2017 Wild Writers
PAMELA MULLOY is the editor of The New Quarterly and the creative director of the Wild Writers Literary Festival. She is also a writer with short fiction published in the UK and Canada. Her debut novel The Deserters was published by Véhicule Press in 2018.
Photo by Ayelet Tsabari.
Lamees Al Ethari is an Iraqi-Canadian writer and artist. She holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Waterloo, where she has been teaching academic and creative writing since 2015. Her poetry has been published in The Malpais Review and the anthology Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here and printed as broadsides. She has a forthcoming work in poetry, From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris (Fall 2018), and another in prose titled Waiting for the Rain: A Memoir (Spring 2019). She is currently working on her monograph, Resistance and Memory in Iraqi Women’s Life Narratives.
Tasneem Jamal’s debut novel Where the Air Is Sweet was published to critical acclaim in 2014. Her writing has appeared in Chatelaine, Saturday Night magazine, and the Literary Review of Canada. She worked as a news editor at The Globe and Mail and before that as a copy editor at Saturday Night magazine. Currently a consulting editor with The New Quarterly, she is at work on a book-length memoir. She lives in Kitchener with her husband and two daughters.
Susan Scott is the editor of Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers (Caitlin Press, 2019)—an anthology in celebration of all things edgy, iffy, unorthodox, and sublime in the lives of women writers. Susan serves as TNQ’s lead nonfiction editor and as associate director of the Wild Writers Festival. As of 2018, she stepped up to direct Write on the French River Creative Writing Retreat, another TNQ outreach venture. She is scouting for a home for Sainted Dirt, her reckonings with land, language, family, and imperfect teaware. Photo by Ron Grimes.
Claire Tacon‘s first novel, In the Field, was the winner of the 2010 Metcalf-Rooke Award. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bronwen Wallace Award, the CBC Literary Prize and has appeared in journals and anthologies such as The New Quarterly, SubTerrain and Best Canadian Short Stories. Claire is a lecturer at St. Jerome’s University and her second book, In Search of the Perfect Singing Flamingo is out with Wolsak & Wynn.
David Worsley became co-owner of Words Worth Books in 2011, after managing the bookstore for 12 years. In 2006 he won the prestigious Hand-Selling Award from HarperCollins Canada. Dave is currently an editor at The New Quarterly and sits on their Wild Writers Festival program committee. He has also volunteered with the CKWR FM Monday with the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, and facilitates speaker and lecturer events, including a men’s only book club, at Words Worth Books. David has over 25 years experience in the book industry and is an exceptional recommender of mystery and crime titles.
Wayne Johnston was born and raised in the St. John’s area of Newfoundland. His #1 nationally bestselling novels include The Divine Ryans, A World Elsewhere, The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, which has been made into a stage play and is being developed as a TV series. Johnston is also the author of the Charles Taylor Prize-winning and best-selling memoir, Baltimore’s Mansion. He lives in Toronto.
Helen Humphreys is the award-winning author of many books. Her latest is The Ghost Orchard: The Hidden History of the Apple in North America, published by HarperCollins. She lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario.
Karen Connelly is the author of eleven books of nonfiction, fiction and poetry, the most recent being Come Cold River, a memoir in poetry about growing up poor in Alberta. Her most recent nonfiction book, Burmese Lessons, a memoir of her time amongst dissidents, guerillas and refugees on the Thai-Burma border, was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the BC National Award for Canadian nonfiction. The Lizard Cage, her first novel, was compared in the New York Times Book Review to the works of Solzhnitsyn, Mandela and Orwell. It was nominated for the Kiriyama Prize and won Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers. Connelly has lived for extended periods of time in different parts of Asia and Europe and now has two homes, one in Toronto and one in Greece.
Bill Pegg has been a baseball fan most of his life. He has played, coahced, umpired, organized, and supported the game in Kitchener-Waterloo as well as following pro ball closely (even before the Blue Jays). Locally, he’s served as City League Convenor with Kitchener Minor Ball and was coach and is presently business manager of the Junior Panthers, a team made up of 19-21-year-olds. In addition, he is the President of the Senior Panthers, the Kitchener men’s team that is getting ready to start its 100th season. He is married and has four adult children, all of whom played ball.
Stacey May Fowles is an award-winning novelist, journalist, and essayist. She is a columnist at the Globe and Mail, Open Book Toronto, and Blue Jays Nation, and author of the popular Baseball Life Advice e-newsletter. She has written about sports for Globe Debate, The Walrus, Torontoist, the National Post, Deadspin, Hazlitt, and ViceSports. She is a frequent guest on Metro Morning and a member of q’s sports panel. She lives in Toronto, where she is writing a memoir to be published by McClelland & Stewart.
