Q&A 2020

Danny Ramadan is an award-winning Syrian-Canadian author and LGBTQ-refugees activist. The Clothesline Swing, Ramadan’s debut novel, won the Independent Publisher Book Award for LGBT Fiction, The Canadian Authors Association’s award for Best Fiction, and was shortlisted for Evergreen Award, Sunburst Award and a Lambda Award. It was long listed for Canada Reads 2018.…

A memoir told in sonnets?! Who takes on this type of challenge — and pulls it off with poetic aplomb in 140 syllable segments! Who else but celebrated poet John Barton with Lost Family. It’s an extraordinary portrait taken as a whole or in single sonnets. Barton, Victoria’s current Poet Laureate, has pushed the boundaries of his craft and of what family is in this exploratory and insightful story of remembrance and discovery.…

Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw-English-Irish aunty and member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. She is the Managing Editor for Room Magazine and a co-organizer of the Indigenous Brilliance reading series. Her debut poetry chapbook, How Not to Spill, co-won the 2019 BP Nichol Chapbook Award, and her short story “Bad Cree” won silver at the 2020 National Magazine Awards and is longlisted for the 2020 Writers’ Trust Journey Prize.…

Joanna Lilley is an award-winning poet living in Whitehorse. Born in the UK, Joanna has always been drawn north, crossing the Arctic Circle twice, before settling in the Yukon. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Malahat Review and Grain. Endlings is her third collection of poetry.

Of Endlings, David Suzuki says: “This book is a reminder of what we have lost within human memory.”…

Annick MacAskill’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad, including Arc, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Fiddlehead, Plenitude, Room Magazine, The Stinging Fly, and Best Canadian Poetry 2019. Her debut collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J.M.…

Vancouver writer Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the acclaimed story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth and the editor of the award-winning Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow. Her second book, Better Living through Plastic Explosives, was a Giller Prize finalist. Her fiction has been widely anthologized and won National Magazine Awards.…

Madeline Sonik is a writer, anthologist, and teacher who lives in Victoria. Her book of personal essays Afflictions & Departures, was nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize, and won the 2012 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.…

Catherine Hernandez is a proud queer brown femme author and artistic director of b current performing arts. She is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, and Indian heritage, and she is married into the Navajo Nation. Hernandez is the author of the novel Scarborough, which is soon to be a motion picture; won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished manuscript; was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, the Evergreen Forest of Reading Award, the Edmund White Award, and the Trillium Book Award; and was longlisted for Canada Reads. …

Michael Prior is a writer and a teacher whose poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in North America and the U.K. He is a past winner of Magma Poetry’s Editors’ Prize, The Walrus’s Poetry Prize, and Matrix Magazine’s Lit POP Award for Poetry. The poet has graduate degrees from the University of Toronto and Cornell University.…

Celebrated poet Lorna Crozier’s book Through The Garden, A Love Story (with Cats) set for fall publication, is as close as you might come to portray the meaning of true love and the grief that follows loss of a life partner. In writing the story of nearly forty years together with her husband, acclaimed poet and author Patrick Lane, Lorna has crafted a stunning combination of prose and poetry; tender and insightful, raw in its disclosure and honesty.…

Shaena Lambert’s first novel, Radiance, and two books of stories Oh, My Darling and The Falling Woman, were all Globe and Mail best books of the year. Her fiction has been nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Evergreen Award, the Danuta Gleed Award and the Frank O’Connor Award for the Short Story.…

Glass Float is Jane Munro’s seventh poetry collection. For more than 20 years, she has studied and practised Iyengar Yoga in Canada and in India.  Her experience of yoga illuminates this collection. Her sixth poetry book, Blue Sonoma, won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Jane has been a professor of Creative Writing at several universities in British Columbia and has taught many informal writing workshops.…