2017 Headliners

Nasra is a queer, Muslim, Oromo creator/curator living in Amiskwaciwȃskahikan (Edmonton) on Treaty 6 territory. They were the Youth Poet Laureate of Edmonton from 2016 to 2017 and are currently the Director of Sister to Sister, an artistic showcase for/by femmes and women of colour. They are also the Festival Director of Black Arts Matter—Alberta’s interdisciplinary Black arts festival—and were the 2017 recipient of the Mayor’s Emerging Artist award. Nasra’s first poetry chapbook A God Dance in Human Cloth with Glass Buffalo Publishing celebrates the soft warrior in all of us; a call to step into our divinity and into ourselves, with fists unclenched.

Considered a godmother of rap, hip-hop, dub and spoken word. Her work is used across the educational spectrum, encompassing alternate learning contexts from kindergarten to post graduate studies. As one of its lead originator and innovators, she has specialized in the writing and performing of dub poetry, a new genre of English Literature which is a highly politicized form of poetry, preferring a black aesthetic and specific cultural codification.

Allen is responsible for opening-up the form to insist and engrave feminist content and sensibilities. Renowned across the globe for her work, Allen has published several books and recordings, and has worked in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, writing for children, experimental writing forms, and has written several plays. Her work also appears in a variety of media. She has spent almost four decades writing, publishing, and performing her work in Canada, The US, Europe, and England and elsewhere.

Recently awarded an Honourary Doctor of Letters from Wilfred Laurier University, Lillian Allen is a Creative Writing Professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design University in Toronto Canada. Allen emerged from the grassroots in the seventies to become a leading influential figure on the Canadian cultural landscape.

Allen is a leading expert on cultural diversity and culture in Canada and has been a consultant and advisor to all levels of government, to several leading Canadian institutions, and to community groups. She has initiated, designed and facilitated the establishment of a number of organizations in various culturally diverse communities, and has worked within several established organizations to implement strategies to create access and change. Lillian also initiated such programs as the legendary Fresh Arts and the International Spoken Word Program at Banff Center for the Arts. Multi-talented and multi-dimensional, she instigated, co-produced and hosted CBC’s (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s) Wordbeat, a national weekly radio show on poetry and the spoken word.

A selection of her published works in book and CD forms include; Psychic Unrest, 2000, Women Do This Every Day, 1993; Nothing But A Hero, 1992; Why Me, 1991; If You See Truth, 1987. Her recordings (CDs) include; ANXIETY 2012, Freedom & Dance, 1999; Conditions Critical, 1988; Revolutionary Tea Party, 1986;

Bert Almon has published eleven collections of poetry. He has won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Award for poetry twice, and received the City of Edmonton Book Prize in 2008 for A Ghost in Waterloo Station. In 2013, he was elected to the Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame. He taught creative writing at the University of Alberta for forty years. Many Edmonton writers have been his students.

Douglas Barbour is Professor emeritus, Department of English & Film Studies, University of Alberta. His books include Visible Visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour (NeWest Press; winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award); Story for a Saskatchewan Night (rdc press);  Fragmenting Body etc (NeWest Press), Breath Takes (Wolsac & Wynn),  Continuations & Continuations 2 (University of Alberta Press); the critical texts, Michael Ondaatje (Twayne Publishers); Lyric / Anti-lyric: essays on contemporary poetry (NeWest Press). The University of Alberta Press has just published his latest book of poems, Listen. If in Spring 2017. He was inducted into the Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame in 2003. Eclectic Ruckus is his review blog: https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/.

Nuala: a fable is Kimmy Beach’s sixth book. Her second, Alarum Within: theatre poems (Turnstone Press, 2003), has been adapted twice as a stage play. The Last Temptation of Bond (UAP, 2013) was featured on CBC’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers, and was chosen as one of the top five books of the year at Quill & Quire’s Readers’ Poll. Kimmy has served as a mentor, teacher, workshop facilitator, and writer-in-residence for over a dozen provincial and national writing organizations and schools. She is currently writing a novel about 1970s romance comics and the music of Tom Jones. Kimmy lives in a creaky old house in Red Deer, Alberta, with Stu, her husband of thirty years.

Shane Book is the current writer in residence at the University of Calgary. His first poetry collection, Ceiling of Sticks, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. His second, Congotronic, won the Lampman Award and was shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award, Ottawa Book Award, and 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. His first film, Dust, won prizes at numerous festivals worldwide. His second, Praise and Blame, premiered in 2016. He was educated at NYU, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford.

