Dionne Brand is internationally known for her poetry, fiction, and essays. She has received many awards, notably the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award (Land to Light On, 1997), the Pat Lowther Award (thirsty, 2005), the City of Toronto Book Award (What We All Long For, 2006), and the Harbourfront Festival Award (2006), given in recognition of her substantial contribution to literature. She is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
Leslie C. Sanders is a professor at York University, where she teaches African American and Black Canadian literature. She is the author of The Development of Black Theatre in America, the editor of two volumes of Langston Hughes’s performance works, and a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes. She has written essays on African American and Black Canadian literature. For over four decades, writer and musician
Paul Dutton has steadfastly maintained his commitment to the integrated expression of the literary, the sonic, and the visual. He has issued seven books (poetry, fiction) and five recordings, plus eleven print and audio collaborations (The Four Horsemen, CCMC, and others), and has performed across three continents, solo and in ensembles.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, educator, and the author of eighteen books of poetry and fiction. His recent books include Moon Baboon Canoe (poetry) and I, Dr Greenblatt, 251-1457 (short fiction). Yiddish for Pirates (novel) will appear in 2016. He received a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo and was the 2014–2015 Writer-in-Residence at Western University. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Al Purdy’s down-to-earth voice populates thirty-three books, including The Cariboo Horses (1965), North of Summer (1967), Sex & Death (1973), and Piling Blood (1984). The two major collections of his work are The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (1986) and Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (2000). Purdy died in Sidney, BC, on April 21, 2000.
Robert Budde teaches creative writing and critical theory at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. He has published four books (two poetry—Catch as Catch and traffick, and two novels—Misshapen and, most recently, The Dying Poem). He maintains two online literary journals at
Fred Wah has been involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line. Recent books are the biofiction Diamond Grill (1996), Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity (2000), a collection of essays, and Sentenced to Light (2008), a collection of poetic image/text projects. He splits his time between the Kootenays in southeastern B.C. and Vancouver.
Louis Cabri is author of The Mood Embosser, which was awarded the 2002 book of the year by Small Press Traffic (San Francisco), and —that can’t (forthcoming). He edited, from Philadelphia, the poets’ newsletter PhillyTalks and co-edited, from Ottawa/Calgary, hole magazine and books. He teaches literary theory, Canadian and US modern and contemporary poetry, and creative writing at the University of Windsor.
Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe is nêhiyaw poet raised on the Saddle Lake Reserve in Alberta. She has travelled extensively nationally and internationally both as a poet and keynote speaker. She served as poet Laureate in Saskatchewan for two years and was given an honorary Ph.D. from Wilfrid Laurier University. In 2017 Halfe was awarded the Latner's Writers' Trust Poetry Prize for an exceptional body of work in the field of poetry.
David Gaertner is a settler scholar of German descent and an instructor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, where he specializes in digital storytelling. He is also a co-editor of Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island.
