Festival 2024  Authors & Headliners

Kat Cameron (she/her) is an award-winning poet and fiction writer. Her second poetry collection, Ghosts Still Linger, won the High Plains Book Award for poetry in 2021 and was a finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, and Vallum.

See Kat Cameron at this year's festival:

• Local Publishers Spotlight

Michelle Lobkowicz (she/her) is Acquisitions Editor for humanities and literature at University of Alberta Press.

See Michelle Lobkowicz at this year's festival:

• Local Publishers Spotlight

University of Alberta Press is a contemporary, award-winning publisher of scholarly and creative books distinguished by their editorial care, exceptional design, and global reach.

Follow on IG: @ualbertapress

For more info check out their website:
https://ualbertapress.ca/

See University of Alberta Press at this year's festival:

• Local Publishers Spotlight

Funicular Magazine publishes short fiction, flash fiction, and poetry from emerging and established writers, as well as work from writers around the world, edited by Jason Lee Norman.

Follow on IG: @funfunfunicular

For more info check out their website:
https://www.funicularmagazine.com/

See Funicular Magazine at this year's festival:

• Local Publishers Spotlight

The Bolo Tie Collective is a SAMU student club whose mission is twofold: to bridge the gap between the students of the English and Communication Studies departments of MacEwan University and to foster a community within the broader MacEwan student body, comprised of those passionate about the process of creative writing.

Follow on IG: @thebolotiecollective

For more info check out their website:
https://thebolotiecollective.ca/

See Bolo Tie Collective at this year's festival:

• Local Publishers Spotlight

Katie Bickell is author of Always Brave, Sometimes Kind, a novel told in short stories. She is the recipient of the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, the Alberta Indie Project Award, the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, the Alberta Views Fiction Prize, the WGA’s Emerging Writer Award, and the Voices of Motherhood Essay Prize. Katie works as a ghostwriter, manuscript consultant, and creative writing instructor, and is currently penning her second novel, Alskling.

Rita Bouvier is a Métis writer, editor and retired educator. Her fourth book of poetry, a beautiful rebellion released April 2023 by Thistledown Press, was inspired by the Idle No More movement. It honours an ongoing resistance of an unconquerable love for family, community, land and life itself. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (Treaty 6), but home is sakitawak—Île-à-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan, Canada situated on the historic trading and meeting grounds of Cree and Dene people (Treaty 10). She currently serves as a volunteer with the Saskatchewan Ânskohk Writers Circle Inc. and the Indigenous Editors Association.

See Rita Bouvier at this year's festival:

• women across the land are dancing…don your moccasins nosisim Writing Workshop with Rita Bouvier
• Closing Showcase: Challenging the Current

Sue Sinclair is the author of six collections of poetry, all of which have won or have been nominated for national or regional awards. Her most recent book is Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems (Goose Lane Editions, 2022), which won the New Brunswick Poetry Book Award and was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Award. Sue has a PhD in philosophy and wrote her dissertation about beauty. She lives in Fredericton, on Wolastoqiyik Territory, where she teaches at the University of New Brunswick and edits for The Fiddlehead and Brick Books.

See Sue Sinclair at this year's festival:

• THE WORLD POURED THROUGH US: POETRY AS TRANSLATION – ONLINE WRITING WORKSHOP WITH SUE SINCLAIR

Kyla Jamieson is a poet and educator whose advocacy and passion for accessibility is rooted in her experience of a brain injury and dynamic, invisible disability. Her first book, Body Count, was a CBC Best Poetry Book of the Year in 2020. She has collaborated with other disabled writers and publishers as a writer, editor, and mentor, and organized the Rest Days Reading Series, a restful virtual reading series starring disabled poets from across Turtle Island. Raised in Squamish, BC, Kyla learned to whitewater kayak at the age of eight and still spends as much time at the river as possible.

Follow on IG: @kyla__jamieson

For more info check out their website:
https://www.kylajamieson.com/

See Kyla Jamieson at this year's festival:

• Alternatives to the Status Quo: Accessibility in the Literary Arts Webinar

Olivia Spring is the founder and editor of SICK, a thoughtful magazine exploring illness and disability. She writes about illness and trauma from her home in Maine, where she lives with her dog, Black Bean.

For more info check out their website:
https://olivialeoraspring.com/

See Olivia Spring at this year's festival:

• Alternatives to the Status Quo: Accessibility in the Literary Arts Webinar

The Horizons Writers Circle is a Writers’ Guild of Alberta program that provides support and mentorship for writers within the Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) community, ESL, and underrepresented writers who live in Edmonton and are at the beginning of their literary journey.

