PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Philippe Allard
Philippe Allard has shown his work in individual and group exhibitions in Canada, France, Portugal, Morocco, and South Korea, and has received several public and private commissions. He was, with Justin Duchesneau, winner of the Place des Arts de Montréal Competition (2009), recipient of the AGAC public art prize for his installation Courtepointe (2014), and creator of the permanent public work Le Joyau Royal et le Golden Mile for the City of Montreal Public Art Bureau. In 2019, Allard’s work was featured in the international publication Hundred Sculptors of Tomorrow (Thames & Hudson).
Allard’s current practice is focused on installation and in situ pieces involving salvaged materials and found objects that are available in large quantities. When manipulated, grouped, and transformed into mega-structures, these objects become public monuments that confront viewers to question the real utility of the objects, and depict the absurdity of the parasitic attitude of humans toward the natural environment. Philippe Allard lives and works in Montreal.
all-art.ca
Cynthia Alvarez
Cynthia Alvarez is a mixed media artist living in New Jersey.
Her work is an investigation into the infinite, discordant, beautiful peculiarities that lie in the subconscious, as well as the natural rhythms present when one is in a state of producing art. A view into a mind that is trying to make sense of all the inequalities, beauties, horror, hope, and chaos present in the world today. There is a love of colour, form, texture present in all the works.
She has exhibited in galleries and art spaces throughout New York and New Jersey.
calvarezart.com
Brooke Barrett
Brooke Barrett attended the summer program in drawing and painting at The Banff Centre, and earned a scholarship to the Slade School in London, UK.
After graduation from OCAD University, Barrett designed greeting cards at Carlton Cards in Toronto, and spent two years as an industrial designer.
After starting a family, public shows and commissions were what she worked at. As a member of the Water Colour Society of Ontario flowers and landscape painting became her chief focus. Her paintings are in private collections in several countries.
Gary Barwin
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist and has published 25 books of fiction, poetry, and work for children. His latest books include For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco. A new novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy will appear from Random House in 2021. A PhD in music composition, his writing, music, media works, and visuals have been presented and broadcast internationally. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
garybarwin.com
Madeline Bassnett
Madeline Bassnett is the author of the poetry collection Under the Gamma Camera (Gaspereau 2019), and two chapbooks, Pilgrimage and Elegies. Her poems have appeared in journals including long con magazine, Prairie Fire, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The New Quarterly, and in the anthology, In Fine Form, 2nd Edition: A Contemporary Look at Canadian Form Poetry. She is currently on the board of Poetry London and teaches in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. She lives in London, Ontario.
Andrew Battershill
Andrew Battershill is a public librarian and the author of two novels. In the coming years he hopes to work in community literacy promotion and to grow more of the food he eats himself. He is married to the writer Suzannah Showler.
andrewbattershill.com
Chris Benjamin
Chris Benjamin is a journalist, editor, and fiction writer. His collection of short fiction, Boy With a Problem, was published by Pottersfield Press in 2020. He is the author of three previous books: Indian School Road, which was named a Nova Scotia Book of Influence by the province’s librarians and publishers; Eco-Innovators, which won the Best Atlantic-Published Book Award and was a finalist for the Richardson Non-Fiction Prize; and Drive-by Saviours, a novel that made the Canada Reads Top Essential Books List. He is the managing editor of Atlantic Books Today magazine.
chrisbenjaminwriting.com
Hilary Bergen
Hilary Bergen is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal where she studies screendance, posthumanism and feminist media history.
hilarybergen.net
Darryl Joel Berger
Darryl Joel Berger is a visual artist and writer in Kingston, Ontario. He writes a weekly Tinyletter about worlds both real and imagined, works created and failed, and why shopping at No Frills feels like the haunted middle chapters of a Cormac McCarthy novel.
Dan Bergeron
Dan Bergeron is a public artist who employs a range of styles, themes, and materials to activate and explore the meaning of our shared public spaces. The shape, texture, and location of a site and its history or current uses dictate the form and content of his projects. Dan’s projects are sometimes commissioned and sometimes uncommissioned; sometimes temporary and sometimes permanent. Dan’s public installations aim to open a dialog with viewers, promoting engagement through both intimate familiarity and wonder at the unexpected.