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

Alison Clarke is a writer/artist who also enjoys painting and drawing. She also experiences life as a spoken word artist. She is the author of The Sisterhood, a young adult fantasy novel about a sorceress’ daughter, and her best friend who is a dragon, and the journey they go on to save the universe. The Sisterhood is book one of The Sisterhood Series. For Alison, life is an interesting journey. Whether she is immersing herself in poetry, prose, or visual art, Alison is at home.

Liam Coady’s work is special for its ability to foreground the human possibilities of social unity, personal resilience, love and enduring hopefulness. A member of the 2011 National Slam Champion Team and a 2-time finalist for the Canadian Individual Poetry Slam, Liam has performed and toured cross Canada and internationally.

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.

Norma Dunning is an Inuk professor, grandmother and writer. Her short story collection, Tainna (the unseen ons), received the Governor General’s Literary Awards for 2021. Annie Muktuk and Other Stories received the Danuta Gleed award in 2018. Dunning’s first collection of poetry, Eskimo Pie: a poetics of Inuit Identity, was released in 2020. Her second collection of poetry, Akia (the other side), will be published in July 2022. Kinauva? (what’s your name?), Dunning’s first work of nonfiction, will release in 2023. She lives in Edmonton.

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.

Montreal-born, Edmonton-based poet Kathy Fisher has been performing her words for international audiences for over three decades. Her passion is marrying sonic elements in poetry with improvisational music or ‘found sound’ – be they recordings of northern lights, tracks from her oral history sound library, or arias from rediscovered opera divas. She recently served as mentor in the Writer’s Guild of Alberta Borderlines program and is currently excavating and re-writing her LL.M. thesis as creative non-fiction.

Nora Gould writes from east central Alberta where she ranches with her family. She graduated from the University of Guelph in 1984 with a degree in veterinary medicine. Her debut poetry collection, I See My Love More Clearly From a Distance (Brick Books, 2012), was winner of the 2013 Robert Kroetsch Edmonton Book Prize and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry (Writers Guild of Alberta); it was also shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was a finalist in the Poetry category for the High Plains Book Awards. Selah is her second poetry collection.

Maya Gupta is in her second year at the University of Alberta studying math and philosophy. This past year she was pleased to win the CLC poetry contest and to have her poem published in Glass Buffalo. She loves wine gums and afternoon naps.

Marina Reid Hale can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be a writer when she grew up (save for a week in grade two when she wanted to be a dolphin). An Edmonton spoken word writer, performer, and educator, Marina spends her time competing in poetry slams, leading writing workshops, and working at the family wig shop. She has represented Edmonton in two national poetry competitions; created a one-woman spoken word poetry show, Monster Girl, for NextFest 2015; was a part of the initial #yegwords coffee sleeve project; and is the creator of the Giant Fridge Magnet Poetry art installation. In 2017, Marina released her first poetry chapbook, These Are Not Love Poems, with Glass Buffalo. Officially a writer now, she is still trying to work on the growing up part.

Richard Harrison’s eight books include the Governor General’s Award–finalist Big Breath of a Wish, and Hero of the Play, the first book of poetry launched at the Hockey Hall of Fame. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, a position he took up after being the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary in 1995. His work has been published, broadcast and displayed around the world, and his poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. In On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, Richard reflects on his father’s death, the Alberta Flood and what poetry offers a life lived around it.

At eighteen, and after a very successful high school performing arts tenure, Malik is diving head first into the real world of professional theatre, spoken word and all around performing arts! He considers it a true privilege and honour to have the opportunity to share his work at Poetry Central this year.

Liz Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, the first time the prize has been awarded to a debut collection. It was also a finalist for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and received an honourable mention for the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize. Born and raised in northern Ontario, Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing through the University of Guelph. She now lives in Toronto where she assists with neurocognitive aging research.

Joel Katelnikoff works on Inhabitations: A Recombinant Theory Project. The project remixes the work of contemporary writers of poetry and poetics, using techniques conventionally associated with plagiarism and piracy in order to develop new collaborative methods of critical and poetic writing. These Inhabitations are produced with the support of the original writers, including Erín Moure, Christian Bök, Fred Wah, Vanessa Place, Johanna Drucker, Steve McCaffery, Sawako Nakayasu, Marie Annharte Baker, and Lyn Hejinian. Further details on the project can be found at inhabitations.com. Work-in-progress is regularly posted on Twitter at: @inhabitations.