For more info check out their website:
https://writersguild.ca/programs-services/horizons-writers-circle/

See Horizon Writers Circle at this year's festival:

• The Olive Reading Series

Sharon Thesen was born left-handed in 1946 to the son of a Norwegian whale- hunter and the daughter of an Irish mystic. She has written, published, edited, and taught poetry and poetics for a long time, and still is writing, publishing, editing, and teaching.

See Sharon Thesen at this year's festival:

• The Olive Reading Series

Patrick Grace is an author and teacher who divides his time between Vancouver and Victoria, BC. His poems have been published widely in Canadian literary magazines, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Columba, EVENT, The Ex-Puritan, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and more. His work has been a finalist for literary contests with CV2 and PRISM international, and in 2020, his poem “A Violence” won The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for poetry. He has published two chapbooks: a blurred wind swirls back for you (2023), and Dastardly (2021), both of which explore aspects of love, fear, and trauma that represent a personal queer identity. Deviant, his first full-length poetry collection, continues to explore these themes.

Follow on IG: @thepoetpatrick.

See Patrick Grace at this year's festival:

• Literary Editions 2024 hosted by UAlberta Press

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up in a cabin down a dirt road without electricity or running water. She studied applied mathematics and physics at university, and went to her scholarship interview wearing shoes she had found at the dump. Her summer student projects in space physics involved numerical modeling of the northern lights. Her poetry appears in magazines such as The Antigonish Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, FOLIO, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, Nat. Brut, OxMag, Strange Horizons, and Vallum: A contemporary poetry, among others. Northerny is her first book.

See Dawn MacDonald at this year's festival:

• Literary Editions 2024 hosted by UAlberta Press

First off, damn magpies like magpies.

And like magpies, they happily devote themselves (in groups of two to six) to making the most extraordinary sounds while hopping about looking for more sounds to make and things to steal. Also like magpies, damn magpies overwinter in Edmonton and enjoy the way snow changes the sound of the sounds they make.

Allison Balcetis – baritone saxophone
Chenoa Anderson – flute, piccolo
Ian Crutchley – found sound
Jane Berry – vocals
Mark Segger – drums
Scott Smallwood – electronic sound

See Damn Magpies (a free-improvisation sextet) at this year's festival:

• BELLOW

For more info check out their website:
https://www.strollofpoets.com/

Follow us on X (Twitter): @strollofpoets

See The Stroll of Poets Society at this year's festival:

• The White Water Blinks with The Stroll of Poets

Spoken Word Youth Choir (SWYC) is a professional spoken word troupe: part Greek chorus, part improvisers, part poets and hip hop artists. We are unique to Canada. SWYC Junior, Senior and Alumni are under the direction of creator, Gail Sidonie Sobat.

For more info check out their website:
https://youthwrite.com/spoken-word-youth-choir

See Spoken Word Youth Choir (SWYC) at this year's festival:

• Streams and Bridges: Let the current flow

E.D. Blodgett (1935 – 2018), PhD, was a poet who published close to 30 books of poetry, for which he received two Governor General’s Awards as well as awards from the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and the Canadian Authors Association.

Thea Bowering’s collection of short stories is called Love at Last Sight (NeWest Press, 2013). In 2022, she and Jody Shenkarek were artists-in-residence at Yorath House, Edmonton, where they wrote about living alongside the North Saskatchewan River.

Follow on IG @olivereadingseries

For more info check out their website:
https://olivereadingseries.wordpress.com/

See Thea Bowering at this year's festival:

• The Olive Reading Series

Tim Bowling is the author of twenty-four works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including two Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Awards, five Alberta Book Awards, a Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, two Writers’ Trust of Canada nominations, two Governor General’s Award nominations and a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his entire body of work.

Social Links for River Streets Writes (working with Tim’s Publisher)
IG: @river_street_writes | Facebook: @RiverStreetWriting | Twitter: @riverstwriting

See Tim Bowling at this year's festival:

• Streams and Bridges: Let the current flow

Leilei Chen 莫譯 (she/her) (pronounced as muo-yee meaning “no translation”) lectures in the Department of English and Film Studies of the University of Alberta. She authored Re-orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-cultural Understanding, the Mandarin versions of Margaret Laurence’s short stories, and the traditional and simplified Chinese versions of Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction. She translates contemporary Chinese ecological writing, women’s writings, and poetry. Her translation of poet MA Hui (马辉), I Have Forsaken Heaven and Earth, but Never Forsaken You, is a Frontenac House 2023 Quartet book.