Dan has installed uncommissioned works in cities around the world including London, New York, Paris, and Amsterdam. He has completed commissions for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, and the Luminato Festival, as well as creating permanent public artworks for the City of Toronto, the City of Richmond, BC, and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).
fauxreel.ca
Jenny Berkel
Jenny Berkel is a writer and musician from rural Ontario, currently living in London Township Treaty (1796) territory. Her interests include investigating how a poem is a song and a song is a poem. Berkel’s most recent album, Pale Moon Kid, was released across Canada in April, 2016 (Pheromone Recordings) and across Europe in October, 2016 (Popup Records). She is currently in the midst of pursuing an MA in English Literature, finishing work on her debut chapbook (forthcoming from Baseline Press in 2021), and diving into a new regional project that reworks poets’ poems into songs.
jennyberkel.com
Heather Birrell
Heather Birrell’s first collection of poems, Float and Scurry, recently won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award. She is also the author of two collections of stories I Know You Are But What Am I? and Mad Hope, which the Toronto Review of Books called “completely enthralling and profoundly grounded in an empathy for the traumas and moments of relief of simply being human”. She lives in Toronto, where she works as a high school teacher and creative writing instructor. Currently, she is collaborating with singer-songwriter Angie Hilts to adapt poems from Float and Scurry into songs. She hopes John Prine approves.
heatherbirrell.com
Amanda Bon
Amanda Bon is a contemporary dance artist from Ottawa. She has had the pleasure of working as an interpreter for several established and emerging choreographers in the region over the last ten years, and is currently a company dancer with Compagnie ODD (Ottawa Dance Directive) under artistic director Yvonne Coutts. In recent years Amanda has also begun to pursue her own choreographic initiatives. She remains active in the local dance community through artistic collaborations, rehearsal direction, and freelance teaching, and offers Pilates-based movement classes at her home studio. Amanda is also a singer-songwriter with two CDs to her name.
amandabon.com
Carol Bruneau
Carol Bruneau is the Halifax-based author of three short story collections and five novels, with a sixth forthcoming. She has lived most of her life near the stretch of shoreline she writes about, regularly witnessing the catastrophic rise in sea level.
carolbruneau.com
Sarah Burgoyne
Sarah Burgoyne is an experimental writer living in Montreal. She has published two collections of poetry: Because the Sun (Coach House, 2021) and Saint Twin (Mansfield, 2016).
sarahburgoyne.com
Catherine Bush
Catherine Bush is the author of four novels, including the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation (2013), the Trillium Award short-listed Claire’s Head (2004), and the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement (2000), also a New York Times Notable Book and an L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. She was recently a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Germany and has spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and Coordinator of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA, based in Toronto. She lives in Toronto and an old schoolhouse in eastern Ontario.
catherinebush.com
Anna Cameron
Anna Cameron is a Fredericton-based painter who graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She has exhibited her work in galleries on both coasts and her work is held in private collections across North America and Europe. In her work, she explores her fascination with the changing earth — the shifting of plates, erosion, fossils, and other geological events — and in the marks, scars, souvenirs left behind. These marks and lines reveal a story of time past but also of time present — a time in which we are seeing the troubling geological events and consequences triggered by humankind.
Through colour, brushstroke, layering, and mark-making, Anna builds her landscapes to create mood, rhythm, and depth, and in doing so, creates her story.
Ayesha Chatterjee
Ayesha Chatterjee was born and raised in India, has lived in England, the USA, and Germany, and now calls Toronto home. She is the author of two poetry collections, The Clarity of Distance, and Bottles and Bones. Her work has appeared in journals across the world, been translated into three languages and set to music by Canadian composer David Jaeger. Chatterjee is past president of the League of Canadian Poets and chair of the League’s Feminist Caucus.
ayeshachatterjee.com
Charles Checketts
Charles Checketts lives in Toronto, where he shares a home with Heather Birrell and their family. He likes illustrating for books and magazines and sitting on the porch playing his banjo.
Gerry Lynne Collins
Gerry Lynne Collins is a zoology and a fine arts graduate who has had solo and group shows in Canada and France. Her sculptures are in public and private collections. She taught sculpture at Université de Moncton from 1999 to 2016 and now works uniquely on her art. Her practice focuses on topics in evolution and the interconnectivity of all living things, beginning with our universally shared DNA.
gerrylynnecollins.com
Nadia Collins
Nadia Collins is a graphic artist and photographer. She lives in Ottawa.
redsonjadesigns.com
Stephen Collis
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018), all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
Valerie Compton
Valerie Compton is the author of the novel Tide Road and a number of short stories. She is also a co-founder of Narrative Agency, where she mentors emerging writers and edits fiction and narrative non-fiction.
