Contributors

Hangama Amiri graduated from NSCAD University with a BFA (Major in Fine Arts) in Canada in 2012, and she was a Canadian Fulbright researcher at Yale University in 2015. She is the winner of the 2013 Portia White Protege Award and an Honourable Mention as part of the 2015 RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

Carleigh Baker is a Cree-Métis / Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings (Anvil, 2017) is now available.

Leslie Beckmann is a biologist working in B.C. and a Master’s student in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She is an unabashed geek and considers her very best gig to be “mother to a teenaged daughter,” followed closely by “guardian of a Labradoodle named Darwin.”

Meghan Bell is the publisher and graphic designer for Room. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The New Quarterly, Joyland, The Feathertale Review, The Impressment Gang, the Minola Review, Room, The Maynard, and Carousel. She lives in Vancouver. meghanbell.com

Twenty-six-year-old award-winning screenwriter, playwright, filmmaker, and multimedia visual artist Isa Benn is currently based out of Toronto, Canada. She is a first generation, Toronto native of African-Canadian and Caribbean-Canadian descent. With several highly visual-sensory “handicaps,” including synesthesia and ideasthesia, she has parlayed these long-time impediments into an extraordinary understanding of visceral-visual language and expression. Her stylistically introspective work deals predominantly with experiential culturalism, colour, class, sexuality, gender, and magical realism.

Alison Braid is a poet from Summerland, B.C., currently teaching kindergarten in Prague. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in CV2, Poetry is Dead, and The Maynard, as well as shortlisted for the 2012 Descant/ Winston Collins Poetry Prize.

Maggie Burton, originally from Brigus, Newfoundland, is a St. John’s-based writer, freelance musician, arts administrator, and violin teacher. Her poetry has appeared in Riddle Fence, untethered, Petal Journal, and Paragon.

Ava C. Cipri has an MFA from Syracuse University, and is a poetry editor for The Deaf Poets Society: An Online Journal of Disability Literature & Art. Ava’s poetry appears in numerous journals and anthologies; her chapbook Queen of Swords is forthcoming (dgp, 2017). She resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. avaccipri.com

Kayla Czaga is the author of For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), which won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. Recent poems of hers can be found in The Puritan, Maisonneuve, Eighteen Bridges, and Carte Blanche. She lives in East Vancouver and works at “possibly the nerdiest bar in Canada,” according to The National Post.

Ruth Daniell is a writer and the editor of Boobs: Women Explore What It Means to Have Breasts (Caitlin Press, 2016). Her work has appeared widely in literary journals, most recently as the first prize winner of the 2016 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest with The New Quarterly. She lives with her family in Kelowna, B.C.

Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her second collection, green girl dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. Her third collection, that tongued belonging, won the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry and Aboriginal Book of the Year. The Pemmican Eaters was published by ECW Press, 2015. Marilyn has been the Writer-in-Residence at five Canadian universities and the Edmonton Public Library. She has been faculty at the Banff Centre, and advised and mentored in the Aboriginal Emerging Writers’ Program.

Leanne Dunic is a multi-disciplinary artist and a writer of poetry, music, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Being of mixed race, much of her work possesses hybrididentity themes. Leanne won the Alice Munro Short Story Prize in 2015 for her piece, “Without Her.” Her book of poetic-prose will be released by various international publishers in 2017. Leanne is the singer/guitarist of the band The Deep Cove.

Tanis Franco is a genderqueer writer living in Montréal. Their writing can be found in Matrix, CV2, Descant, Event, Vetch, and online at newpoetry.ca, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Metatron’s Omega blog, among other places.

Taryn Hubbard joined the Room editorial board in November 2012. Her poetry, fiction, reviews, and interviews have appeared in journals such as Canadian Literature, Room, The Capilano Review, Canadian Woman Studies, filling Station, The Rusty Toque, and others. She lives in B.C.’s Fraser Valley with her partner and their two tuxedo cats.

Cara Lang is a writer and editor living in Vancouver, B.C. She graduated from Goddard College in February with an MFA in Creative Writing and is the current Poetry Coordinator for Room. You can read her most recent published work, “Theory of Her” on Sad magazine’s website.

Doretta Lau’s debut short story collection, How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?, was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award and was named by The Atlantic as one of the best books of 2014. She is working on a novel and a screenplay.

Andréa Ledding writes from Saskatoon, where she lives with animals and kids. Her writing is included in anthologies, stage plays, and journalism, winning short and long manuscript awards in every genre. She is a Lush Triumphant poetry winner, and has been shortlisted for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize.

Tanya Lyons studied glass at Sheridan College, the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland, the Toyama Institute of Glass Art in Japan, and concept at The Atlin Art Centre, B.C. She was a resident at the Harbourfront Centre and a teacher at Sheridan College and Haliburton School of Art & Design.

Annick MacAskill’s poetry has appeared in journals including Room, The Fiddlehead, Arc, and CV2. Other work has been longlisted for the CBC’s Canada Writes Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (Frog Hollow Press, 2016). She currently lives in Kitchener.

Kim McCullough’s novel, Clearwater (Coteau Books, 2013), was a High Plains Award recipient. Kim is a National Magazine Award finalist and a two-time winner of the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay award. She lives in Calgary, where she juggles writing and teaching junior high.