Social Media:
instagram: IG @leileichenleilei | Facebook: Leilei Chen MoYi | TikTok: @leilei.chenmoyi | X: @leileichenlei

For more info check out their website:
www.leileichen.ca

See Leilei Chen at this year's festival:

• Streams and Bridges: Let the current flow

Margaret Christakos’ recent poetry titles include charger and Dear Birch. Previous books include Excessive Love Prostheses, Sooner, Welling, Multitudes, the novel Charisma, and a multimodal memoir, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos, edited by Gregory Betts, was published in 2017 and several of her collections have been nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Christakos has served as writer-in-residence at five Canadian universities, including the University of Alberta (2017-2018). Born and raised in Sudbury, she has worked as a writer, poet, instructor, and event organizer in Toronto since 1987.

Follow on IG: @margaretchristakos

For more info check out their website:
https://www.margaretchristakos.com/

See Margaret Christakos at this year's festival:

• Literary Editions 2024 hosted by UAlberta Press

Marilyn Dumont teaches for the faculties of Arts and Native Studies at the University of Alberta and is proud of Metis family lines from her Mother’s – Vaness / Dufresne families and her father’s – Boudreau/Dumont families. Her four collections of poetry have won provincial or national awards: A Really Good Brown Girl (1996); green girl dreams Mountains (2001); that tongued belonging (2007); The Pemmican Eaters (2015). A fifth collection surrounding Indigenous history of Edmonton, called South Side of a Kinless River will be published by Brick Books in 2024.

See Marilyn Dumont at this year's festival:

• Closing Showcase: Challenging the Current

Shima Aisha Robinson is an amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton) born student, community builder, poet and spoken word artist who embodies, with every literary and scholarly effort, the ancient meaning of her chosen pen name. Dwennimmen is the name of an ancient African Adinkra symbol, which means strength, humility, learning and wisdom. It is no surprise, then, that this veteran of the Alberta poetry community uses a searing intellect and dynamic precision-of-language to create poetry which ushers her readers and listeners toward greater understanding and poignant reflection.

For Shima Aisha Robinson aka Dwennimmen, poetry has long been a compass, a salve, an anchor and guiding light. She uses the potential and force of poetry to uncover the full range of her cerebral, linguistic and spiritual fortitude. This is why her every poem and performance testifies to an emerging power and wisdom, an authentic, deeply human potency which she hopes to pass on to listeners and poetry-lovers around the world.

She is the author of two books including HORN, 2016, Denseverse (self published), and Bellow, 2022, Glass House Press. She has worked, advocated, and represented our community as Artistic Producer for the Edmonton Poetry Festival Society from 2022-23 Festival Society, founder and curator of the WORD*LAB spoken word series, Learning and Outreach Manager for Fringe Theatre Adventures, and not least-of-all is also the The City Of Edmonton’s 10th Poet Laureate.

See Dwennimmen (Shima Robinson) at this year's festival:

• BELLOW

Trisia Eddy Woods (she/her) grew up exploring Alberta and Manitoba on horseback. Her artwork has been exhibited both close to home and internationally, and is held in the special collection of the Herron Art Library. A former editor for Red Nettle Press, Trisia’s writing has appeared in a variety of literary journals and chapbooks across North America, including Contemporary Verse 2, The Garneau Review, and New American Writing. She currently lives in Edmonton / amiskwaciywâskahikan with her family, which includes an array of four-legged companions. A Road Map for Finding Wild Horses is her first full-length collection.

Follow on IG: @prairiedarkroom 

For more info check out their website(s):
www.rednettlepress.com and https://prairiedarkroom.com/

See Trisia Eddy at this year's festival:

• Streams and Bridges: Let the current flow

Jannie Edwards writes from her chosen city of Edmonton amiskwacîwâskahikan (ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ). An Emeritus of MacEwan University, she has published three collections of poetry and has collaborated on many multidisciplinary artistic projects and literary mentorships. Most recently, Learning Their Names: Letters from the Home Place (Collusion Books, 2022), a decade-long “slow art” collaboration with visual artist Sydney Lancaster, explores their connection with a beloved five-acre homestead near the historic Victoria Trail in northeastern Alberta. During a year of the pandemic, Sydney and Jannie exchanged poetic letters across the country (Jannie in Edmonton, Sydney in Nova Scotia) that deepened their thinking about history, stewardship, responsibility and the aliveness of every living thing.

