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 In 2009 she won the Halifax CBC poetry face-off and in 2008 the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia’s unpublished manuscript prize for poetry.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.
Peter Such
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.
Lisa Potvin
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 Hammond
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
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.