Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent whose multi-genre writing has appeared in Augur, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Plenitude, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us: New Chinese Canadian Fiction and others. The co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series, they are a member of Room’s editorial collective, long con magazine’seditorial board and the creative poetry collective VII. They are represented by Tasneem Motala at the Rights Factory and currently live on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada).

Derek Webster is a Canadian writer and editor. Born in Richmond, Virginia, Webster spent early years in Beijing and London before returning to his hometown of Oakville, Ontario.

As a graduate student he won the Levens Poetry Prize at Washington University in St. Louis. His first book Mockingbird was shortlisted for the 2016 Gerald Lampert Award for best poetry debut in Canada.

In 2002 Webster founded arts and opinion magazine Maisonneuve, winner of over 40 National Magazine Awards. His Letter from the Editor was an NMA finalist for Best Column in 2006, and in 2017 his profile of literary translator Sheila Fischman in The Walrus was a finalist for the Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism.

National Animal, his second collection of poems, appears in Spring 2024. He lives in Toronto and Montreal.

Steve Noyes has published six collections of poetry, a story collection, and a novel. His latest poetry title is small data, from Frog Hollow Press. His second novel, November’s Radio, is forthcoming from Oolichan Books in Spring, 2015. Noyes was brought up in Winnipeg, studied writing at UBC, and has worked several times in China. He is currently a doctoral candidate at University of Kent in Canterbury, England, where he is working on another novel about aberrant beliefs.

Columpa Bobb has worked as a producer, director, playwright and performer for over 30 years. She is the recipient of a Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for Best Actress for the lead role in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe; she was also nominated for Jessie Awards in the categories of Best Supporting Actress and Best Ensemble Cast for her work in Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth (Firehall Arts Centre). She was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Actress for Sixty Below (Native Earth Performing Arts); she was also nominated for a Dora Award for Most Outstanding Production (Youth Category) for Jumping Mouse, co-written with Marion deVries. Columpa was also nominated for a Returning the Gift Award for Contributions to North American Native Writing. For more than a decade Columpa ran Canada’s largest and most extensive empowerment through the arts training program for Indigenous youth in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which culminated in the creation of Urban Indigenous Theatre Company, Manitoba’s only professional theatre organization by and for Indigenous people.

Tania Carter is an actor, playwright and poet whose work has appeared in anthologies and scholarly journals. A member of the Sto:lo Nation, she holds a BA in World Literature and a Masters Degree in Theatre, with a specialization in Playwriting. After living in Toronto for twenty years, she now lives in British Columbia.

Jan Conn has written eight books of poetry, most recently Edge Effects, Brick Books, 2012. These are poems that map the world in fragments, encountering ghosts, hookers and lost-and-found selves.

Botero's Beautiful Horses (Brick Books, 2009) includes many lyrical poems written in Latin America, and one set on Mars. Jaguar Rain (Brick Books, 2006) focuses on the outstanding Amazonian botanical illustrator, naturalist and explorer Margaret Mee.  Vehicule Press published Beauties on Mad River: Selected and New Poems, in 2000.  Her book South of the Tudo Bem Cafe (Vehicule Press, 1990) was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award.

Born in southeastern Quebec, she received her Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Toronto in 1987. She studies the evolution and ecology of mosquitoes that transmit pathogens at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, in Albany, New York.

Kayla Czaga holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and currently serves as the online poetry mentor for Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. 

Her debut collection, For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014) won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets. It was also nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the BC Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019), also a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, was described by David O’Meara as “sparkling with recollection’s rich details…exhilarating.” Her third collection, Midway, will be published by House of Anansi in spring 2024. 

Her poems have appeared in Maisonneuve, The ex-Puritan, The Walrus, The New Quarterly, and have been selected six times for inclusion in The Best Canadian Poetry in English series. Individual poems have won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph GustafsonPoetry Prize, ARC Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Award, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for poetry, and CV2’s Lina Chartrand Award. 

Czaga lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen People (Victoria, B.C).

Tim Lilburn is the author of twelve books of poetry and three essay collections. His work has been translated widely, and garnered awards including the Governor General’s Award, The Canadian Authors’ Association Award and the Homer Prize. His latest book is an essay collection, Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, from the University of Alberta Press in November.

Warren Heiti is the author of Hydrologos (Pedlar Press, 2011), Attending (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), and Diaphora (forthcoming), and co-editor of Chamber Music: The Poetry of Jan Zwicky (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015). He lives in Nanaimo on the land of the Snuneymuxw Nation, and teaches philosophy and literature at Vancouver Island University.

Heiti’s poetry has been anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope, 2010), Lyric Ecology (Cormorant, 2010), Best New Poets (Samovar, 2009), and Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets (Nightwood, 2004). He has received the Earle Birney Prize for Poetry, and two honourable mentions at the National Magazine Awards. Hydrologos was nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize.

Melanie Siebert's first poetry collection, Deepwater Vee (M&S), was a finalist for Canada's Governor General's Literary Award. Her book for young readers Heads Up: Changing Minds on Mental Health won the Lane Anderson Award for best science writing in Canada and was a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize.

Melanie completed an MFA at the University of Victoria where she received the Lieutenant Governor's Silver Medal for her master's thesis. She has worked as a wilderness guide on remote rivers in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Alaska for decades. Melanie’s has had work published in Canadian Geographic, The Globe and Mail, and The Walrus and her poems have been included in various anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry in English, Thinking With Water, Force Field: 77 Women Poets of BC, and Refugium: Poems for the Pacific.

CASSIDY McFADZEAN studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and fiction at Brooklyn College. She is the author of two books of poetry: Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her crown of sonnets, Third State of Being, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2022. She lives in Toronto.

AARON KREUTERis the author of five books. His poetry collection, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, was a finalist for a 2022 Governor General's Literary Award and was shortlisted for both the 2022 Raymond Souster Award and the 2023 Vine Awards for Jewish Literature. His other books include the poetry collection Arguments for Lawn Chairs, the short story collectionYou and Me, Belonging, and the monograph Leaving Other People Alone: Diaspora, Zionism and Palestine in Contemporary Jewish Fiction. His latest book is a collection of seven and a half linked stories, Rubble Children. Aaron lives in Toronto and teaches at Trent University.

Writer, editor, teacher and poet, Yvonne Blomer is the author of The Last Show on Earth, Caitlin Press, 2022 and the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, which explores body, time and place. She holds an MA in Creative Writing Poetry with Distinction from the University of East Anglia. Her other books of poetry include As if a Raven, The Book of Places and A Broken Mirror, Fallen Leaf. She works as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir. She served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015–2018. In 2018 Yvonne was the Artist-in-Residence at the Robert Bateman Centre and created Ravine, Mouse, a Bird’s Beak a chapbook of ekphrastic ecological poetry in response to Bateman’s art. In 2017 Yvonne edited the anthology Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press) with poets responding to their connection to the Pacific from the west coast of North America, and as far away as Japan and New Zealand. Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds is the second in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies published by Caitlin Press and edited by Yvonne.

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Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. She gives thanks for the beauty of the west coast and the privilege of living and writing from there.