Susan Olding is the author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays, selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of the 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her writing has won a National Magazine Award and has appeared in The Bellingham Review, The L.A. Review of Books, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and the Utne Reader, and in anthologies, including Best Canadian Essays 2016 and In Fine Form, 2nd Edition.
Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He has published three books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, and most recently, Siege 13: Stories, which won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Governor General’s Award: Fiction, and the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has published over seventy short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni and Granta, and won an O Henry Prize in 2011, and the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards in 2014.
Betsy Warland has published 12 books of creative nonfiction, poetry and lyric prose. A creative writing teacher, mentor and editor, Warland works with writers from across Canada. Her bestseller book of essays if Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing (2010). Oscar of Between — A Memoir of Identity and Ideas was one of two books that launched Caitlin Press’s Dagger Editions in 2016. Warland received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2016. A founder of the Canada’s Creative Nonfiction Collective (CNFC), she mentors and teaches in The Writer’s Studio at S.F.U.; and directs and mentors the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive.
Rebecca Rosenblum is the author of two acclaimed books of fiction, The Big Dream and Once, winner of the Metcalf-Rooke Award and named one of Quill and Quire‘s 15 Books That Mattered in 2008. So Much Love is her first novel. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Awards, and the Danuta Gleed Award, and has appeared in the National Post, Exile Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, the Journey Prize Stories, Maisonneuve, Coming Attractions, and Best Canadian Stories. She holds an Honours English degree from McGill, a publishing certificate from Ryerson, and a Master’s of English and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. She lives in Toronto.
Lori McNulty is an author, photographer, digital storyteller and travel writer. A two-time Journey Prize finalist and a three-time finalist for the CBC Canada Writes Prizes, her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, PRISM international, The Dalhousie Review, Descant and the Globe & Mail. As a writer-in-residence aboard the Canada C3 icebreaker this summer, she navigated part of the world’s longest coastline with a cross-section of Canadian explorers. She is the author of Life on Mars, a fierce and funny short fiction collection and is hard at work on a novel.
Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario with her husband and daughter. Her literary writing has been published by The Malahat Review, Room, Grain, and The New Quarterly, and her current events editorials have been published by CBC, Globe and Mail, Maclean’s and Maisonneuve. She’s currently Associate Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor with The New Quarterly. Most recently, her essays, “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won a National Magazine Award.
Trevor Corkum is a writer, consultant, and educator. His fiction, essays, and reviews have been published widely in magazines and journals across Canada. His work has been nominated for the Journey Prize, the CBC Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and the Western Magazine Award for Personal Journalism. He reviews frequently for The Toronto Star and hosts a popular author interview series called The Chat on 49thShelf.com. A current PhD student in Adult Education at the University of Toronto, his research explores the intersection of storytelling, identity, home, and migration. His novel The Electric Boy is forthcoming with Doubleday Canada.
Chris Banks is a Canadian poet. He is the author of three previous collections of poems: Bonfires, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, and Winter Cranes. His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry in Canada. His next book The Cloud Versus Grand Umificiation Theory will be published in the Fall of 2017 by ECW press. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, PRISM international among other publications. He lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario.
Maša Torbica was born in Zagreb shortly before the breakup of Yugoslavia. Displaced by the subsequent civil war, her family immigrated to Canada. Maša writes in English and Serbian. Her recent work in English has appeared in Versal (Netherlands), Qu (USA), and Understorey (Canada). Her second book of poetry in Serbian, titled Atlas, will be published next year. Maša holds a BA and an MA from the University of Guelph. She is currently a PhD candidate and graduate instructor at the University of Waterloo, specializing in Canadian literature and rhetoric. Her dissertation examines decolonization initiatives in contemporary Canadian society.
Zainab Mahdi is a poet, writer and videographer of Somali-Canadian origin. A K-W local, she is currently an undergraduate Health Studies student at the University of Waterloo. Zainab first developed an interest in poetry after discovering spoken word, and has since competed and featured at numerous venues locally and across the GTA. Her writing typically explores themes of identity, intersectionality and the experiences of being a daughter of the diaspora. Zainab was the recipient of the University of Waterloo’s 2017 Albert Shaw Poetry Prize and is currently a columnist for The Community Edition.
Beth Gebreyohannes escaped with her family from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, after the military government the Derg, came to power in 1979. She was 14 years old. They travelled on foot across the cruel Danakil Desert for 17 days before arriving in Djibouti with just the clothes on their backs. She lived in Djibouti as a refugee for 14 months before coming to Canada in November 1981. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto majoring in Psychology and Sociology. Beth lives in Toronto with her husband and two children, where she is a front-line public worker in the city government, serving its most underprivileged residents.
