Previous Q&A

Patrick Friesen has published more than a dozen books of poetry, a book of essays, stage and radio plays, and has co-translated, with Per Brask, five books of Danish poetry, including Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments by Ulrikka Gernes.  In January 2020, he released a CD, Buson’s Bell, consisting of composed and improvised music, with text.  …

Terence Young recently retired from teaching English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. He is the author of several books: The Island in Winter, shortlisted for the Governor General’s literary Award for poetry and the Gerald Lampert Award; Rhymes With Useless, a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed award for short fiction; After Goodlake’s, a novel and winner of the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize; Moving Day, nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize; and The End of the Ice Age, a collection of short fiction.…

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Sindu holds an M.A. in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a PhD in English from Florida State University. Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Golden Crown Literary Society Award for Debut Fiction, was selected by the American Library Association as a Stonewall Honor Book, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the VCU First Novelist Award.…

Amanda Leduc’s essays and stories have appeared in publica­tions across Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. She is the author of the novels The Miracles of Ordinary Men and the forthcoming The Centaur’s Wife. She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she works as the Communications Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and stories.…

Jack Wang received an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in English/creative writing from Florida State University. In 2014–15, he held the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Stories in his debut collection, We Two Alone,have been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and longlisted for the Journey Prize.…

Yusuf Saadi’s first collection is Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions April 2020). He previously won The Malahat Review‘s 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry and the 2016 Vallum Chapbook Award. His writing has also appeared in journals including Brick, Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, Canadian Notes & Queries, Arc, CV2, and The Puritan. Yusuf holds an MA from the University of Victoria and currently resides in Montreal, though he thinks of Victoria often.…

jaye simpson an Oji-Cree Saulteaux indigiqueer writer with roots in Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. they often write about being queer in the Child Welfare system, as well as being queer and Indigenous. their work has been featured in Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international, SAD Mag, GUTS Magazine and Room. simpson resides on the unceded and ancestral territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), səlilwəta’Ɂɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) First Nations peoples, currently and colonially known as Vancouver, BC.…

Jenna Butler is the author of the poetry collections Seldom Seen Road, Wells, and Aphelion; a collection of ecological essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail; and the travelogue Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard. Revery: A Year of Bees, essays about beekeeping, climate grief, and trauma recovery, was released by Wolsak and Wynn this fall.…

Serena Lukas Bhandar is a Punjabi/Welsh/Irish transfemme witch, youth worker, and facilitator living as a settler on Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ lands. Her Pushcart Prize-nominated writing has appeared in print in Nameless Woman and Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, among other places. She is currently working on a novel and a hybrid collection of essays and poetry.…

David A Robertson is the author of numerous books for young readers including When We Were Alone, which won the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award and was nominated for the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award.  A sought-after speaker and educator, Dave is a member of the Norway House Cree Nation and currently lives in Winnipeg.…

Kyeren Regehr, born Sydney, Australia, immigrated to Canada in 2002.  She has twice received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and served for several years on the poetry board of The Malahat Review. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada, Australia and America, and her genre-bending first collection, Cult Life, was released with Pedlar Press in February, 2020.…

Jesse Thistle is Métis-Cree, from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He is an assistant professor in Métis Studies at York University in Toronto. He is a finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and the Indigenous Voices Awards, won a Governor General’s Academic Medal in 2016, and is a Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Scholar and a Vanier Scholar.…