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.
Mari-Lou Rowley
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
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.
Philip L. Fradkin
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.