See Jannie Edwards at this year's festival:

• Poems in a Quiet Pool: Zen Reading

Emma Elder (she/her) is a poet and full-time student at the University of Alberta. She is studying Honors Physiology with a goal of pursuing medicine, and intends on publishing her debut poetry collection soon! As treasurer of the EPF board, she looks forward to supporting the festival and is committed to sharing her love of poetry with the Edmonton community. Emma is a human body fanatic and science nerd, but has never lost sight of her artistic side.

See Emma Elder at this year's festival:

• Open Stage @ Audreys Books

Dr. Manijeh Mannani is Professor of Literary Studies and Dean in Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at Athabasca University. Her research interests include Persian literature, comparative literature, poetry, and life-writing.

Dr. Mannani will be featured in the event WALKING INTO GOD BY TED BLODGETT.

Susan McCaslin (PhD) is the editor of E.D. Blodgett’s posthumous volume of poetry, Walking Into God. She is also the author of seventeen volumes of poetry including her most recent, Consider (Aeolus House, 2023).

Susan will take part in WALKING INTO GOD BY TED BLODGETT.

The author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, publisher and literary impresario rob mclennan’s most recent titles include World’s End, and essays in the face of uncertainties. He lives in Ottawa.

Website: robmclennan.blogspot.com

See rob mclennan at this year's festival:

• Literary Editions 2024 hosted by UAlberta Press

Peter Midgley is the author of several books of poetry, children’s literature, and plays. He lives in Edmonton.

For more info check out their website:
https://www.midgley.ca/

See Peter Midgley at this year's festival:

• Walking Into God by Ted Blodgett (Posthumous Book Launch)

Jason Lee Norman writes short fiction, edits Funicular Magazine, and published Monto Books. He lives in Edmonton.

See Jason Lee Norman at this year's festival:

• Local Publishers Spotlight

Catherine Owen, from Vancouver, now lives in Edmonton and has published 16 books, including her latest, Moving to Delilah (Freehand 2024).

Follow on IG: mslyricspoetryoutlaws

See Catherine Owen at this year's festival:

• The Olive Reading Series

Pierrette Requier is a multi-faceted bilingual writer and translator. She is the recipient of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal 2022. Her recent triple publication—a translation / adaptation of details from the edge of the village, into French, entitled Petites nouvelles du Last Best West is available in book form, as an e-book, and audiobook. A collaboration between two western Canada publishing houses, Les Éditions de la nouvelle plume, Regina Saskatchewan and Frontenac House, Okotoks, Alberta.

See Pierrette Requier at this year's festival:

• French Twist

Emily Riddle (Okimâw Pipikwan Iskwêw) is Nehiyaw and a member of the Alexander First Nation (Kipohtakaw). She is a writer, textile artist, and policy iskwew based in Amisko Waciw Wâskahikan (Edmonton, Canada). In 2022, she released her first full length poetry collection, The Big Melt which won the Griffin Poetry Prize Canadian first book award. Her writing has been published in The Malahat Review, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, among others. Emily Riddle is a dedicated Treaty 6 descendant and a semi-dedicated Edmonton Oilers fan.

Follow on 
X (Twitter) | Instagram

See Emily Riddle at this year's festival:

• Closing Showcase: Challenging the Current

Anna Marie Sewell is a multi-genre author and former Poet Laureate, a founding member of the Stroll of Poets, and  involved with various collaborators in pursuit of beauty, meaningful exchange and reverent foolishness. Her latest novel, Urbane, is a finalist for the City of Edmonton Book Prize. A member of Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation, also of Anishinaabe and Polish heritage, she lives in Edmonton and works globally.

For more info check out their website:
prairiepomes.com.

See Anna Marie Sewell at this year's festival:

• Closing Showcase: Challenging the Current

Matthew Stepanic is a queer writer who lives and works on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton. He is a co-author of Project Compass (Monto Books, 2017) and the author of Relying on that Body (Glass Buffalo, 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp, 2022), Plenitude, FreeFall, and others. He hosts VERS/E, a queer poetry open mic the first Wednesday of every month at Felice Cafe.

Follow on IG: @mlstepanic

For more info check out their website:
http://matthewstepanic.com/

See Matthew Stepanic at this year's festival:

• Sherwood Park Celebration of Poetry

Matthew James Weigel is an award winning Dene and Métis artist and author born and raised in Edmonton. His visual art often represents the many relationships we have with our surroundings, while his scholarly focus hopes to reclaim archival histories. His debut book “Whitemud Walking” recently won the City of Edmonton Book Prize and he is currently finishing his PhD at the University of Alberta.

See Matthew James Weigel at this year's festival:

• Sherwood Park Celebration of Poetry