Barbara Klar
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.
Candace Savage
Candace Savage is the award-winning author of more than two dozen books including A Geography of Blood, which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and Prairie: a Natural History, winner of the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, she was inducted into the Honor Roll of the Rachel Carson Institute, Chatham College, in Pittsburgh in 1994. In addition to her work as a writer, she is member of both the Saskatoon Fiddle Orchestra and Le Choeur des plaines and also chairs Wild about Saskatoon’s NatureCity Festival. She lives in Saskatoon and Eastend, Saskatchewan.
Joan Skogan
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.
Wayne Grady
Wayne Grady is the award-winning author of Emancipation Day, a novel of denial and identity. With his wife, novelist Merilyn Simonds, he co-authored Breakfast at the Exit Café: Travels Through America. And with David Suzuki he co-wrote the international bestseller Tree: A Life Story. He has also translated fourteen works of fiction from the French. In 1989, he won the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Maillet’s On the Eighth Day. Grady teaches creative writing in the optional-residency MFA program at the University of British Columbia. He and Merilyn Simonds live in the country north of Kingston, Ontario.
Seán Virgo
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.
Sherry Johnson
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
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.
Terry Jordan
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.
Deborah Willis
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.