Curtis Gillespie is the author of five books, including the memoirs Almost There and Playing Through and the novel Crown Shyness. He has won or been nominated for a variety of awards for his books including the Danuta Gleed Award, the Henry Kreisel Award and the MacEwan Prize. He is the recipient of seven National Magazine Awards from twenty nominations for his writing on science, politics, sports, travel and the arts, including a record-tying four awards in 2014. In 2010, he co-founded the narrative journalism magazine Eighteen Bridges, which he also edits. In addition to his own writing, he has worked with many of Canada’s best writers as an editor, teacher and mentor at the University of Alberta, the Banff Centre for the Arts and Eighteen Bridges.
Jason Purcell is a writer and musician from amiskwaciwaskahikan, Treaty 6 (Edmonton, Alberta), where they are also the co-owner of Glass Bookshop. As a chronically ill writer, Jason writes at the intersection of queerness and illness and is the author of the chapbook A Place More Hospitable (Anstruther Press). Swollening is their first full-length collection.
Lynn Coady's Strange Heaven was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and won the Dartmouth Book Award and the Atlantic Booksellers' Choice Award. She has since written three books of fiction, Play the Monster Blind, Saints of Big Harbour, and Mean Boy, all national bestsellers. Her work has appeared in Saturday Night, This Magazine, and Chatelaine. She also writes a column on relationships for the Globe and Mail.
Ying Chen left her native Shanghai and settled in Montreal in 1991. Her first novel, La mémoire de l’eau was published by Leméac in 1992. Subsequent novels include the award-winning Les Lettres chinoises (Leméac, 1993); L’ingratitude (Leméac, 1995), Immobile (Boréal, 1998) which won the Prix Alfred-DesRochers 1999), Un enfant à ma porte (Boréal, 2008) and La rive est loin (Boréal, 2013). Chen lives in Vancouver.
Michael Crummey is a poet, novelist, and short story writer from Newfoundland. His first novels, River Thieves (Doubleday, 2001) and The Wreckage (Doubleday, 2005) were each finalists for various prestigious literary awards. His third, Galore (Doubleday, 2009), won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. His most recent novel Sweetland (Doubleday, 2014) was released in August.
Jennifer Bowering Delisle is the author of the lyric family memoir, The Bosun Chair, and a book of literary studies, The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration. Her poetry and prose have been published in magazines and anthologies across North America. Delisle has a PhD in English, regularly teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta Faculty of Extension, and is on the board of NeWest Press. She is a settler living in Treaty 6 territory (Edmonton).
Kit Dobson is Professor of English at the University of Calgary. His research and teaching are concerned with literatures in Canada, transnational studies, and questions of affect and ecology.
Caterina Edwards’ latest book, a work of creative non-fiction, Finding Rosa: A Mother with Alzheimer’s/ A Daughter’s Search for the Past (Greystone 2008), won the 2009 Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction. The Island of the Nightingales (Guernica 2000) won the Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Short Fiction. She has co-edited two books of life writing by women.
Marina Endicott was born in British Columbia and worked as an actor and director before going to London, England, where she began to write fiction. Her novel Open Arms was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and her second won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Canada and Caribbean region.
Lawrence Hill is an award-winning novelist and memorist. The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins Canada, 2007), Hill’s most recent and successful novel, won numerous awards. He is the author of the bestselling memoir, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada (2001). In 2013, Hill delivered the annual Massey Lecture, published by House of Anansi as Blood: The Stuff of Life.
Daniel Laforest is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta where he teaches Quebec and Canadian literatures, as well as French literature, cultural studies and critical theory. He has been Fulbright fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies of the University of California Santa Cruz. He serves as associate editor for the academic journal Canadian Literature.
Alice Major, Edmonton’s first poet laureate, has published 11 books of poetry and essays, many of which explore her long-standing interest in the sciences. She is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta 2017 Distinguished Artist Award. Her most recent publications with UAP are Standard candles and Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science. You can find her online at www.alicemajor.com
Don Perkins is a lecturer in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and has also taught for the Drama department and the Faculty of Native Studies. He teaches and publishes in the areas of non-fiction writing, Canadian drama, popular culture, literature and history, and Native literature.
Julie Rodgers is a lecturer in French at Maynooth University, Ireland. She teaches and publishes on contemporary women’s writing and film in French. She has published two articles on Ying Chen to-date, with a third forthcoming in a special issue of Quebec Studies in 2015.
Joseph J. Pivato is a professor of Literary Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Athabasca University. He is the founding professor of the Master of Arts Integrated Studies program. His research has helped to establish the academic recognition of ethnic minority writing in Canada, particularly the Italian-Canadian literature.
Eden Robinson is the internationally acclaimed author of Traplines, Monkey Beach, and Blood Sports. Traplines was the winner of the New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Britain's Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Monkey Beach was nominated for the Giller Prize, the 2000 Governor General's Award for Fiction, and was selected as the Globe and Mail's Editor's Choice. Robinson is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations.
GREGORY SCOFIELD is Métis of Cree, Scottish and European-Immigrant descent whose ancestry can be traced to the Métis community of Kinosota, Manitoba. He has taught Creative Writing and First Nations and Métis Literature at Laurentian University, Brandon University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and the Alberta University of the Arts. He currently holds the position of Associate professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. Scofield won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 for his debut collection, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel, and has since published seven further volumes of poetry including, Witness, I am. He has served as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is the recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012), and most recently the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize (2016) that is awarded to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work. Further to writing and teaching, Scofield is also a skilled bead-worker, and he creates in the medium of traditional Métis arts. He continues to assemble a collection of mid to late 19th century Cree-Métis artifacts, which are used as learning and teaching pieces. Scofield’s first memoir Thunder Through My Veins (Doubleday Canada/Anchor Books) was re-published Fall 2019.
Winfried Siemerling is a professor in the department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. His current research includes African Canadian writing, literary history, and the presence of the past. He is co-researcher of "International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation: A Partnered Research Institute," funded by the SSHRC Partnership Grant.
Pamela V. Sing is Director of the Institut d’études canadiennes/Institute of Canadian Studies at Campus Saint-Jean, the University of Alberta’s francophone campus, and Associate Director of the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne at the University of Alberta. She teaches French, Québec, and Franco-Canadian literature at Campus Saint-Jean and is the co-editor of Impenser la francophonie: Recherches, renouvellement, diversité, identité with Estelle Dansereau (Campus Saint-Jean, 2012). Her research focuses on Franco-Canadian and Québécois writers, as well as Canadian and American writers of Franco-Métis ancestry.
Maïté Snauwaert holds a PhD in French Literature from Université Paris 8. In Canada since 2004, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire Figura at the Université du Québec à Montréal, at the CRILCQ/Université de Montréal, and at McGill University (Marie-Thérèse Reverchon scholarship). She is an assistant professor at the Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta.
Kim Thúy’s first novel Ru was published in French (Libre Expression, 2009) and translated into English by Sheila Fischman (Random House of Canada, 2012), winning numerous awards within Canada and abroad. The English translation was also nominated for prestigious prizes. Thúy’s second novel, Mãn (Libre expression, 2013) garnered critical acclaim and was translated into English by Sheila Fischman in 2014 (Random House of Canada). She lives in Montreal, Quebec.
Angela Van Essen is a PhD candidate in the English and Film Studies department at the University of Alberta where she is writing a dissertation on contemporary Cree bilingual literature. She has taught English courses at The King’s University and at the University of Alberta and published on Indigenous writers in Canada.
