Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, Vince Agro graduated from King's College at the University of Western Ontario. He has taught high school English, served on the Hamilton City Council and worked in the insurance industry. He has previously published one nonfiction collection, You Can Fight City Hall.
Author photo: Jodi LaPlante
Luanne Armstrong is the author of fourteen books, including poetry collections, novels and children's books. She has been nominated for the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year, the Sheila Egoff BC Book Prize award, the Red Cedar award and the Relit Prize for Fiction. Luanne Armstrong is an adjunct professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
Oana Avasilichioaei is a poet and translator whose work explores history, geography, public space, textual architecture, multilingualism, translation, textual and collaborative performance, and who transformed the landscape of Vancouver’s Hastings Park into an acclaimed book of poems, feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008). She has translated Nichita Stanescu from Romanian, published as Occupational Sickness (BuschekBooks, 2006), created visual textworks for galleries in Montreal and Vancouver, and has performed her work in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe. She recently collaborated with Erín Moure on Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009), a dialogic work exploring the boundaries between author/translator and original/copy. The Islands, a translation of Les Îles by Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir, is forthcoming from Wolsak and Wynn in 2011 and We, Beasts, Avasilichioaei's newest poetry collection, in 2012.
Author photo: Anthony Burnham
"Douglas Barbour, an innovative poet keenly attuned to the spoken word, adapts the ancient verse form of the ghazal in this contemporary collection. You don't 'snuggle' with the poetry of Doug Barbour. You strap yourself in & feel the burn." – rob mclennan
Joan Baxter is a Canadian journalist, award-winning author and anthropologist. In 2002, she was one of the first journalists to gain entry to the rebel-held Côte d'Ivoire to report on the civil war. She reported for many years for the BBC World Service, The Associated Press, and has contributed various features to a variety of CBC programs.
Author photo: Wes Baxter
Maxianne Berger enjoys a lively literary career. She has contributed to fifteen anthologies, notably In Fine Form (2005) and The Paradelle (2005). Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Mahalat Review, The North American Review and The Hamilton Stone Review. Her translations of francophone poets have appeared in Maisonneuve, Poetry (Chicago) and in the British anthology Poetry to Heal your Blues (2005). Active in the French and English haiku and tanka communities, she reviews for Gust and writes about poetics for the Revue du tanka francophone. Her literary memberships include The League of Canadian Poets, Quebec Writers' Federation, Haiku Canada and Tanka Canada. And when not involved in writing, she is an audiologist at the McGill University Health Centre in Montréal.
Author photo: Doug Williams
Gregory Bettsis an award-winning author, editor and professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. He has been teaching literature for a dozen years now at four different universities in Canada and Germany. He has published five books of poetry, edited five books of experimental Canadian writing, and recently published Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies and Graduate Program Director of Canadian and American Studies at Brock.
Katherine Bitney is author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry: While You Were Out, Heart and Stone, and Singing Bone. A fourth collection is forthcoming from Turnstone Press for fall 2012. She has worked as editor, mentor, creative writing instructor, arts juror and literary creative director for over thirty years in Manitoba. Most recently she developed the text for Cantus Borealis, a choral piece on the Boreal with composer Sid Robinovitch (premiered April 2011). Katherine Bitney holds a Master's degree in Religion.
Lesley-Anne Bourne grew up in North Bay, Ontario. She received her Hons. B.A. in English and Creative Writing at York University and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and has been a participant several times in the Writing Program at The Banff Centre for the Arts. She is the author of three books of poetry – The Story of Pears (1990), Skinny Girls (1993), and Field Day (1996) – and a novel, The Bubble Star (1998). Her writing has appeared in various anthologies, including Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets and Coastlines: the Poetry of Atlantic Canada. Her awards include the Air Canada Award, administered by the Canadian Authors’ Association, for a writer under thirty with outstanding promise; the Bliss Carman Poetry Award; and the PEI Milton Acorn Poetry Award. She has been a creative writing instructor for the Maritime Writers' Workshop at the University of New Brunswick and Artsperience at Canadore College in North Bay. She teaches Creative Writing and University 100 (First-year Experience) at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Jacquie Buncel is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She is active in Holocaust Education Programs across Toronto, and has been studying and writing about the Jewish experience for over ten years. She is also the exceutive director of the Sunshine Centre for Seniors, a community-based organization that works with isolated seniors.