Kyle Edwards is a freelance writer in Toronto and a former policy researcher at the Chiefs of Ontario. He completed his bachelor of journalism at Ryerson University in June 2017. He enjoys writing about Indigenous politics and culture, and has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. Kyle is Anishinaabe from Lake Manitoba First Nation, but is a member of Ebb and Flow First Nation in Manitoba. His work has appeared in Maclean’s (where he is now an Editorial Apprentice), This, CBC Indigenous and the Toronto Star. One day he wants to become a good nonfiction writer.
Author of two poetry books, Intimate Distances (City of Vancouver Book Prize finalist) and Enter the Chrysanthemum, and the children’s book, The Rainbow Rocket, Fiona Tinwei Lam‘s nonfiction, poetry and fiction appear in over 30 anthologies. Her articles have appeared in The Tyee online news magazine. She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer, co-edited the nonfiction anthology Double Lives Writing and Motherhood, and is co-editing an anthology with Jane Silcott, Love Me True: Writers on the Ups and Downs, Ins and Outs of Marriage (Caitlin Press, 2018). Her video poems have screened at festivals internationally.
Pasha Malla is the author of five books. His writing has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction, and several National Magazine Awards, been shortlisted for the Amazon.ca Best First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Prize (Best First Book, Canada & Caribbean) and long-listed for the Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He is a frequent contributor to Newyorker.com, The Walrus and CBC Radio, and his books column appears monthly in The Globe and Mail. Fugue States, a new novel, was released in May 2017.
Amanda Leduc‘s stories and essays have been published across Canada, the US, and the UK. She is the author of The Miracles of Ordinary Men (ECW Press, 2013), and The Centaur’s Wife, forthcoming from Random House Canada in 2018. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she spends too much time on Twitter and serves as the Communications and Development Coordinator for The Festival of Literary Diversity, Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and stories.
Anna Ling Kaye’s fiction has most recently been short-listed for the 2015 Journey Prize. A former editor at PRISM International and Ricepaper magazines, she is co-founder of Hapa-palooza Festival and sits on the board of Project Bookmark Canada. In 2015, Quill & Quire named Anna as one of seven women imprinting change in the Canadian publishing industry.
Laurie D. Graham, from Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta), currently lives in Haldimand Treaty territory (Kitchener, Ontario), where she is a poet, an editor, the publisher of Brick, and a member of the advisory board for the Oskana Poetry & Poetics series. Her first book, Rove, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada; her second book, Settler Education, was nominated for the Trillium Award for Poetry.
Emily Donaldson is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries, Canada’s oldest journal of literary criticism, and a freelance writer and book critic for The Globe & Mail, the Toronto Star, Maclean’s, Quill & Quire, among other publications. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Toronto with her husband and two boys.
Evelyn Lau is the Vancouver author of twelve books, including seven volumes of poetry. Her memoir Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, published when she was 18, was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh. Evelyn’s short stories, essays and novel have been translated into a dozen languages; her poetry has received the Milton Acorn Award, the Pat Lowther Award, a National Magazine Award and a Governor-General’s nomination. Evelyn served as the 2011-2014 Poet Laureate of Vancouver, as well as writer-in-residence at UBC, Kwantlen College and Vancouver Community College. Evelyn’s most recent collection is Tumour (Oolichan, 2016).
Carrie Snyder is the author of three books for adults and two for children (the latest is Jammie Day, out this fall with Owlkids). Her novel, Girl Runner, was published in Canada in 2014 and has been translated into a number of foreign languages. Carrie lives in Waterloo, Ontario with her husband, four children, and two dogs, and blogs as Obscure CanLit Mama. She teaches creative writing at the University of Waterloo.
Craig Norris is host of The Morning Edition, Waterloo Region’s top-rated morning show. He also hosts and produces In the Key of C, a weekly Ontario-wide look at music, arts, and culture. Both shows air on CBC Radio 1. He has also hosted Laugh Out Loud, CBC Radio 2 Drive, As It Happens, The R3-30, and Know Your Rights. Prior to coming to work at the CBC in 2005, Craig was on CTV’s The Chatroom and eTalk. Besides being a broadcaster for almost two decades, Craig is also a singer-songwriters. For the past 27 years, he has performed with his band, The Kramdens.
Kathleen Winter wrote the novel Annabel and memoir Boundless (Anansi), and story collections boYs and The Freedom in American Songs (Biblioasis). This fall Knopf published her novel Lost in September based on letters of General James Wolfe to his mother.
Alison Pick is the author of six books of fiction, memoir and poetry, most recently the novel Strangers with the Same Dream. She was the winner of the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for the most promising writer in Canada under 35, and her novel Far to Go was nominated for the Man Booker prize. She lives and writes in Toronto.