CONTRIBUTORS

Manahil Bandukwala is a poet and artist born and raised in Pakistan and currently making a home in Ottawa. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming with the Puritan, Ricepaper, Bywords, and Coven Editions. She is an editor for In/Words, and is currently working on her debut chapbook.

Fang Bu lives in Los Angeles, California, and spends her days at a microscope and her weekends spinning yarns (or was that knitting them?) and pastry-ing dangerously. Pets and loved ones sometimes unwittingly sneak into the things she writes.

Allison Graves received her BA in English literature from Dalhousie University and her MA in creative writing from Memorial University, where she wrote a collection of short stories called Soft Serve. Her work has appeared in Riddle Fence, The Impressment Gang, and The Overcast. She lives and works in Newfoundland.

Kadijah Guillaume is a photographer based in Toronto. Her artwork brings awareness to the recurring issues within the Black community, such as Black womanhood and the negative impact of Eurocentric conditioning. Her inspiration comes from current events, her personal life, and stories told from other Afro-Canadian individuals.

Dana Hansen is a writer, reviewer, and professor in the English Department at Toronto’s Humber College. Her criticism has appeared in Quill & Quire, Literary Review of Canada, The Winnipeg Review, the Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. As the editor-in-chief of Hamilton Review of Books, she lives in Waterdown, Ontario.

Ava Homa’s collection of short stories, Echoes From the Other Land, was nominated for the 2011 Frank O’Connor award. She is the second vice-chair of the national council of the Writers’ Union of Canada, a journalist, and a political analyst specializing in Middle Eastern affairs and gender issues.

Ashley Hynd lives on the Haldimand Tract. She was a member of the 2015 Kitchener Slam team and her work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine. Her hobbies include trampling the patriarchy, avoiding doing the dishes, and being consumed by conversations.

Jessica Johns is of Cree ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation. She is the incoming poetry editor for PRISM international and is on the editorial board for Room, living and working on the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

Jónína Kirton is a prairie-born Métis/Icelandic poet, author, and facilitator. As an editorial board member of Room, she is one of the co-founders of their new reading series, Indigenous Brilliance. She has two collections of poetry published with Talonbooks, page as bone ~ ink as blood and An Honest Woman.

Lauren Kirshner’s novel, Where We Have to Go, was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award. Her short stories and non-fiction have appeared in publications including The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and Carousel. She leads the Sister Writes program and is an assistant professor of English at Ryerson University.

Amy LeBlanc holds an honours BA in English literature and creative writing at the University of Calgary, where she is editor-in-chief of NōD Magazine. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, (parenthetical), untethered, and Canthius among others. Her chapbook, Collective Nouns for Birds was published by Loft on Eighth Press.

Vanessa Lent lives, loves, and works in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. In her house, you will find one large human man and two small human children. You can find her work in PRISM international, The Dalhousie Review, No Press, Acta Victoriana, and Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics (WLU Press, 2015).

Annick MacAskill is the author of Book of Hours (Gaspereau Press, 2018). She has published widely in North American and European literary journals, including PRISM international, Versal, Room, PANK, and CV2, and has been a finalist for prizes including the CBC Poetry Prize. She currently lives and writes in Halifax.

Tasslyn Magnusson lives in Prescott, Wisconsin with her husband and two kids. She received her MFA in creative writing for children and young adults at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She writes poetry for adults, and poetry and fiction for children. She loves words more than anything.

Chloe Yelena Miller lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and their child. Her poetry chapbook, Unrest, was published by Finishing Line Press (2013). Miller teaches writing at the University of Maryland University College and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. as well as privately. Follow her: chloeyelenamiller.com

Nav Nagra is a writer and reader living in Vancouver. She is currently working on a collection of poetry and what will one day be a novel.

Amy Oldfield was born in Ottawa and lives in Toronto. Read more of her work in The Puritan, Bad Nudes, and This magazine.

Alycia Pirmohamed is a Canadian-born poet living in Scotland, where she is a PhD student studying poetry by second-generation immigrant writers. Her own writing is an exploration of what it means to be the daughter of immigrants, and it grapples with language loss, cultural identity, and a sense of displacement.