Author photo: Greg van Riel
Heather Roberts Cadsby was born in Belleville Ontario and moved to Toronto at a young age. She obtained a B.A. degree from McMaster University and taught elementary school for a number of years. In the '80s she helped organize poetry readins at the Axle-Tree Coffee House in Toronto. Currently she is on the Board of advisors for the Art Bar Poetry Series. A Tantrum of Synonyms is her third book of poetry.
Domenico Capilongo's writing has appeared in publications abroad and in Canadian literary journals including The New Quarterly, Filling Station, Descant, and Acta Victoriana. In 2005 his work was nominated for the Journey Prize. He received an honourable mention in the Toronto Star Poetry contest in 2004. Capilongo lived in Vancouver and Swift Current before finally settling in Toronto.
Author photo: Lynda Anthony
Ron Charach is a practicing psychiatrist and poet. He is the author of seven previous books and his writing has appeared in newspapers and literary magazines across Canada and the United States. He was awarded the Canadian Jewish Award for Poetry in 2003.
Author photo: Dan Roitner
Lesley Choyce lives at Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, where he surfs the North Atlantic year round. He is one of Canada's most versatile man of letters, the author of more than 70 books in genres including autobiography, history, poetry, fiction and young adult novels. He has won the Ann Connor Brimer Award, the Dartmouth Book Award and was named the Best Writer of Halifax by readers of The Coast five years in a row. He has been short-listed for many other awards, including The White Pine Award, The Stephen Leacock Medal and the Alberta Book Award. Two of his novels, The Republic of Nothing and Cold Clear Morning are being developed as feature films.
Author photo:Daniel Abriel
Since publishing his first essay in R. Crumb’s Weirdo magazine, David Collier has been known for his thoughtful comic essays, often biographies of endearing eccentrics like himself. With his strong feeling for rustic scenery, Collier has carved a niche drawing homely images of grain elevators and abandoned cabins for publications like The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Saturday Night and Geist.
Author Image by David Collier
Born in 1948 in Sorel, Québec, Louise Cotnoir has published over fifteen books of poetry, fiction and drama. Many of her books have received critical acclaim, including nominations for the Governor General’s Award. She has participated in numerous conferences on writing and women and has served on the editorial boards or collaborated in other ways with many Canadian and international journals, including Sorcières, Estuaire, Arcade, Tessera, Matrix, Moebius, Room of One's Own, Ellipse, Trivia, Silencíada Festada Palabra, El Ciervo and Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme. Some of her works have been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Swedish and Chinese. Her next collection of poetry, Les sœurs de, will be published by Éditions du Noroît in 2011.
Author photo: Alexis Laflamme, Drazel Photo
As an actor, writer, radio personality, director, festival organizer, long-time arts promoter, and poet, Don Cullen has dedicated his life to the arts in Canada. His ground-breaking coffee house, the Bohemian Embassy, is only one of the ways he brought the arts into the lives of Canadians, but it is one of his most storied efforts and deserves to be told to us in Cullen's own wry style.
Barry Dempster was born in Toronto, Ontario, and educated in child psychology. He is the author of a novel, a children's book, two volumes of short stories and eleven collections of poetry. He has been nominated for the Governor General's Award twice; for his first book, Fables for Isolated Men, and most recently for The Burning Alphabet, which won the Canadian Authors Association Chalmers Award for poetry. From 1990 to 1997, he was Poetry and Reviews Editor for Poetry Canada. Presently, he is Senior Acquisitions Editor with Brick Books. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has been on the faculty at The Banff Centre as mentor for the Writing Studio, Wired Writing and Writing with Style programs; has conducted master classes all across the country and as far away as Chile; and has been the Writer-in-Residence at the Richmond Hill Public Library twice. His most recent books include Love Outlandish, Ivan’s Birches and Blue Wherever.
Author photo: DMN Photo Art
Jamie Dopp is an Associate Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Victoria. He has published a variety of articles on Canadian fiction, poetry, and culture, as well as one novel and two books of poems. In 2004, during a very rare cold spell in Victoria, he stayed up all night to build a backyard ice rink and managed to have three blissful days of outdoor hockey with his family.
Author photo: Stephen Dopp
Glen Downie has published half a dozen books of poetry and in 2008 was awarded the Toronto Book Award for his collection, Loyalty Management. His work has appeared in the secondary school textbook Inside Poetry, as well as in many anthologies and journals. Formerly a social worker in cancer care, he served a term as writer-in-residence at Dalhousie University’s Medical Humanities Program before returning to a life of anonymity in Toronto as an at-home father.