Amber McMillan is the author of The Woods: A Year on Protection Island (2016, Nightwood Editions) and the poetry collection We Can’t Ever Do This Again (2015, Wolsak and Wynn). Her work has appeared in Arc, PRISM, Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus, and others across North America. She lives and works on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast.

Nav Nagra is a writer, reader, and knitter. Currently, she is working on a novel that will one day be finished (she hopes).

Sarah Nakamura is a Torontonian of mixed race origin who loves baking, rockclimbing, and, of course, writing. She attended the Humber Fall Workshop in Creative Writing on the prestigious Wayson Choy scholarship. She writes about gender, race, sexuality, and abortion.

Zehra Naqvi is a Karachi-born writer and editor residing on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver). Her work has appeared in Schema Magazine, The Talon, and Jaggery. She is currently completing her undergraduate degree in English Honours and Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Annmarie O’Connell’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sixth Finch, Juked, Vinyl Poetry, Slipstream Press, and Verse Daily. Her second chapbook, hello, is forthcoming with Yellow Flag Press. annmarieoconnell.com

Eva Redamonti is a pen and ink illustration artist who depicts drawings that blend realistic scenes with fantasy, through movement and precision. She uses music as a strong source of inspiration for her ideas and relies on its effect toward her art’s overall movement. She has been playing music since she was ten, and began writing her own music later on. She graduated with a degree in Music Composition at Berklee College of Music in Spring of 2017.

Amanda Rhodenizer is a Nova Scotia-born painter who is currently based in Waterloo, Ontario. She is a recent recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and from May–June 2017 she will be the artist-in-residence at the Doris McCarthy Centre. An exhibition of her new work entitled Parallel Play will run June–July 2017 at ARTsPLACE Artist-Run Centre in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.

stephanie roberts has work that appears or will appear, this year, in The Stockholm Review of Literature, Room, Shooter Literary Magazine (U.K.), Reunion: The Dallas Review, Burning House Press, The Inflectionist Review, After the Pause, Waxing and Waning, The Thing Itself, and Nano Text, an anthology published by Medusa’s Laugh Press. In 2016, her work was featured in The New Quarterly, Blue Lyra Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and Breakwater Review. She lives just outside of Montréal and counts her strengths as passionate curiosity and good humour. oceansandfire.com

Chelsea Rooney’s debut novel, Pedal (Caitlin Press, 2014), was a finalist for the 2015 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and was nominated for the 2015 ReLit Award for Best Independent Fiction. She lives in Vancouver.

Emily Schultz is the co-founder of Joyland Magazine. Her novels include The Blondes (Doubleday Canada, 2012) and Men Walking on Water (Knopf Canada, 2017). She has more poems forthcoming in the Minola Review and Carousel. She spent a decade in Toronto and now resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Nadia Siu Van is a Toronto-based writer and editor with an MA in English from Wilfrid Laurier University. She is currently the reviews editor at Shameless magazine, and has written for publications such as Ricepaper, Hyphen, and U of T Magazine.

Jillian Tamaki is a cartoonist and illustrator living in Toronto, Ontario. She is the co-creator (with Mariko Tamaki) of SKIM and This One Summer, and the creator of SuperMutant Magic Academy. jilliantamaki.com.

Mallory Tater is a writer from Ottawa. She won CV2’ s 2016 Young Buck Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, This Will Be Good, is forthcoming with BookThug in 2018.

Erika Thorkelson was born on the Prairies, spent time in Ireland and Japan, and now lives in Vancouver, B.C. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Vancouver Sun, The New Quarterly, Hazlitt, and Ricepaper, and she is a host of The Storytelling Show on Vancouver Co-op Radio.

Debbie Urbanski is a writer living in Syracuse, New York. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in the Sun, Orion, Verse, the Kenyon Review, Nature, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. Find her at debbieurbanski.com or on Twitter @DebbieUrbanski.

Jean Van Loon, an Ottawa writer, holds an MFA from UBC. Her short prose has appeared in Queen’s Quarterly, The New Quarterly, Room, Prairie Fire, Ottawa Magazine, and Journey Prize Stories 19, her poetry in Arc, Event, Queen’s Quarterly, and Nashwaak Review. She also reviews for Arc.

Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt’s fiction has recently appeared in (parenthetical), Matrix, Cosmonaut’s Avenue, and Room’s Canadian Gothic issue (39.3). She lives in Montréal, where she is at work on her first novel. Visit her at carlyrosalie.com or follow her on Twitter @carlyrosalie.

Susan E. Wadds writes because she has to. When she’s away from the keyboard, she’s either hosting writing workshops and retreats, or giving Rebalancing massages. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers, and won The Writers’ Union of Canada’s 2016 short prose competition. She lives in Sebright, Ontario, and Victoria, B.C.

Laurelyn Whitt’s poems appear in various, primarily North American, journals. Her most recent book, Tether (Seraphim Editions), won the 2013 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She has a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Western University. She lives in Manitoba and in Newfoundland.

Irene Wilder is a closet poet and small-time femme hustler. You can find her growing medicine and listening closely at the confluence of the Speed and Eramosa rivers, on traditional Attawandaron Territories (Guelph, Ontario). This is her first publication.