Duncan Cowles
Duncan Cowles is a BAFTA Scotland Award winning documentary filmmaker whose films have been selected for numerous film festivals such as BFI London Film Festival, Raindance, and Edinburgh International Film Festival, winning a selection of awards at festivals such as Glasgow Short Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, BFI Future Film Festival, Hamburg Short Film Festival, and been featured on platforms such as Short of the Week, Vimeo Staff Picks, BFI Player, It’s Nice That, and TED.
duncancowles.com
Tom Cull
Tom Cull teaches creative writing at Western University and was the Poet Laureate for the City of London from 2016-2018. Tom’s first collection of poems, Bad Animals, was published in 2018 by Insomniac Press. His chapbook, What the Badger Said, was published in 2013 (Baseline Press). Tom is the director of Antler River Rally, a grass roots environmental group he co-founded in 2012 with his partner Miriam Love. ARR works to protect and restore Deshkan Ziibing (Thames River). Tom is also an online editor for Watch Your Head, an anthology of creative works devoted to climate justice.
tomcull.ca
Carly Dow
Carly Dow is a writer and musician whose style of wildcrafted folk has garnered international acclaim for its vivid imagery and enchanting melodies. With her background as an environmental scientist, she can look closely and transform our world into intimate musical and poetic landscapes. Her songwriting and poetry reflect a deep appreciation of beauty and darkness balanced throughout personal, physical, and natural histories. Her studio albums, Comet and Ingrained, were toured extensively and held placement in the national Top 10 folk/roots charts.
Carly divides her time between the parkland prairies of Manitoba and the Kootenay mountains of BC.
carlydowmusic.com
Duke and Battersby
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby are artists working in video and installation. Their work has shown widely at minor institutions around the world, sometimes in very big, important cities. It has been included in huge group shows at major institutions, also sometimes in big important cities, but in many small cities too. They understand themselves as part of a huge sweep of cultural production that occasionally creates superstars, but also grinds out cultural history. They dedicate their tiny efforts to the production of a history that is interesting and just.
dukeandbattersby.com
Alexandrya Eaton
Alexandrya Eaton is a contemporary Canadian painter. Eaton has had over forty solo exhibitions of her work and her paintings hang in numerous private and public collections. In the past decade her practice has grown to include rug-hooking, incorporating the same vibrant palette and feminine icons across both mediums.
Eaton works in a very physical way, painting quickly and on the floor. Her inclusion of tools such as rollers, tape, and handmade stencils facilitates her fascination with the repetition of images. Infusing her work with bold colour and lush texture, Alexandrya is interested in femininity and the representation of a powerful female image.
alexandryaeaton.com
M.A.C. Farrant
M.A.C. Farrant is the author of seventeen books: thirteen collections of satirical and philosophical short fiction; one novel, The Strange Truth About Us; a novel-length memoir, My Turquoise Years; a book of humorous essays, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs; and the stage adaptation of My Turquoise Years, which premiered at Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre in 2013. Her most recent book (2021) One Good Thing: A Living Memoir, spent eleven weeks on the BC Bestseller list. A new non-fiction book will appear from Talon Books in 2023.
Cathy Kyle Fenton
Cathy Kyle Fenton is an Ottawa-based artist, choreographer, and educator.
Michael Fraser
Michael Fraser is published in various national and international journals and anthologies. He is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, and the 2018 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition. His third poetry book, The Day-Breakers, is forthcoming from Biblioasis in spring 2022.
Christopher Friesen
Christopher Friesen is a painter, community advocate, and an educator. Friesen lives in Langley, British Columbia. His work has been shown extensively throughout Western Canada in public and commercial galleries. Friesen has work in international public, private, and corporate collections. Friesen is an Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in the School of Creative Arts (SoCA). He received his BFA from the University of Lethbridge and his MFA from the University of Regina. Friesen is represented by the Elissa Cristall Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as online at artfully.ca.
christopherfriesenart.com
Sarah Fuller
Sarah Fuller is a Canadian artist who works across the mediums of photography, video, and installation. She holds an MFA from the University of Ottawa and a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University.
Sarah has been an artist in residence at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Laughing Waters, Australia, the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Yukon, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Italy, and the Association of Visual Artists (SIM) in Reykjavik, Iceland. Recent exhibitions include Terra Incogknita at PLATFORM centre for digital + photographic arts and Refugio at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery.
sarahefuller.com
Bethany Gibson
Bethany Gibson is a writer and editor. She is the acquiring fiction editor for Goose Lane Editions, and a co-founder of Narrative Agency, where she edits fiction and narrative nonfiction. She is also the creator of the Scales Project.
bethany-gibson.com
Kim Goldberg
Kim Goldberg is a Nanaimo-based writer and the author of eight books of poetry and non-fiction. Her most recent book is Devolution (Caitlin Press, 2020), poems and fables of ecopocalypse. Kim chaired the Women’s Eco-Poetry Panel at the inaugural Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle. She holds a degree in biology and has covered BC environmental issues for decades as a freelance journalist—from Clayoquot Sound in the 1990s, to Fairy Creek today. She lives on Vancouver Island, on unceded Snuneymuxw territory.
pigsquash.wordpress.com
Sue Goyette
Sue Goyette lives in K’jipuktuk (Halifax), the unceded and unsurrendered land of the Mi’kmaq peoples. She has published six books of poems and a novel. Her latest collection is Penelope (Gaspereau Press, 2017). She has been nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several awards including the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for her collection, Ocean. Sue teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.