Louise Dupré is a poet, novelist and literary critic whose work has appeared extensively in magazines and journals in Canada and abroad, and who has won several prizes. She has published eight collections of poetry including Noir déjà, Tout près and Une écharde sous ton ongle. She has also written two novels, Memoria and The Milky Way, and a collection of short stories, Highwire Summer, all translated in English by Liedewij Hawke. A collection of her poetry, The Blueness of Light, was translated in English by Antonio D’Alfonso. In 2006, Tout comme elle, staged by Brigitte Haentjens, was presented in Montreal, Quebec and Ottawa.
Author photo: Jean-Pierre Masse
Deirdre Dwyer lives in Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia, and teaches at Dalhousie University and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She is the author of one previous book of poetry, The Breath that Lightens the Body, and is a winner of the Writers' Federatin of Nova Scotia's poetry prize. Going to the Eyestone is her first book with Wolsak and Wynn.
Lee Easton works in the Department of English at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. He began his lifelong habit of reading superhero comics in Sudbury, Ontario, after receiving an issue of World's Finest Comics. He has taught courses about comics at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, and at Mount Royal University alongside his colleague and collaborator, Richard Harrison. In addition to teaching and writing about superhero comics, Lee also writes about the representation of gender and sexuality in film and science fiction. He is currently the chair of the Department of English at Mount Royal University.
Author photo: Robert Manderson
Polly Fleck loves words, and has been a student and teacher of literature all her life. She has an M.A. in Old and Middle English (University of Western Ontario) and has taught at Western and at l'Universite Canadienne en France at Villefranche-sur-mer. She is a founding member of Squid Inc., a Toronto poets' group. Her first book, Polychronicon, was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 1984.
Eric Folsom attended McGill, Dalhousie, St. Mary’s and Queen’s Universities in Canada, and has lived in Kingston for the last thirty-five years. He is an occasional book reviewer and creative writing instructor, and was an editor for both the poetry zine Next Exit and Quarry magazine. He is the author of three books of poetry: Icon Driven; What Kind of Love Did You Have in Mind?; and Poems For Little Cataraqui. In 2005, he published a chapbook titled Northeastern Anti-ghazals with above/ground press and, in 2008, his work was included in the anthology Crossing Lines: Poets Who came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era. That year, he also participated in the Common Magic Conference, a tribute to Bronwen Wallace, at Queen’s University. Folsom was recently appointed as Kingston’s first-ever Poet Laureate.
Author Photo: Colleen Richardson
Griselda García is one of the principal voices of a younger generation of Argentine poets who have grown up in the cultural resurgence and economic uncertainty that have characterized Argentine life since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1983. She has published six collections of poetry and is highly active in the Buenos Aires literary world, both as co-editor of the small press La Carta de Oliver and as a key figure in Internet publication, which is a major component in the diffusion of contemporary Argentine writing. She has also worked with the literary review La Guacha, produced radio programs on culture and literature, worked in theatre and dance, and translated poetry by Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath into Spanish. Alucinaciones en la alfalfa y otros poemas / Hallucinations in the Alfalfa and Other Poems is the first published translation of her work into English.
Author photo: Rubén Silva
Jean Greenberg grew up in Welland, ON, and has lived and worked in Toronto since her university years. She is a librarian who writes and edits information about community services and women's health. She has a son and a grandson and is an avid amateur photographer.
David Groulx was raised in the Northern Ontario mining community of Elliot Lake. He is proud of his Native roots – his mother is Ojibwe Indian and his father French Canadian. David studied creative writing at the En’owkin Centre in Penticton, BC, in 1998–1999, where he won the Simon J. Lucas Jr. Memorial Award for poetry. He has written three previous poetry collections: Night in the Exude (Tyro Publications, 1997); The Long Dance (Kegedonce Press, 2000); and Under god’s pale bones (Kegedonce Press, 2010). David’s poetry has appeared in over 100 periodicals in England, Australia, Germany, Austria and the US. He lives in a log home near Ottawa.
Author photo: Janis Hoff
Stephen Guppy is the author of two previous books of poetry and a collection of short fiction. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Malaspina University College on Vancouver Island.
