CONTRIBUTORS

Tharuna Abbu is an emerging writer whose work has been featured in Window, a gallery space in their hometown of Winnipeg, and CV2. They hold tender roots in many cities, but are grateful to be exploring and building community on unceded Coast Salish lands (Vancouver, B.C.).

Farah Ali is from Karachi, Pakistan. Her more recent work can be found in Kenyon Review, Ecotone, the Southern Review, and others. She received a special mention from the 2018 Pushcart Prize for a story published in J, and was the winner of the Colorado Review’s 2016 Nelligan Prize.

Kristin Bjornerud is a visual artist based in Montreal. Her work, which has been exhibited nationally, is represented in numerous public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the City of Ottawa Art Collection, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board. Visit her at kristinbjornerud.com.

Michelle Chen is a nineteen-year-old writer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who immigrated to the U.S. at age four. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Bat City Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. She attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio with the support of the National Society of Arts and Letters. Visit her blog for ambitious youth at mc-ambitiousyouth.com.

Nomi Chi is a multidisciplinary visual artist currently resisting in unceded Coast Salish Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, otherwise known as Vancouver, Canada. Their primary practice engages with the visual lexicon of illustration and tattoo. They graduated from Emily Carr University in 2015 with a BFA in illustration.

A Toronto native, Morgan Christie’s work has appeared in Hippocampus, Aethlon, Blackberry, and others; she has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, Variations on a Lobster’s Tale (New Plains Press, 2018), won the 2017 Alexander Posey Prize, and her second collection, Sterling (WordTech Communications, 2019), is forthcoming.

Anita Dolman’s debut short fiction collection is Lost Enough (Morning Rain Publishing, 2017). She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry, and co-editor of Motherhood in Precarious Times, an anthology of nonfiction, essays, and poetry (Demeter Press, 2018). Follow her @ajdolman or anitadolman.blogspot.ca.

Rhonda Dynes is a professor of liberal studies at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, and the author of Essay Essentials (Nelson Education, 2014; 2018). Previously a senior editor and reviewer at the Hamilton Review of Books, she also has published in the Temz Review and The Humber Literary Review.

Stacey May Fowles is an award-winning novelist, journalist, and essayist living in Toronto. The author of three novels, her bylines include the Globe and Mail, the Athletic, and Jezebel. Her most recent book, Baseball Life Advice (McClelland & Stewart, 2017), was a national bestseller. She coedited an anthology on sexual assault and survival, due in spring 2019.

Kim Fu is the author of the novels The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (HarperCollins, 2018) and For Today I Am a Boy (HarperCollins, 2014), as well as the poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance (Nightwood Editions, 2016). Originally from Vancouver, she currently lives in Seattle, Washington.

Growing up, Hannah Graff was transfixed by the illustrations she saw in children’s books. Her favourites were often dark and sometimes brutal fairy tales—the darkness intertwined with the whimsical. She lives in Norwood, Ohio, with her fiancé and three cats. She is constantly inspired by nature, folklore, and the everyday magic that surrounds them.

nancy viva davis halifax is a queer, crip poet and scholar, born on the North Shore of New Brunswick on Mi'gma'gi terriory. she lives as a guest on stolen traditional lands. she has published one collection of poetry (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015) and is writing her second.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of nine books of creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, including the 2016 novel Weekend. Jane’s books have been shortlisted for many awards, including the BC Book Prize. They are the two-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize for fiction (2003 and 2014). They live near Vancouver.

Ceilidh Isadore is a nineteen-year-old Mi'kmaw artist from Wagmatcook, located in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She is a Two-Spirit queer woman currently attending Trent University for Indigenous studies. Rather than using words, she lets the picture speak.

Rachna Raj Kaur has a BA in art history from the University of Toronto. She has written about television, literature, art, and politics for Canadian Art, Now, and Kala and is the reviews editor for Plenitude. Rachna (r-uh-ch-nah) is a Third Culture Kid; she lives in Parkdale, Toronto.

Liz Kellebrew writes fiction and poetry from Bainbridge Island, Washington. Her work appears in Writers Resist: The Anthology 2018, the Conium Review, and Elohi Gadugi, among others. She was shortlisted for the Calvino Prize and the Black River Chapbook Competition, and holds an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College.