Laurie D. Graham
Laurie D. Graham is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her books of poetry are Rove, Settler Education, and a collaborative chapbook with artist Amanda Rhodenizer called The Larger Forgetting. Recent work can also be found in the anthologies Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds and Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times.
lauriedgraham.ca
Carla Gunn
Carla Gunn spends most of her time teaching psychology courses and keeping up on bad-news stories about the environment. Just over a decade ago, her escalating eco-anxiety prompted her to explore this theme in fiction and this resulted in the novel, Amphibian, published by Coach House Books in 2009 and short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize for best first novel. She recently resumed work on a couple of novels in progress, both with environmental themes.
Summer J. Hart
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her written and visual artworks are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. She is the author of Boomhouse (The 3rd Thing Press, 2022). Her poetry can be found in Waxwing, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in galleries including Pen + Brush, NYC; Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ; and LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA. She is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.
summerjhart.com
Steven Heighton
Steven Heighton received the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for The Waking Comes Late. His work has appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Poetry, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Best American Mystery Stories, and the New York Times Book Review. His forthcoming work includes Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos (Biblioasis, 2020), and a volume of new and selected poems (Anansi, 2021).
stevenheighton.com
Jeremy Herndl
Jeremy Herndl was born in Surrey, BC, and has lived across Canada and abroad. He earned his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art in Design in 1996 and his MAA in Painting at Emily Carr University in 2011.
Jeremy lives and works in Victoria, BC, on the territory of the Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ First Nations with his wife, Izabela and their two children and their cat, Lily.
jeremyherndl.com
Pauline Holdstock
Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist whose work has been a finalist for the Giller and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been published in national media. Her most recent book is the novel, Here I Am! (Biblioasis)
paulineholdstock.com
Sarah Hopkin
Sarah Hopkin is a dance artist from Nova Scotia. She dances for the Ottawa Dance Directive (artistic director, Yvonne Coutts), is a production assistant for Mocean Dance, and teaches at Halifax Dance. She has danced for TAKE UP SPACE led by Elizabeth Emond-Stevenson, and for choreographers Peggy Baker, Cathy Kyle Fenton, and Allison Burns. She danced with Toronto Dance Theatre (2015-2016), interned with Mocean Dance (2015), and in Dance Ontario’s Dance Weekend (2015). She was a demonstrator for Peggy Baker at Canada’s National Ballet School, and taught contemporary dance at The School of Dance in Ottawa.
David Huebert
David Huebert’s work has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a National Magazine Award nominee (fiction) in 2018 and 2019. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His second collection of poems, Humanimus, will be published in fall 2020. He lives, writes, and teaches in K’jipuktuk (Halifax).
davidhuebert.com
Philip Huynh
Philip Huynh is the author of the story collection The Forbidden Purple City (Goose Lane Editions, 2019), which was shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award and for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. A graduate of the University of British Columbia, Huynh is also a practising lawyer. He lives in Richmond, B.C., with his wife and twin daughters.
Mahak Jain
Mahak Jain writes for young people and adults. She currently lives in Toronto, where she teaches creative writing.
mahakjain.com
Mark Anthony Jarman
Mark Anthony Jarman is an award-winning Canadian author of six books of fiction and the critically acclaimed Ireland’s Eye. He has won a National Magazine Award in non-fiction and his essays have appeared in the Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Hobart, the Barcelona Review, Vrig Nederland, and the Globe and Mail. He lives in Fredericton.
Kim Vose Jones
Kim Vose Jones is a Fredericton-based installation artist who grew wandering the forests of southern Ontario, building a series of unstable treehouses on other people’s property. Her work draws upon notions of abjection and the sublime to question commonplace dichotomies. Her most recent creations delve into notions of commodification and artificiality, as both ideological centrepieces of contemporary culture and reflections of self-obsessive jouissance.
kimvosejones.com
Conor Kerr
Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian writer and Labrador Retriever enthusiast. A member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, he is descended from the Lac Ste. Anne Métis and the Papaschase Cree Nation. His Ukrainian family were settlers in Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan. In 2021 he received The Malahat Review’s long poem prize and was longlisted for the CBC poetry prize. In 2020 he won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Award. He is the author of the novel Avenue of Champions, and the poetry collection An Explosion of Feathers. His next collection of poetry, Old Gods, is coming out in the Spring of 2023.
conorkerr.ca
Jenna Kessler
Jenna Kessler has been working as a farmer and illustrator, cultivating a relationship with the land and memorializing plants and landscapes in her paintings. She selects plant specimens to illustrate into botanical patterns, and loves depicting nature in all its forms and in every season. She also splices poetry into her illustrated scenes, weaving lyrics and ideas into her illustrations, asking the viewer questions about human interactions with the earth. In between, she also crafts songs that reflect her unique, artistic vision of the world. She has recently released a new EP entitled A Still Life.