Originally from Brandon, Manitoba, Plynn Gutman left a career in the business world to follow her lifelong passion for writing. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is the former director of the Young Adult Writing Project sponsored by Arizona State University's English Department. Gutman is a writing coach, freelance editor and teaches writing classes and workshops in Canada, the US and the United Arab Emirates.
Author photo: Mitchell Gutman
Richard Harrison’s first comic book was a Marvel Tales collection of Spider-Man’s first battle with the Hulk, Thor vs. Sandu, the Human Torch vs. the Sub-Mariner and a scary cautionary tale told by the Wasp to a kid in the hospital, “Somewhere Waits a Wobbo.” Four fantasies for a quarter: it was a steal. He’s been reading ever since. Richard is a nationally recognized poet (Hero of the Play,Big Breath of a Wish), editor and essayist on topics ranging from philosophy to prayer, literary criticism to mathematics, and poetry to hockey – as well as his work on superheroes. A professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, he teaches English, Creative Writing, and courses in comics (with Lee Easton) and the graphic novel.
Author photo: Lisa Rouleau
Hugh Hazelton is a writer and translator who specializes in the work of Latin American writers living in Canada, as well as in comparisons between Canadian and Quebec literatures and those of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay). He has published four books of poetry and has translated eleven books from Spanish and French into English. His translation of Vétiver (Signature, 2005), a collection of poems by the Haitian-Canadian writer Joël Des Rosiers, won the Governor General's award for French-English translation in 2006. He teaches Spanish translation and Latin American civilization at Concordia University in Montreal.
Author photo: Edith Boucher-Hazelton
Susan Helwig lives in Toronto. For several years Susan Helwig produced and hosted the literary programme "In other words" at radio station CKLN-FM in Toronto. Her work has been widely publshed and anthologized throughout North America, from ACTA victoriana to Zygote. A lifelong obsession with food has started to pay dividends with the inclusion of one of her pieces in a book on Appalachian home cooking. Her first book, Catch the Sweet, was published to great acclaim in 2001. Pink Purse Girl is her second collection.
Robert Hillies was born and raised in Kenora, Ontario, and now lives in Calgary, Alberta, with his wife Rebecca and their two children Breanne and Austin. He teaches computer programming at the DeVry Institute of Technology. His first novel, Raising of Voices, won the Writers' Guild of Alberta Georges Bugnet Award for best novel. He also won the Governer General's Award for Poetry in 1994 for his book Cantos from a Small Room.
Cornelia Hoogland has published five poetry collections, most recently, Woods Wolf Girl (Wolsak and Wynn, 2011). Her poetry has been published internationally and has been short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards on multiple occasions. Hoogland is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario , and is the founder and the co-artistic director of Poetry London, an organization that brings prominent writers into lively discussion with local writers and readers. Hoogland divides her time between London, Ontario, and Hornby Island, BC.
Author photo: Hennie Aikman
Ken Howeis a dyed-in-the-wool Québécois born in Edmonton, who moved north to the idyllic town of Beaverlodge at age nine. He studied horn (a.k.a. French horn) performance in university and later became a Jesuit novice. Still later he landed a job as principal horn of the Regina Symphony, where he remained for eight years before being fired just as his first poetry collection, Household Hints for the End of Time, was being released. He now lives in Quebec City and has a fun job as a translator. His tenuous hold on sanity is ensured by his wife, E., and their son, Zachary.
Photo Credit: Zachary Howe
Sarah Klassen is a poet and fiction writer living and working in Winnipeg. Earlier, she taught English literature in a Winnipeg high school and for two years in Lithuania. Her first book, Journey to Yalta, recieved the Gerald Lampert Award in 1989 and two later collections were nominated for the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award. Her work has appeared in literary journals across Canada.
Zoë Landale's writing has appeared in over thirty anthologies and her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry has won signficant awards, including first prize for poetry in the CBC Literary Competition. Einstein’s Cat is her seventh book. She also edited, with Luanne Armstrong, Slice Me Some Truth: An anthology of Canadian creative nonfiction, which was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2011. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines including The New Quarterly, CV2, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, Chatelaine, and Canadian Living. She is a member of the Writer's Union of Canada and the Federation of BC Writers. Landale lives in British Columbia where she is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Author photo: Cathryn Lawrence
Richard Lemm is an award-winning author, and a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Prince Edward Island. He has published four previous collections of poetry, a book of short fiction, Shape of Things to Come, and a biography of Canada’s “People’s Poet,” Milton Acorn: In Love and Anger. His most recent poetry book before Burning House was Four ways of dealing with bullies (Wolsak and Wynn, 2000). Born in Seattle, he immigrated to Canada in 1967, and moved to Atlantic Canada in 1979.
