Notes on Contributors

M E G H A N B E L L ’ s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Quarterly, Grain, Carousel, Joyland, The Puritan, SAD Magazine, Tesseracts 21, The Minola Review, The Impressment Gang and The Maynard. She lives in Vancouver, where she is an MFA candidate in UBC’s creative writing program and the publisher of Room magazine. She was the lead editor of Room’s fortieth anniversary anthology, Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine (Caitlin Press, 2017), and is one of the co-founders of Vancouver’s Growing Room literary festival.

BARBARA BLACK won first prize in the 2017 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition and was a fiction finalist in The Malahat Review 2017 Open Season Awards. Other publications include FreeFall, The New Quarterly and Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal. Her poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Forage Poetry, The Dying Dahlia Review and Poems from Planet Earth. She lives in Victoria, BC, where she’s currently busy riding the twisties on her new motorcycle. www.barbarablack.ca

LORI C AYER is the author of three poetry collections: Stealing Mercury, Attenuations of Force and Dopamine Blunder. She has a forthcoming book, “Mrs. Romanov,” in September 2018, with The Porcupine’s Quill.

JESSICA CO LES grew up a fervid bookworm and creative writer, but her ardour for words became incurable after her first linguistics class at the University of Alberta in 1997. Now living in Vancouver, she edits technical documents for an engineering company and makes up silly songs to entertain her two small children.

A tawny mix of Ojibwe/ Swampy Cree and English/Irish, L I S A C O O K E R A V E N S B E R G E N was born in Winnipeg into the Bear clan and is currently based in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish Territory. She is an accomplished multi-hyphenate theatre artist as well as a full-time mama and graduate student at Queen’s University.

LUCAS CRAWFORD is a poet and assistant professor of English at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of Sideshow Concessions (Invisible Publishing 2015), which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, Transgender Architectonics (a book of academic prose) and “The High Line Scavenger Hunt” (a poetry collection forthcoming

in September 2018 with the Brave and Brilliant series at University of Calgary Press). His work has appeared widely, including in Best Canadian Poetry 2015, The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, The Antigonish Review, Geist, Room, PRISM International, Rampike and elsewhere.

ROE WA NC ROWE is ac is femme, multi disciplinary artist/ writer/ teacher who teaches at the University of Winnipeg. Recent work includes: digShift (ongoing), a decolonizing and environmental reclamation project; Lifting Stone, a queer femme performance/installation creating intimate stone encounters; and the queer Western text Quivering Land (ARP), a gritty feminist meditation on the possibilities of art to reckon with the ongoing legacies of violence and colonization.

BENJAMIN HER T WIG is the recipient of a National Magazine Award, and his debut book of poems, Slow War, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Prairie Fire and The Walrus, among others. He is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and is represented by Samantha Haywood and Marilyn Biderman at Transatlantic.

BILL HOWELL has five published poetry collections, including Porcupine Archery( Insomnia c Press ). You can find Bill’s work in The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, Event, The Fiddle head, Prairie Fire, Grain, The Impressment Gang, Naugatuk River Review, The New Quarterly and Vallum. For more info, check out library.uto-ronto.ca/canpoetry/howell

Activist poet, performer and playwright PENN KEMP is the League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Artist, 2015. Her latest book of poetry, “Local Heroes,” will be published by Insomniac Press in Spring, 2018. Updates are on pennkemp.wordpress.com and pennkemp.weebly. com.

JOSHUA LEVY is the 2018 CBC writer-in-residence; a position that allows him to write and tell stories across CBC Radio, CBC Television, and CBC Digital Print. He won the 2017 Carte Blanche/CNFC Creative Nonfiction Prize and was longlisted for the 2017 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Joshua is a previous winner of the CBC/QWF Quebec Fiction Prize. His writing has appeared in The Malahat Review, Maisonneuve, Queen’s Quarterly, The Rumpus, Event and the Oxford University Press. Joshua lives in Montreal, Quebec, with his wife.

TAN IS MACDONALD is a poet, editor and creative non-fiction writer. Her book of essays, “Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City,” will appear from Wolsak and Wynn in Spring 2018, and her next poetry book, “Mobile,” from BookThug in 2019. She is one of the coeditors of “GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times,” which will be published by Frontenac Press in Spring 2018. She is always and forever from Winnipeg, and lives in Waterloo, Ontario, where she teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University.

NOLAN NATASHA PIKE is a queer and trans writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His poems have appeared in The Puritan, Event and Plenitude. He has been shortlisted for the Geist postcard contest, Room’s poetry contest, the Atlantic Writing Competition, and has been longlisted for the CBC poetry prize.

AL Y CIA PI R MOHAMED was born in Edmonton, Alberta. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where she is studying creative writing, and she received an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2014. Alycia is an emerging artist, and her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, wildness, Grain, Vallum and Best New British and Irish Poets 2018.

MARJORIE POOR is an editor and writer who lives and reads( and lives to read) in Winnipeg. By day, she edits educational materials for the provincial goverment, and, on the side, she is the editor of Prairie Books NOW. Her reviews and poetry have appeared in Prairie Fire and Zygote.

SCOTT RAND AL L’ s third collection of short fiction, And to Say Hello, won the 2015 Ottawa Book Award for fiction and a 2015 gold medal for fiction in the Independent Publishers Book Awards. He is currently completing another short-story collection, a novel and a UBC MFA.

MARK SANDERS’ s most recent books are Conditions of Grace: New and Selected Poems (2011), Landscapes, with Horses (2017) and The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser. His poems have appeared in journals in the US, Canada, Great Britain and Australia; creative prose has received honourable mention in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He is chair and professor of English at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas.

CHRISTOPHER SNOOK has poems appearing in forthcoming issues of The Literary Review of Canada, The Windhover, The Remembered Arts Journal and The St. Katherine’s Review. Chris lives and writes in his hometown of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

JENNIFER STILL explores the intersections of language and material forms. Her third book, Comma, is a hand-assembled composition exploring silence, pause and hesitation. Still has mentored writers as writerin-residence at the Winnipeg Public Library, University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg and the Banff Centre. She recently projected a poem into a planetarium dome, threaded a light beam out of a page, and transposed a scroll over a prairie field. She is currently composing a book-length tactile poem using a light source and a sewing needle.

JANINE TS CH UN C KY is managing editor at Prairie Fire Press and the co-ordinator of the Practicum in Publishing, Leadership and Communication. Her work has been published in various journals and she is working on a series of children’s books set in the boreal forest. Exploring everyday objects through photography is a recent passion.

ARM IN W IE BE is the author off our novels set in the mythical community of Gutenthal: The Salvation of Yasch Siemens, Murder in Gutenthal, The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst and Grandmother, Laughing. Armin has served as writer-in-residence at Saskatoon Public Library, Parkland Regional Library in Dauphin and University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture.

SUZANNA H WINDSOR is a dual citizen of Canada and Australia, currently living in Northwestern Ontario. Her writing has appeared in Geist, Sou’wester, Grist: The Journal for Writers, Saw Palm, The Writer Magazine, Anderbo, Best of the Sand Hill Review and Not Somewhere Else but Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place (Sundress Publications).

ALICE ZORN is a past winner of Prairie Fire’s 2006 and 2011 Fiction Contests. Her book of short fiction, Ruins& Relics, was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation 2009 First Book Prize. She has published two novels, Arrhythmia and Five Roses, the latter being selected for the Ontario Library Association’s 2017 Evergreen Reading Program. She lives in Montreal and can also be found at alicezorn.blogspot.com/