jennakessler.com
Anita Lahey
Anita Lahey’s books include the memoir The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship (Biblioasis, 2020), The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture (Palimpsest Press, 2013), and two Véhicule Press poetry collections: Spinning Side Kick and Out to Dry in Cape Breton. Anita is also a journalist and series editor of the Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. She lives in Ottawa.
anitalahey.ca
Angélique Lalonde
Angélique Lalonde dwells on Gitxsan Territory north of Hazelton, BC. She is the author of Glorious Frazzled Beings, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Angélique was the recipient of the 2019 Journey Prize, holds a PhD in Anthropology, and has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre and Open Book. Her work has been published in several journals, including Prism International, The Malahat Review, Room, Grain, and Prairie Fire. Her stories have been anthologized in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories.
angéliquelalonde.com
Fiona Tinwei Lam
Fiona Tinwei Lam’s third poetry collection, Odes & Laments celebrates wonder in the everyday while lamenting human incursions on the natural world. She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems on Facing Cancer. Lam won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Prize and was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her work appears in over forty anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry (2010 and 2020). Her poetry videos have screened at festivals internationally.
fionalam.net
Heather Lane
Heather Lane is a Vancouver-based visual artist. Born in Charlottetown, PEI, she graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, UBC, and Dalhousie University, and has undertaken valuable mentorships in folk art and craft during a two-year period in Japan.
Layered, compulsive, and protracted, her work suggests the influence of memory and the passage of time as metaphor for perception and experience — creating sensory records of notions for which language often proves insufficient. She is irresistibly drawn to the ideas of contrast and contradiction.
Heather lives and paints in North Vancouver. Her work is held in collections in the USA, Mexico, and Canada.
heatherlane.com
Emilie Grace Lavoie
Emilie Grace Lavoie is an artist, curator, and member of 3E Collective, from New Brunswick. Lavoie holds a diploma in fashion design (2011) from LaSalle College, a Bachelor of Visual Arts (2016) from Université de Moncton, and a Master of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2018). In 2017, Lavoie received the silver medal at the VIII Games of La Francophonie in Abidjan for the sculpture/installation category, representing Canada-New Brunswick. Lavoie’s work has been presented across Canada. Her writing has been published on various platforms including catalogues and books she has co-authored with her colleagues from 3E Collective.
emiliegracelavoie.com
Vicky Lentz
Vicky Lentz is a visual artist from the northwest region of New Brunswick. Her home and studio are located in a secluded maple forest. She explores the relationship that exists between our ecology and culture. Her daily life unfolds in a direct interaction with the living environment. Her studio enquiries employ a variety of materials and methods to engage with the landscape on a human scale. The processes and materials open up a dialogue with the environment. In our modern world where our environmental concerns become epic, her contemporary work that echoes a life of connection finds a worthy importance.
vickylentz.com
Joanna Lilley
Joanna Lilley is the author of three poetry collections: Endlings (Turnstone Press), If There Were Roads (Turnstone Press), and The Fleece Era (Brick Books) which was nominated for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her novel, Worry Stones (Ronsdale Press), was longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award and she’s also the author of a short story collection, The Birthday Books (Hagios Press). Joanna has given readings and workshops as far afield as Alaska and Iceland. From Britain, Joanna now lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, on the Traditional Territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council.
joannalilley.com
Tamara Lindeman
Tamara Lindeman is a songwriter and singer who performs under the name The Weather Station. As The Weather Station, she has released five albums and toured extensively across Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia. She has been nominated for a Juno, a Socan Award, and shortlisted for the Polaris Prize, and garnered extensive praise from Pitchfork, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Rolling Stone and The New York Times, among many others.
theweatherstation.net
Nadja Lubiw-Hazard
Nadja Lubiw-Hazard is a writer and a veterinarian. Her work has been published in The Fiddlehead, Understorey, Room, Canthius, The Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, and more; her first novel, The Nap-Away Motel, was published in 2019. As a lifelong animal lover and long-time vegan, her writing often explores themes related to the natural world. She lives with her wife, their two adult daughters, an old black pug, and a feisty fluffy kitten in Toronto.
nmlhazard.com
Adam Malcolm
Adam Malcolm is a teacher, builder, writer, and musician. He lives in Cape Breton.
themoonsofukiaq.com
Heather Marmura
Heather Marmura (the Winter Painter) is a Fredericton-based artist. Her favourite mediums are watercolour, oils, collage, assemblage and printmaking. She loves playing with shapes and colours and her paintings are inspired by the places around her — often Maritime and New England landscapes. Marmura is interested in exploring how one’s identity is informed by place. Much of her work explores how we think about our environment, and how we’ve come to experience it as Canadians at a particular time in history.