Author photo: Lee Ellen Pottie
Douglas Lochead published twenty volumes of poetry. He was Professor Emeritus of Canadian Studies, Mount Albion University, Senior Fellow Emeritus and Founding Librarian, Massey College, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He lived in Sackville, New Brunswick and passed away in March 2011.
Jeanette Lynes is the author of one novel and five collections of poetry. Her novel, The Factory Voice (Coteau, 2009), was longlisted for The Scotiabank Giller Prize and a ReLit Award. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and has won The Bliss Carman Award.
She has been Writer in Residence at Saskatoon Public Library, University of Manitoba, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, among other places. Archive of the Undressed is Jeanette's sixth collection of poetry. She has taught writing at the Banff Centre and The Sage Hill Writing Experience. She is Coordinator of the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan's Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity and a member of the Department of English.
Author photo: Deb Stagg
The Parable Boat is Hannah Main-van der Kamp's second book of poetry. Her first book, The Gift of Rain, came out in 1995, and she has also published a third book, With Averted Vision. The author was born in the Netherlands, came to Canada as a girl, and started publishing poems in journals and anthologies in her teens. Her time is divided between British Columbia's Desolation Sound, Arizona, and Victoria, British Columbia, where she lives with her muscisian husband. She considers contemplation to be her true vocation and out of that she writes, teaches, edits and reviews.
Micheline Maylor moved from Windsor, Ontario, to Calgary, Alberta, in 1975 and lives in a little house beside the Bow River with her family. She has been the recipient of the Overseas Research Scholarship, the International Research Scholarship and grants from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. She has published poetry in over 50 journals in five countries. A certified poetry fanatic, she teaches various poetry workshops at the Alexandra Writer’s Centre Society, serves as its Vice President, and is the editor of FreeFall literary magazine.
Julia McCarthy is originally from Toronto. She spent ten years living in the United States, most notably Alaska, where she began the clay apprenticeship that largely shapes her book Stormthrower. She has also lived in Norway and spent signifigant time in South Africa. She now resides in Nova Scotia. Stormthrower is her first book.
Kathleen McConnell’s Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth (2002) won the Lampert Award for best first book of poems in Canada, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. The Hundefräulein Papers (2009) chronicles the years she spent living with, and looking after the dogs of Elisabeth Mann Borgese. After a typically peripatetic writer’s life Kathleen McConnell has settled in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where she teaches Creative Writing and Women Writers in the English Department at St. Thomas University.
Kathleen McConnell also writes poetry under the name Kathy Mac
Photo Credit: Kathleen McConnell
Born in Toronto, Julie McNeil was an early member of the Bohemian Embassy Poets' Workshop (later Phoenix). An accomplished reader in numerous venues both on stage and on radio, her identification with the long oral tradition of poetry is revealed in the strong lyrical voice of her work. Her poetry has appeared in periodicals and anthologies. Including Poems for Sale In the Street and Other Channels and in her chapbook Ching, the Well (1976). This is her first collection.
Steve McOrmond’s poetry has appeared in Canadian literary magazines including Event, The Fiddlehead, Geist, Grain, Malahat Review, The New Quarterly and Prairie Fire, and online at Maisonneuve, Jacket (Australia) and nthposition (UK). His work also appears in the anthology Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets (Nightwood 2004). His first book of poetry Lean Days was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In 2006, he received a “Highly Commended” award in the Petra Kenney International Poetry Contest. He lives in Toronto.
Christina McRae lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, with her family. Her poetry appears in many literary journals including Descant, Prairie Fire, Room of One's Own, Pottersfield Portfolio and The Antigonish Review. In 2001, Christina was awarded first place in the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia's Atlantic Writing Competition for poetry. Next to Nothing is her first full-length collection.
Author photo: Nance Ackerman
Robert Moore was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and now resides in Saint John, New Brunswick. Currently a professor of English at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, his poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Wascana Review, Ink Magazine, The New Quarterly, Canadian Author, Prairie Fire, Maisonneuve, Pottersfield Portfolio, The Gaspereau Review, CV2, and Quadrant. His first book of poetry, So Rarely in Our Skins (finalist for both The Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and long-listed for the ReLit Award in Poetry), came out in 2002. His second book, Museum Absconditum (2006), also long-listed for the ReLit Award, was published in 2006. He is also the author of a dozen plays.
