Board & Organizers

Nisha Patel is an award-winning queer poet & artist. She is the City of Edmonton’s Poet Laureate, and the Canadian Individual Slam Champion. She is a recipient of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award.

Nisha has performed across Canada and the world from Moose Jaw to Seoul. Her poetry speaks to themes of race, feminism, and identity, focusing strongly on her struggles and triumphs as a woman of colour. She strives to build strong relationships, mentorship, and opportunities for artists around her, believing in the possibility and forgiveness of the Edmonton arts scene.

Nisha is an alumnus of the University of Alberta School of Business. Nisha works to further her goal of building a stronger artistic community through living in her truth.

Alice Major founded the Edmonton Poetry Festival in 2006 while she was serving as Edmonton’s first poet laureate. (She warns all future laureates to be careful what they start!). Alice has published eleven award-winning collections of poetry, including The Office Tower Tales (which won the Pat Lowther award) and Memory’s Daughter (which received the Stephan G. Stephansson Prize). Her latest book is Welcome to the Anthropocene, which was nominated for three major awards. In 2019, she received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Alberta. Her website is here.

Bio coming soon …

Katherine Gibson received her MLIS from McGill University in Montreal before working at the Richmond Public Library in British Columbia, Canada. After a year and half there she took up teaching English in Japan and finally settled down at the Edmonton Public Library in 2010. Katherine leads Capital City Press, EPL’s initiative to support local writers.

Bill Howe has been basking in the sounds and rhythms of the Edmonton poetry scene for over 20 years. As a high school English teacher, he is eager to see his students encounter poetry both in and out of the classroom — not because the curriculum says he needs to, but because as much as poetry, in both play and intensity, connects to what it means to live fully, it cannot be ignored. And if it is ignored, or dismissed, or trivialized, our entire community suffers because of it. Though not a ‘published poet,’ Bill readily writes poetry for and with students and enthusiastically supports and applauds the words that speak the heart and mind of the soul’s urgency.

Marco Melfi is an Edmonton poet whose work has been published in The Prairie Journal, FreeFall, the Edmonton Poetry Festival’s Poetry Route and 40 Below: Volume 2. His chapbook, In Between Trains, was published in 2014, and Marco was the recipient of the Sharon Drummond Chapbook Prize.

Bio coming soon …

Don Perkins has been on the Festival board since 2013. He is also a member of the Edmonton Stroll of Poets. He has recently retired from teaching in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and now works part time as a Special Advisor to the Association of Academic Staff University of Alberta.

Matthew Stepanic is the editor of Glass Buffalo, the poetry editor of Eighteen Bridges, and a freelance writer and editor. His poetry has appeared in Eighteen Bridges, The New Quarterly, 40 Below: Vol. II and his short fiction on coffee sleeves. His first book, the collaborative novel Project Compass, was published by Monto Books in Fall 2017. On an ideal Friday night, he is unwinding with a good book and a better bottle of wine.

Brandon Wint is an Ontario born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joy and devastation and inequity associated with this era of human and ecological history. Increasingly, his work on the page and in performance casts a tender but robust attention toward the movements and impacts of colonial, capitalist logic, and how they might be undone. In this way, Brandon Wint is devoted to a poetics of world making, world altering and world breaking.

For Brandon, the written and spoken word is a tool for examining and enacting his sense of justice, and imagining less violence futures for himself and the world he has inherited. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry.

Bio coming soon …

Randall is one of the founding fathers of the Raving Poets and has been involved in the spoken word scene for longer than he can remember. His photography has been published in the Globe and Mail, Edmonton Journal, See, Vue and Edmonton Life Magazine. He particularly enjoys making author bio photos. Randall likes to forge connections between the spoken word and the world of images, music and motion video. When he’s not making photographs, this is where you’ll find him.

Kasia is a freelance website developer and creative consultant, operating under the trade name CodeWord Media Design since 2011. Prior to launching her business, Kasia obtained a BA in English from the University of Alberta, and worked in marketing communications for companies in the tech and manufacturing sectors. Kasia co-founded the Words with Friends Edmonton Creative Writing Collective. She also sat on the Board of Directors for the Edmonton Poetry Festival from 2013 through 2016, serving stints as both Treasurer and Communications Committee Chair. Kasia released her self-published collection, the mourning after: poems 1996-2011, in October of 2011.