heathermarmura.com
Karen McBride
Karen McBride is an Algonquin Anishnaabe writer and artist from the Timiskaming First Nation. Her acclaimed debut novel, Crow Winter, was shortlisted for the 2020 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the PMC Indigenous Literature Award, and was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Awards.
kmcbridewrites.com
Hilary McCarthy
Hilary McCarthy is a contemporary painter who lives and works in Laguna Beach, CA. She holds a BFA in painting from Hartford Art School and an MFA from New York Academy of Art. She is currently working on an art history degree at Columbia University. She is an adjunct professor of drawing and painting at Laguna College of Art and Design. Her artist residencies include locations in Puglia, Italy, Johnson, VT, and Leipzig, Germany. Her work evokes the complexities of the human condition, where the ocean forms a vast rhythmic backdrop. She is inspired by nature, dance, light, and the sea.
hilarymccarthyart.com
Elaine McCluskey
Elaine McCluskey lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, the City of Lakes, and is the author of two novels and three short story collections. Her stories have been published in over twenty Canadian literary journals as well as internationally. McCluskey writes about people you might find in the corners of life: bouncers and boxers, the aggrieved and the unlucky. Her next book is being published by Goose Lane Editions. It is her hope that the lakes, a source of pleasure and purpose, sustenance and wonder, will be there for future generations.
elainemccluskey.ca
J.R. McConvey
J.R. McConvey is a writer from Toronto. His first collection, Different Beasts, came out in 2019 with Goose Lane Editions. His stories have been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and the Matrix Lit Pop award, and appeared in The Malahat Review, Joyland, The New Quarterly, and other publications.
jrmcconvey.com
Karen D. Miller
Karen D. Miller is a textile artist living and working in Ottawa, Ontario. Her work has been in group and solo shows across Canada and in the United States, and in publications around the world. Her first book, Eyes Open to the World: Memories of Travel in Wool, was published in 2019.
Karen delights in finding the under-appreciated and the overlooked, and presenting them in unexpected ways. She follows her inspirations into whatever unlikely places they may take her, from the rigours of motherhood, to the colours that you find under your feet on a walk through the woods.
karendmillerstudio.com
Prashant Miranda
Prashant Miranda grew up in Bangalore, studied at the National Institute of Design, India, and moved to Canada in 1999. He designed children’s animated shows for TV in Toronto before moving on to pursue his passions as an artist. He spends time in the coastal rainforests on the west coast of Canada now, where he travels and documents his life through his watercolour journals, animates films, teaches visual art, illustrates children’s books, and paints murals.
prashart.blogspot.com
Kathryn Mockler
Kathryn Mockler co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. Her films have screened at over 60 festivals such as TIFF, EMFA, and most recently at the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival and the Arizona Underground Film Festival. Her debut collection of stories is forthcoming from Book*hug in 2023.
kathrynmockler.com
Rhiannon Ng
Rhiannon Ng is a writer based in Chelsea, Quebec. Her poetry and lyrics have previously been featured in Jam & Sand Journal, the Lake Effect Anthology, and Down There. She is currently working on her first full-length poetry book.
Ildiko Nova
Ildiko Nova is a Romani-Canadian multimedia artist working in acrylic, watercolour, digital illustration, and bead embroidery. Her illustration work is narrative in nature, and is concerned with juxtaposition, and asking questions about expanding urban areas, and its effects on wildlife. In her work Nova experiments with different materials, and tries to incorporate recycled objects. As a community worker and activist, Nova works to improve the lives of underprivileged people, and to address societal issues.
ildikonovaart.weebly.com
Anton Piatigorsky
Anton Piatigorsky is an award-winning writer of fiction, plays, and librettos. His story collection, The Iron Bridge, is about 20th Century dictators when they were teenagers, and his novel, Al-Tounsi, follows the lives of fictional Justices of the US Supreme Court. Plays and libretti include Eternal Hydra, The Kabbalistic Psychoanalysis of Adam R. Tzaddik, Breath In Between, Airline Icarus, and The Offering. Anton has received commissions, residencies, and productions from the Stratford Festival and Soulpepper Theatre Company, and has twice won Toronto’s Dora Awards for best new play, amongst other awards and nominations. Anton teaches Research and Creative Writing in the Arts and Science program at McMaster University.
antonpiatigorsky.com
Dawn Promislow
Dawn Promislow is the Toronto-based author of a short story collection (Jewels and Other Stories, Mawenzi House, 2010), with a novel forthcoming. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been widely published in the US, UK, and Canada.
dawnpromislow.com
Andrew Pyper
Andrew Pyper is the award-winning author of ten novels, most recently The Residence, which is being developed as a hybrid fiction/documentary series with Skybound Entertainment and Radical Media. Among his previous novels, The Demonologist was the winner of the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Novel, and Lost Girls won the Arthur Ellis Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and appeared on both the New York Times and Times (UK) bestseller lists. He lives in Toronto.