Author photo: Judith Mackin
Erín Moure is a Montreal poet who writes mainly in English, yet works multilingually and in hybrid forms. Her most recent books are O Resplandor and – in collaboration with Oana Avasilichioaei – Expeditions of a Chimæra. Moure has translated Quebec poets Nicole Brossard (with Robert Majzels) and Louise Dupré, Galician poet Chus Pato, and Chilean Andrés Ajens into English, as well as Fernando Pessoa from Portuguese. She has published 14 books of her own poetry and 7 books of poetry in translation since 1979. Her translations have been finalists for the Griffin Prize and the Governor General’s Award and she has won the Governor General’s Award, the AM Klein Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and been nominated for the Griffin Prize for her own poetry.
Author photo: Rotterdam
Jim Nason was born in Montreal and has lived in Calgary, Vancouver, and Syracuse, New York. He presently lives in Toronto where he is a social worker. He has worked as a flight attendant, a bookseller, and has taught at Ryerson University. His poems have appeared in journals across Canada, and a selection of poems from The Fist of Remembering was short-listed for the 2002 CBC Literary Award.
Ken Norris was born in New York City in 1951. In the early seventies, he emigrated to Canada, where he quickly became on of Montreal's infamous Vehicule Poets and the author of numerous books of poetry. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. Norris teacges at the University of Maine, where he is professor of Canadian Literature. He currently divides his time between Canada, Maine, and the Caribbean.
Erin Noteboom comes from the American prairies. From a childhood steeped in family, science and writing, Erin first choose science when the two options of science or poetry split apart. She collected a physics degree, worked at the CERN accelerator in Geneva, and took the world’s first Polaroid of Cherenkov ring. After a brain tumour rearranged her priorities Erin went back to poetry, and immigrated to Canada in 1997. She has been published widely in literary magazines since then, winning the CBC Literary Award in 2001, the 2004 KW [Kitchener Waterloo] Arts Award, and Acorn/Plantos Award for Peoples poetry in 2004. She is the poetry editor for the New Quarterly, runs writing workshops in Kitchener, Ontario, and is active in the literary community.
Catherine Owenis a Vancouver writer. She’s published nine collections of poetry. Her book Frenzy won the Alberta Literary Award for 2009. Other titles have been nominated for the BC Book Prize, the CBC Award, the ReLit and the George Ryga Prize for Socially Conscious Literature. Catalysts: Confrontations with the muse is her first compilation of essays and memoirs. She also plays bass in the metal project Medea, works as a freelance editor/tutor, and serves as a composer and narrator for the eco-musical Awakening the Green Man.
Author photo: Monique de St. Croix
Poet and literary translator Edita Page has an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Vilnius University, Lithuania. She has translated poems and stories in three languages. Born in Lithuania, Page immigrated to Canada in 1989. She lives and works in Toronto as an arts consultant and a professional fundraiser with a theatre.
Chris Pannell serves on the board of Hamilton's annual gritLIT literary festival. He has published three poetry books: Under Old Stars, Sorry I Spent Your Poem and Drive. He is also the author of a set of three poetry broadsheets entitled Fractures, Subluxations and Disclocations, which won the Hamilton & Region Arts Council poetry book award in 1997. From 1993 until 2005 he ran the New Writing Workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. and edited two book-length anthologies for the group. He has been published in literary magazines across Canada and internationally as well.
Author photo: Janice Jackson
As a performer of his own poetry and songs, Robert Priest has been delighting children and their parents for twenty-five years. Robert has also written and performed segments for Sesame Street, and Eric's World. His novel, Knights of the Endless Day, received a special choice award from the Children's Book Centre. Robert lives in Toronto where he is writing his second children’s novel, The Paper Sword.
Author photo: Allen Booth
Harold Rhenisch is the author of ten books of poetry, including Iodine, about the second coming of Christ; The Blue Mouth of Morning, about Cayote, Mozart and a host of other tricksters; and Free Will, a send-up of the theatre, including versions of Shakespeare's plays composed by a collection of wise and unpredictible monkeys locked into a padded room. He is also the author of the emotionally intense novel Carnival and two books about late colonial British Columbia, Out of the Interior and Tom Thomson's Shack. He has been writing poetry for 30 years. This is his tribute to the creative imagination.