Claire Kelly’s first full-length collection, Maunder, is available from Palimpsest Press. Her poem “Mother, What Should We Do?” was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2017. She lives and writes in Edmonton. Her second book of poetry, One Thing – Then Another, is published with ECW.

Ariel Kroon is a PhD student in English at the University of Alberta, where she studies post-apocalyptic Canadian genre literature. In a previous life, she was the Art & Literature section editor of Paper Droids, an online magazine of geek culture for women, by women. She writes poetry sometimes.

Ben Ladouceur is a writer living in Ottawa. His first collection of poems, Otter (Coach House Books), was selected as a best book of 2015 by the National Post, nominated for a 2016 Lambda Literary Award, and awarded the 2016 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best debut poetry collection in Canada. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Walrus, The Awl, Prairie Fire, Open Book and many other magazines. He edits prose for Arc Poetry Magazine.

Lady Vanessa Cardona is a mestiza, Colombian, first generation immigrant artist, poet, theatre practitioner, community organizer, dance instructor and photographer. She started her spoken word career in Windhoek, Namibia and currently lives in Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), Treaty 6 Territory. Lady Vanessa is the 2018 Canadian Individual Poetry Slam Champion. She graduated with a BFA and specialization in Theatre and Development from Concordia University. She has written and performed her own one woman show called “Three Ladies” at the Edmonton Found Festival of 2017. She is also a co-creator and performer of “Whiteface” produced with Mile Zero Dance, Hip-hop in the park, Winnipeg and Edmonton Fringe Festival. Lady is a mentor of a refugee youth leadership group called, “Newcomers are lit” officially known as the Canadian Council for Refugees Youth Network. She is the founder of “Fiesta y Resistancia” Alberta’s interdisciplinary Latinx art Festival. Lady has toured and competed around Canada and the United States promoting her art as an Edmonton local artist and proud member of the Breath in Poetry collective. She features in the chapbook Water, published by Glass Buffalo. Lady is currently working on her upcoming book La Sangre Llama. Lady believes in the healing powers art provides for our community. Healing is not polite; art allows us to be the frankest versions of ourselves so that we may strengthen our souls, minds and the community around us. Art is where we come together through unity of purpose.

Curtis LeBlanc was born and raised in St. Albert, AB. In 2016, his poetry won the Readers’ Choice Award in the Arc Poem of The Year Contest and was shortlisted for The Walrus Poetry Prize as well as CV2’s Young Buck Poetry Prize. More of his work can be found in Eighteen Bridges, Prairie Fire, Event, Geist, Alberta Views, The Literary Review of Canada and elsewhere. Good for Nothing (Anstruther Press, 2017) is his first chapbook.

Laurie MacFayden is an award-winning writer, visual artist and former journalist who has lived in Edmonton since 1984. Her latest poetry collection, Walking Through Turquoise, explores love, desire, and other intimacies mined in her first two titles, White Shirt and Kissing Keeps Us Afloat. Her writing has appeared in The New Quarterly, FreeFall, Queering the Way and Alberta Views.

Pearl Lorentzen is fascinated with creativity, culture, and language in various motley and marvelous forms. In her last year at U of A, she is studying, Linguistics, Creative Writing, and Japanese. Since the fall, she has focused on fiction, but continues to allow poetics to impregnate her writing.

Haitian-born spoken word artist and patient advocate, Medgine is a person for whom the love of language and the alchemy of words is second nature. Her multi-lingual upbringing (French, Creole, English) not only prompted her to begin experimenting with the potential and magic of language but naturally compelled her into a deep love of poetry. Over the years, Medgine became a Lupus, CIDP, Polymyositis, and Raynaud’s warrior, all of which fuels her desire to merge storytelling and her power of language into patient advocacy especially for those living with chronic illness. Medgine currently serves as a Patient Advisor and is working on her first collection of poetry.

Micheline Maylor’s newest collection, titled Little Wildheart, was recently short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry and deals with existentialism, the environment, and transcendence. She will be the Calgary Public Library Author in Residence in the fall of 2016, and she is Calgary’s current Poet Laureate. Her second collection Whirr and Click is with Frontenac House (2013) and landed her on the Pat Lowther Memorial Award shortlist. She serves as guest editor at Frontenac Press’ renowned Quartet series for 2013-17. She serves as the Past-president and co-founder of Freefall Literary Society, and is the editor-in-chief of FreeFall literary Her latest works can be found in Partisan, The Literary Review of Canada, and Quill and Quire.