andrewpyper.com
Claudia Coutu Radmore
Claudia Coutu Radmore writes lyric and Japanese-form poetry. Accidentals (Apt. 9 Press) won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award. On Fogo (Alfred Gustav Press) was shortlisted for the 2017 Malahat Long Poem Contest. A poem from camera obscura (above/ground) was included in The Best Canadian Poetry 2019. Other collections include rabbit (Aeolus House Press) and Park Ex Girl: Life with Gasometer (Shoreline Press). Claudia lives in Carleton Place, west of Ottawa.
claudiaradmore.com
Roadsworth
Roadsworth first gained notoriety as a street artist using a stencil-based technique to alter and subvert, in often playful and humorous ways, various elements of the urban landscape. This early period of his career is chronicled in the NFB documentary: Roadsworth: Crossing the Line. His ground paintings, murals, and installations have been commissioned throughout North America, also in South America, Europe, and Asia. He has showcased his work with the LAF, the Cirque du Soleil, the Tour de France, and Banksy’s Can’s Festival, to name a few. His unique approach of blending art and activism can be seen in his collaborations with such organizations as Greenpeace and Amnesty International. His recognizable brand of street art has been featured and discussed in many of the leading publications on street art in the past two decades. He lives in Montreal.
roadsworth.com
Genevieve Robertson
Genevieve Robertson is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in environmental studies, based in British Columbia, Canada. Her practice encompasses drawing, painting, video, and writing and is often place-based and collaborative. Genevieve holds a BFA from NSCAD University (Halifax) and an MFA from Emily Carr University (Vancouver), and has attended artist residencies and participated in exhibitions internationally. Her work has been published with the Centre for Alterity Studies, Capilano Review, The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and was featured in the recent compilations Outdoor School, Fire Season, and Ecocene.
genevieverobertson.com
Patricia Roberston
Patricia Robertson’s third collection of short fiction, Hour of the Crab, will be released in fall, 2020. She is co-editor of a special issue of CNQ magazine, “Writing and Literature in an Age of Unravelling,” January, 2020.
The Ropes
The Ropes is Hugh Christopher Brown’s trio, with long-time collaborator Jason Mercer (bass) and Pete Bowers (drums). Brown is a songwriter, organist, pianist, clavinetist, what-is-necessary-to-translate-loveist, who makes music on Wolfe Island, Ontario, New York City, and many other places. He is the founder of the Pros and Cons program, producing music in prisons.
The Ropes’ debut album (The Ropes) also features Brown’s often-music-partner Kate Fenner, as well as Tony Scherr, Michael Blake, Teddy Kumpel, Lucien Hugh Clough, Rocky Roberts, Mickey Raphael, and Teilhard Frost.
Ava Roth
Ava Roth is a Toronto-based encaustic painter, embroiderer, and mixed-media artist. Roth’s current work brings together techniques from the discrete worlds of fine art and crafts. Her series of sewn encaustic paintings, her collection of encaustic embroideries, and her work with live beehives all push the boundaries of what we imagine possible in each individual practice.
Roth uses natural and local materials whenever possible. Canadian beeswax, reclaimed Ontario barn wood, birch bark, linen, landscape photography, and paper are hallmarks of her work. She is fundamentally guided and inspired by the organic materials she uses.
Ava Roth is represented by Loop Gallery in Toronto, Wallspace Gallery in Ottawa, and Frederick Holmes and Company in Seattle. In addition to exhibiting in solo and group shows, Roth’s work has been featured in many online and print magazines, and she has been the recipient of several awards for her paintings. Her pieces have been acquired by private collectors throughout Canada and internationally.
avaroth.ca
Andreas Rutkauskas
Andreas Rutkauskas was born in Winnipeg, and currently resides on the unceded traditional territory of the Syilx (Okanagan Valley, British Columbia).
His projects focus on landscapes that have been affected by technology and feature images of surveillance along the Canada-US border, cycles of industrialization and deindustrialization in Canada’s oil patch, and the aftermath of wildfires in Western Canada.
Rutkauskas was a 2018 Research Fellow with the Canadian Photography Institute and is the inaugural recipient of a residency with the Fondation Grantham pour l’art et l’environnement.
andreasrutkauskas.com
Kyle Scheurmann
Kyle Scheurmann is a painter and canoeist living on Malahat and Cowichan territory. He holds an MFA from Emily Carr University and is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Painting Award. Scheurmann’s practice is contingent on extensive travel, relying on experiential research of the earth’s diverse ecosystems and interdisciplinary collaborations with musicians and poets. He is the current artist-in-residence for the Georgian Bay Land Trust. Scheurmann’s paintings are available at Angell Gallery in Toronto and Elissa Cristall Gallery in Vancouver.
kylescheurmann.com
Matt Shane
Matt Shane was born in 1981 in Vancouver. He makes paintings and drawings, and room-sized collaborative installations. His pictorial worlds follow a Romantic lineage, but arrive at a mercurial ground, at the border of perception and fantasy.