Tanis Rideout’s work has been shortlisted for several prizes, including the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the CBC Literary Awards. She was named the Poet Laureate for Lake Ontario by the environmental advocacy group Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and has toured with Gord Downie and Sarah Harmerto promote environmental justice.
She is also the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Above All Things.
Photo Credit: Simon Racioppa
Born in Vancouver, Stan Rogal has lived in Toronto for the past twelve years. Geometry of the Odd is Stan's fourth book of poetry, his second with Wolsak and Wynn. As well as writing poetry and fiction, Rogal is a playwright/actor/director and co-artistic director of Bald Ego Theatre. He is also into his ninth year as the coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series. How he actually supports himself financially has puzzled friends and relatives for some time now. As Gwyneth Paltrow states in Shakespeare in Love: it's a mystery.
Born and raised in Toronto, Kenneth Sherman inhabits and writes about a much larger world, which includes Muskoka as well as Europe and the Near East. He teaches at Sheridan College and York University. The Well is Sherman's ninth book of poetry.
Bren Simmers lives in Vancouver, where she works as a park interpreter. Winner of the Arc Poem of the Year Award and finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award, her work has been published in journals across Canada. She has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.
Author photo: Vivienne McMaster
Jim Slominski published his first full length book, The Wind is a Tall Man Striding with watershedBooks (2000). Some of his poems were short-listed for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Literary Awards in 2000, and in 2002 he placed second for the same award. Twice he has been awarded second prize by the Canadian Authors Association Niagara Branch annual poetry contest, and has had several poems published in their anthologies, Symbols and The Saving Bannister. His work has appeared in Quarry, Journal of the Writing Space, Lit, Niagara Currents, En Route, and the new writing workshop anthology Between a Dock and a High Place. Born in Montreal, he lives with in Niagara-on-the Lake with his wife, Mary, and two children, Jake and Maya.
Douglas Burnet Smith writes Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie as his twelfth book of poetry. His book Voices from a Farther Room (1993) was nominated for a Governor General's Award and The Killed (2000) was nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize. He won the The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for The Knife-Thrower's Partner (1989). Smith has served as the President of the League of Canadian Poets and as Chair of the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada. He divides his time between Argentina and teaching at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.
Francis Sparshott was born in Chatham, England, in 1926, and came to Canada in 1950, where he taught Philosophy at the University of Toronto until 1991. He has been awarded two honorary degrees, a Doctor of Sacred Letters from Victoria University (Toronto) and a Doctor of Laws, University of Toronto. He is the author of ten books of academic prose and eleven volumes of poetry.
Heather Spears, Vancouver-born writer and artist, has lived in Denmark since 1962. Her books include fourteen collections of poetry, four novels, and three books of drawings. She has won the Governor General’s Award, CBC Literary Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award three times. As an artist she specializes in drawing in theatres, concert halls, courtrooms, hospital wards and war zones. She has held many exhibitions in Europe and America. Check out her website.
Susan Stenson lives in Victoria with her family where she co-publishes The Claremont Review, a literary magazine for writers aged thirteen to nineteen. She teaches English and creative writing in Saanich School District and has taught at Waterford Kamhlaba'a United World College in Swaziland. Her students, both young and adult, have won provincial, national and international prizes.
Sheila Stewart grew up in Stratford, Waterloo, and Montreal. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals including The Antigonish Review, Descant, Fireweed, Grain, The Malahat Review, and The Windsor Review. Her work has been anthologised in A Room at the Heart of Things: The Work That Came to Me, edited by Elisabeth Harvor. She won the 2000 Pottersfield Portfolio Short Poem Competition. Sheila lives in Toronto and works on adult literacy issues at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.
Moez Surani is a poet, reviewer and short fiction author. His writing has been included in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including The Literary Review of Canada and The Walrus. He has attended writing residencies in Finland, Latvia and Switzerland, and his writing has won the Chalmers Arts Fellowship, the Kingston Literary Award and the Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest. He lives in Toronto.
Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize Citation, Antigonish Review: Fall 2010
When a poet speaks of having been “given” a line, often the poem’s first line that sets the form, pace and sounds of the rest of the poem, then he or she may be hearing poetry at its origin, not as an idea, not as a mood.