Mia Poirier is a poet living in Montréal. Their work has previously been published in The Void, Soliloquies, and as a chapbook titled Demon Hickeys (The Blasted Tree, 2015). Poirier is completing their master’s degree in creative writing at Concordia University.

Victoria Prevot was born and raised in Vancouver. She enjoys working in digital, film, and more recently photograms. She can often be found working in a darkroom on the weekends these days. She loves learning, playing music, and her two amazing teenagers.

Michelle Purchase lives in Kitchener, Ontario and is a printmaker, landscape architect, teacher, botany geek, and mother. However, she dreams of living in a treehouse, spending her days drawing, swimming, and listening to indie music.

Jade Riordan is from the Northwest Territories, Canada; she’s attending university further south. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Claremont Review, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, The Malahat Review, NōD Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a member of Bywords’ selection committee.

Jessica Rose is a writer and editor whose reviews have appeared in publications across Canada. She is a senior editor at the Hamilton Review of Books and a writer at Hamilton magazine. Jessica has ten years of experience in educational publishing and is the reviews editor at This magazine.

Ellie Sawatzky’s writing has appeared in Room, The Dalhousie Review, Prairie Fire, FreeFall, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2017, she was awarded first place in CV2’ s Young Buck Poetry Prize, and runner-up in the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Poetry. Her first chapbook, Rhinocerotic, was released in spring 2018.

Sigal Samuel is an award-winning novelist, journalist, essayist, and is currently the religion editor at The Atlantic. The Mystics of Mile End, her debut novel, won the Fiction Prize at the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards and the Trade Fiction Book of the Year Award at the Alberta Book Publishing Awards in 2016.

Vancouver-born Geffen Semach completed her undergrad in Halifax before returning home to work in digital marketing. Following what was meant to be a quick trip across the pond to complete the Columbia Publishing Course at Oxford University, Geffen now lives full-time in London where she works in publishing.

Bren Simmers is the author of two books of poetry. Her most recent book, Hastings-Sunrise (Nightwood Editions, 2015), was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript about Howe Sound, B.C. from her new home in Sackville, N.B.

Dahae Song is a South Korean, Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist. A self-declared visual philosopher, she uses various mediums to materialize the immaterial and to contemplate this very moment that is forever fleeting. To paint the way a tree grows, Song’s art objects serve as an impetus to look inward.

Anne Stone teaches creative writing and literature at Capilano University. She is the author of three novels: jacks (Livres DC Books, 1998), Hush (Insomniac Press, 1999) and, most recently, Delible (Insomniac Press, 2007).

Susie Taylor is a queer writer who lives in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. Her work has appeared in Riddle Fence and PULP Literature. In 2015 she won the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for emerging writers, and in 2016 she won the Riddle Fence Leaside Fiction contest.

Zainub Verjee is an artist, a critic, a senior administrator in the arts and culture sectors, and the current executive director of Ontario Association of Art Galleries. Her artwork has been shown internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and MoMA.

Katherena Vermette is a Métis writer from Treaty One territory, the heart of the Métis nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses’ Company, 2012) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2013. Her novel, The Break (House of Anansi, 2016), was a bestseller and won multiple awards, including the 2017 Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Vermette’s second book of poetry, river woman, will be published in the fall of 2018.

jiaqing wilson-yang is a transsexual writer living in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Room, Maisonneuve, Ricepaper, Poetry Is Dead, carte blanche, and the Toronto Star. Her novel, Small Beauty, won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction.

Kayi Wong has been an editorial member at Room since 2013. After living in Hong Kong and Singapore for many years, she settled on the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and is currently writing copy and doing social media for bookish folks, including Room.

Hiba Zafran is an Arab Canadian and multiple migrant who finally feels that Montréal is one of her homes. She is a therapist and academic who is drawn to critical, queering, and phenomenologicalpoetic understandings of loss, meaning, transformation, and becoming. www.mcgill.ca/spot/hibazafran

Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto/Tkaronto, Canada. She is interested in exploring how integration, diversity, and assimilation are implemented and negotiated, how they relate to lived experiences, and how culture is learned and relearned.