Shane obtained an MFA from Concordia in 2013. He has received numerous grants and awards and has co-organized 20 collaborative drawing installations alongside his best friend, Jim Holyoak. His work has recently been shown at the Midlands Arts Centre Birmingham and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
Matt Shane is represented by McBride Contemporain. He lives and works in Montreal.
mattshaneart.com
Sandra Simonds
Sandra Simonds is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019). Her poetry and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere.
sandrasimondspoet.com
Heather Kai Smith
Heather Kai Smith is a visual artist currently living between Nanaimo, BC, and Chicago, IL. Heather completed her BFA in drawing from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2009) and her MFA at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2017). Rooted in drawing as a practice, her works have been shown in institutional and non-conventional exhibition spaces. Recent exhibitions include Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, AB), Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver, BC). Heather is currently a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow.
heatherkaismith.com
Carrie Snyder
Carrie Snyder is the author, most recently, of Girl Runner, which was published internationally and was a finalist for the 2014 Rogers Writers Trust Prize for fiction. Her new novel, Francie’s Got A Gun, will be published by Knopf Canada in 2022. Carrie lives in Waterloo, Ontario with her family. She blogs and cartoons, mostly about writing and spirituality.
carriesnyder.com
Gabriel Specter
Gabriel Specter is internationally known for his murals, sculptures, and street art installations that revitalize forgotten environments. Specter employs a range of styles, themes, and materials to explore the meanings of our shared public spaces. He investigates the historical, environmental, and/or community context of his locations to create works that illuminate the relationship between a location and its surroundings. His artworks aim to open a dialogue with viewers, promoting engagement through both intimate familiarity and wonder at the unexpected. Gabriel Specter has been awarded a Canada Council International Residency Grant in New York City, created artwork for Prada runway shows and clothing lines, and completed installations for institutions such as the Royal Ontario Museum, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, and the Brooklyn Museum.
specterart.com
Annie Sumi
Annie Sumi is an ethereal-folk artist creating sonic landscapes that breathe with the rhythms of the earth. Her music brings attention to the practice of listening by offering a space for whispering melodies to be amplified. Through music, Sumi has been able to grow, educate, and collaborate with communities working towards an eco-centric future.
anniesumi.com
Margaret Sweatman
Margaret Sweatman has performed with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, and the National Academy Orchestra, as well as the Broken Songs Band and other new music ensembles. Her novels are Mr. Jones, The Players, When Alice Lay Down with Peter, Sam and Angie, and Fox. She’s currently at work on a novel probably called The Gunsmith’s Daughter, and a play certainly called Fracas!
margaretsweatman.com
Joan Thomas
Joan Thomas is the author of four novels, all of which are preoccupied with individual response to a changing world. Her 2019 book, Five Wives, won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. Joan lives in Winnipeg.
joanthomas.ca
Jocelyn Todd
Jocelyn Todd spent eight years living in London, England, where she studied a wide variety of both classical and cutting-edge dance techniques from world-renowned choreographers and teachers. She has presented her choreographic works in venues and festivals in London and Canada, was one of three choreographers chosen to be mentored by Peter Boneham in 2015, and in 2019 she was invited to create in-residence for Ottawa Dance Directive company dancers. She is the co-founder of Dark Horse Dance Projects, and in 2021 Jocelyn will be remounting and presenting the A-team, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
lawlessdance.com
Ryan Turner
Ryan Turner’s stories have been published in The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and other reputable Canadian journals and magazines. His first collection, What We’re Made Of, was shortlisted for the ReLit Award. His latest collection, Half-Sisters & Other Stories, was published by Gaspereau Press in November 2019. He is the co-founder and co-director of the AfterWords Literary Festival in Halifax.
Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Mandy-Suzanne Wong is the author of the award-winning chapbooks Awabi (Digging Press) and Artificial Wilderness (Selcouth Station Press) as well as the exhibition catalog Animals Across Discipline, Time, and Space (McMaster). Her multi-award-winning novel Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House) was a Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award finalist and a PEN Open Book Award nominee. Her essay collection on nonhuman-animal voices in radical art, Listen, we all bleed, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press. Her work appears in Cosmonauts Avenue, Black Warrior Review, Entropy, Permafrost, The Spectacle, and other venues.
mandysuzannewong.com
Jared Young
Jared Young is a novelist and screenwriter originally from Yellowknife, NT, and currently residing in Ottawa, ON. You can subscribe to his irregular newsletter documenting the plague year.
jaredyoung.co