The judges decided that the first prize winner, “Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real,” by Moez Surani is such a poem. It shows a fearless trust in the lyrical. It never abates its space. One judge commented: “The speaker’s insistent questioning is mirrored by the poem’s form rolling forward with confidence, sustaining its energy throughout, allowing its impulse the room to develop, deepen and reset its course.” There are, however, persistent ambiguities in the poem preventing it from being too rhetorical. There are switches of address and reference from “rivers” to “this river,” from “they” to “it,” from “you” to “I,” from western cultural experience to eastern, from the whole body of human poetic experience to the particular poetic experience of the speaker. Whether the speaker’s river is confluent with all other rivers, or whether those rivers are confluent with the speaker’s river may seem only two different ways of asking the same question. But the poem refuses to say yes to either. By doing so it dramatizes the tension between the world of the collective myth and poetic imagination on the one hand and individual experience and empirical decision on the other.
Author photo: Robin Heron
John Terpstra is the author of eight books of poetry, including Disarmament, which was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award, and Two or Three Guitars: Selected Poems. An earlier work, Captain Kintail, won the CBC Radio Literary Prize for Poetry. He has also written three books of creative non-fiction. The Boys, or Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter was short-listed for both the Charles Taylor Prize and the BC Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. He lives in Hamilton.
Author photo: Jeff Tessier
Tierney’s poetry has been published in many literary journals in Canada including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Event, The Antigonish Review, Prism International, The New Quarterly and Qwerty, as well as in the Brobdingnagian Times and Southword, in Cork, Ireland. He was born in a small town outside of Waterloo and grew up in Toronto, where he now lives. Several years ago, he spent some time in Japan teaching conversational English, and returned home by way of the Trans-Mongolian Express, an offshoot of the Trans-Siberian Express, one of the last great transcontinental train routes. He continues to take the subway to work every day.
Rhea Tregebov was born in Saskatoon, raised in Winnipeg and currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia. Her fifth collection of poetry, The Strength of Materials, was issued by Wolsak and Wynn in Fall 2001. A volume of selected and new poems, entitled (alive) was released in September 2004. Tregebov has also published five children's picture books and is the editor of nine anthologies of essays, poetry and fiction, most recently Gifts: Poems for Parents (Sumach Press, 2002). Tregebov received Honorable Mention for the National Magazine Awards (poetry) in 1998. She is a co-winner of the Malahat Review Long Poem Competition in 1994 and also received the Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry from Prairie Schooner in 1993. Her first collection of poetry won the Pat Lowther Award in 1983. For more information on Rhea Tregebov, check out her website.
Naomi Beth Wakan has written over thirty books, including Images of Japan, Segues, Late Bloomer: On Writing Later in Life, Compositions: Notes on the written word and Book Ends: A year between the covers. Her book Haiku – one breath poetry was an American Library Association selection. Her essays, haiku and tanka have appeared in many magazines and anthologies and have been broadcasted on the CBC. Naomi lives on Gabriola Island with her husband, sculptor Elias Wakan.
Author photo: Eli Wakan
Weier has traveled extensively throughout South Africa, India and Europe pursuing his passion for bird watching and logging over 1,200 species of birds. Weier has published books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and for children. Lost Alcyon: Notes from an African Journey is Weier’s eleventh book. His writing has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies and he has read widely in North America and abroad. Weier lives in Winnipeg where he works as a freelance writer and violin restorer, and owns a small chapbook press.
Ian Williams received his PhD from the University of Toronto and is currently a Professor at Fitchburg State College. He has held multiple fellowships and residencies and his writing has been in many journals across Canada and the US. Williams has a collection of short stories forthcoming from Freehand Books in 2011. He divides his time between Ontario and Massachusetts.
Author photo: Ian Williams
Born and raised in central Alberta, Paul Wilson moved to Regina where he has worked as a writer and closely with writers for over twenty-five years as co-publisher of Hagios Press. He is the author of three books of poetry, including The Long Landscape (1999) which won the City of Regina Book Award. His writing has also earned him the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild Literary Award for Poetry and the Sterling Poetry Award. Recently, Wilson co-edited Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets. The images of nature in his writing are a natural extension of Wilson's work as the Member Services and Outreach Manager at Nature Saskatchewan.
Elizabeth Rhett Woods was born in Prince George, British Columbia, in 1940, and has been writing professionally since 1968. She has published two previous books of poetry and two novels, and has had her plays and poetry adapted for radio. Woods, who lives in Victoria, is a member of the League of Canadian Poets and The Writers' Federation of British Columbia.
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