deer Advocate, the Winnipeg Sun, and the Vancouver Province. In 1996 she moved with her young family to the mountain resort of Invermere, B.C., where she spent the next eight years as a regular writer for Reader’s Digest Canada before publishing her own community newspaper, the Columbia Valley Pioneer. After leaving journalism, Elinor turned to historical fiction. Her first novel Bird’s Eye View, about a Saskatchewan farm girl who joins the air force in the Second World War and becomes an interpreter of aerial photographs, was published by Dundurn Press in 2014 and became a Globe & Mail bestseller. She appears regularly at public events where she speaks about the inspiration behind her work. She has also written a monthly blog for the past ten years, Letters From Windermere. Elinor is now working on her third novel, about women homesteaders in Western Canada. You may sign up for her blog and read more about her books at www.elinorflorence.com.
Emilie Smith
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.
Karim Alrawi
June 2022
Karim Alrawi is is the recipient of the 2022 Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts. Karim's plays have been produced in the UK, USA and Canada. He has had productions in London's West End and New York's off-Broadway.
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.
Anne Laurel Carter
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
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
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
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
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
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.