Jo Lee is a full-time freelance illustrator based in Toronto, Canada. Her process of creating images combines different forms of media such as watercolour, pen and ink, and digital. In addition to freelancing, she has an illustrated product line of stationary and home goods, La Jolee, featuring beautiful watercolour patterns and fun-loving animals.

A recent graduate of OCADU, Kris Ly lives in Toronto and produces work that is inspired by their desire to uncover the unseen. Through studying the physiology and history of humans, they often make works that are rich in diverse meanings, such as the way we choose to visually communicate the anatomy that reflects on how we see society.

Melanie Mah’s debut novel, The Sweetest One (Cormorant Books, 2015), won the 2017 Trillium Book Award, and her work’s been published in PRISM international, Ricepaper, and Brick. She’s currently at work on a short story collection and an intergenerational memoir. Born and raised in Alberta, she now lives in Toronto.

Sara Mang’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Quarterly, Canadian Literature, and Pulp Literature. She has been a finalist for TNQ’s Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry. Originally from Labrador, she is currently completing her MFA in creative writing at UBC.

Alissa McArthur has been a member of Room’s editorial board since 2015. She was born in Tokyo, grew up in the North Shore of Vancouver, and now writes and edits from Toronto. She holds an MA in English literature from UBC and previously worked at Canadian Literature. Her work has appeared in Ricepaper and Room 37.3.

Katie McGarry lives in Waterloo and is enrolled in the Writer’s Studio Online through Simon Fraser University. Her writing is forthcoming in The Humber Literary Review, filling Station, and GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018).

Estlin McPhee is a writer, magic-maker, and collective organizer living on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land in Vancouver, B.C. They work with youth and live with cats. For five years, Estlin co-organized REVERB, an anti-oppressive queer reading series. Find them online at emcphee.com.

Triin Paja lives in rural Estonia. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Portland Review, Adroit, and Entropy, among others. She is the author of a poetry collection in Estonian, Nõges (Värske Raamat, 2018).

Loghan Paylor is an MFA creative writing student at UBC and a former column writer for Beat. Their non-fiction work has appeared online at Alterheros.org, Rebelle Society, and Tiny Buddha. Loghan lives in Abbotsford, B.C. with their partner, two cats, and one very fluffy dog.

Nagmeh Phelan lives in Toronto with her family. She’s a poet ad agency Pisces (that’s a thing), and can be found saying nothing of import on Twitter @somesomersaults.

Oubah Osman is a Somali-Canadian writer and creative from Toronto, Canada. Her work is forthcoming in The Unpublished City Volume II. She holds a BA in English from the University of Toronto and is an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph.

Lisa Rawn lives in the sage west of Kamloops, British Columbia. Her 2018 chapbook Between Ocean and Land (above/ground press) follows Ahead of Winter (Alfred Gustav Press). Her poems have been selected by Pandora’s Collective, Spring, subTerrain, Prairie, and Word. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

After completing her Master of Journalism at UBC, Yvonne Robertson worked as a journalist and editor in Vancouver. She also created and facilitated a writing workshop for homeless and marginalized youth. Now in Toronto, she works as a policy analyst and research communicator.

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.

Geffen Semach is a literary agent’s assistant at Aitken Alexander Associates. A former Vancouverite, Geffen relocated to London, England after completing the Columbia Publishing Course at Oxford University in 2017. She has also worked at Profile Books and Andrew Nurnberg Associates. You can find Geffen on Twitter @gsemach.

Erika Thorkelson is a writer of fiction and creative non-fiction living in Vancouver. She was born in Winnipeg, grew to adulthood in Edmonton, and has lived in Dublin, Ireland, and Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Her work has appeared in national and international publications, including Maisonneuve, The New Quarterly, and Electric Literature.

Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt is a Montreal-based writer, translator, and English teacher. She recently won the Humber Literary Review’s Emerging Writers Fiction Contest, and was shortlisted for the Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Award in 2017. Visit her at carlyrosalie.com or follow her @carlyrosalie.

Ottawa-born and Costa Rica-based Cara Waterfall’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in Event, The Fiddlehead, and Oratorealis. She was shortlisted for FreeFall’s 2016 poetry contest, and longlisted for Room’s 2017 poetry contest. She has a diploma in poetry and lyric discourse from the Writer’s Studio at SFU.