Opening Showcase: Parental Guidance Advised

ELIZABETH HAY is the author of the #1 nationally bestselling novel Alone in the Classroom, the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel Late Nights On Air, as well as four other highly acclaimed works of fiction, His Whole Life, A Student of Weather, Garbo Laughs, and Small Change. All Things Consoled, her first book of non-fiction, is shortlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize and the winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Formerly a radio broadcaster, she spent a number of years in Mexico and New York City before returning to Canada. She lives in Ottawa.

Photo Credit: Mark Fried

KATHY PAGE is the author of ten previous books, most recently Dear Evelyn (2018), which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Fiction Prize. Other works include Paradise & Elsewhere (2014) and The Two of Us (2016), both nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Born in the UK, she moved to Salt Spring Island with her family in 2001, and now divides her time between writing and teaching at Vancouver Island University.

Photo Credit: Billie Woods

EUFEMIA FANTETTI’S debut, A Recipe for Disaster & Other Unlikely Tales of Love, was runner-up for the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and winner of the 2014 Bressani Literary Prize. A graduate of the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing, she is a three-time winner of Accenti Magazine’s annual competition.

Her work appears in Event, The New Quarterly, the Globe and Mail and the recently released anthology Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers (Caitlin Press 2019). She teaches writing at Humber College and edits for the Humber Literary Review. My Father, Fortune-tellers and Me: A Memoir is her latest book, from Mother Tongue Publishing.

Originally from Treaty 1 territory (Landmark, MB), SARAH ENS is currently a writer and editor based in Treaty 6 territory (Saskatoon, SK). Her poetry has appeared in literary journals such as Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Poetry Is Dead. This year’s winner of The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, she also placed 2nd in Contemporary Verse 2’s 2019 2-Day Poem Contest. In 2018, she won 1st place in Room Magazine’s Short Forms Contest. Sarah is a current MFA in Writing candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. Her debut poetry collection, The World Is Mostly Sky, is forthcoming with Turnstone Press in Spring 2020.

PAOLA FERRANTE’S debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was published Spring 2019 by Mansfield Press. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Puritan, The New Quarterly, Grain, The Fiddlehead, CV2, Room, Joyland and elsewhere. She won Room‘s 2018 prize for Fiction, The New Quarterly’s 2019 Peter Hinchcliffe Award and her poetry has been nominated for The Best of the Net. She is currently working on a collection of short fiction and is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review. She resides in Toronto, Canada.

TERENCE YOUNG lives in Victoria, BC, where he has recently retired from teaching English and creative writing at St. Michaels University School. His poems and stories have appeared in literary periodicals across Canada. Most recently, the poem “Tender Is The Night” was the winner of the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, sponsored by The New Quarterly. It is from a forthcoming collection called Smithereens (Harbour, 2021).