Kaz Mega is a POEMcee, community builder and musician. He is Co-Director of Hip Hop in the Park and was Cap’n of the 2013 & 2014 YEG National Slam Team.

Jane Munro’s Blue Sonoma won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Recent books include False Creek, Open Every Window, and Glass Float. Munro has taught creative writing at universities, led writing workshops, and given readings around the world. She lives on unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

With wolf-esque eyes and dimples as deep as the sea, she opens the vault to spill out a little poetry; all while flying by the seat of her pants . A swareee of many short pieces all strung together to create a colourful and interconnected story to then Drink it all in with a boozy accordion.

David Oberholtzer has been a teacher of English, Latin, Creative Writing and Communications for 35 years in both rural and urban high schools. For this effort he has twice been rewarded the Provincial Teaching Award as well as the Prime Minister’s award for Teaching Excellence.

He is also a pianist and accompanist in the Edmonton Musical community and has been a church musician and organist for over 50 years.

His present creative work is a series of poems on the relationship between the gay artists – Benjamin Britten and E.M. Forester.

He is also actively engaged in keeping his golf score – for 9 holes under his actual age!

An Edmontonian by birth, but raised and currently living in Calgary, Tyler Perry is a poet and English teacher who has traveled as far as Japan to perform his poetry, and is thrilled to be returning to his birthplace to take part in the Edmonton Poetry Festival. He completed his B. Ed. at the University of Alberta and his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at UBC, and his work has appeared in anthologies such as Home and Away: Alberta’s finest poets muse on the meanings of home, and in literary magazines such as Arc, Descant, and The Prairie Journal. Tyler is one of the executive organizers of Alberta’s provincial high school poetry slam competition, Can You Hear Me Now?, which is running for its fourth consecutive year this coming April and is open to all junior and senior high school students across the province. His is the author of two books of poetry: Lessons in Falling (B House Publications, 2010) and Belly Full of Rocks, (Oolichan Books, 2016).

Mary Pinkoski, 5th Poet Laureate of the City of Edmonton (2013-2015), is an internationally recognized poet. She has performed on stages across North American and at the 2015 Winter Lights Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland. Her work has appeared in multiple anthologies. She is the 2011 Canadian National Spoken Word Champion and a winner of the 2008 CBC National Poetry Face-off. In 2015, Mary was recognized as an Edmonton Top 40 Under 40 and also awarded a University of Alberta Alumni Horizon Award for her poetry work in the Edmonton community, in particular for facilitating youth poetry workshops and her creation of the City of Edmonton’s Youth Poet Laureate role which she continues to coordinate in partnership with the City of Edmonton Youth Council.

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.

Floyd Robert-Maduekwe is currently a student at the University of Alberta. He is a poet, writer, actor, designer, and an aspiring renaissance being. Floyd’s writings have been published in several magazines. He is currently performing spoken word poetry with a view to the disruption of general ideology to discover truth.

Gregory Scofield is Red River Metis of Cree, Scottish and European descent whose ancestry can be traced to the fur trade and to the Metis community of Kinesota, Manitoba. He has taught First Nations and Metis Literature and Creative Writing at Brandon University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and the Alberta College of Art + Design. He currently holds the position of Assistant Professor in English at Laurentian University where he teaches Creative Writing, and previously served as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg and Memorial University.

Scofield won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 for his debut collection, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel. In addition to several volumes of poetry, the most recent being Witness, I Am (2016), Scofield is the author of the memoir, Thunder Through My Veins (1999). In 2016, The Writers’ Trust of Canada awarded Scofield with the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize.

Morgan Smith is an Edmonton-based theatre artist and poet. She’s the founder of The Edmonton Poetry Brothel, an immersive performance-poetry collective. She’s previously performed at the Edmonton Poetry Festival in collaborative performance “Poetry Moves.” As an actor, you may have seen her in “Tudor Queens: A Burlesque” and “Shakespeare’s Sirens” for Send in the Girls Burlesque, and in “The Runcible Riddle” and “Dead Centre of Town” for Catch the Keys Productions. During the day, she reads the news for iNews880 and 630CHED.

Tab is a poet, dancer and community activator who strives to create safe spaces, facilitate artists of many disciplines and promote creative freedom and artistic experimentation in inclusive environments. They are an original member of The Edmonton Poetry Brothel, a 2016 Slam Team Finalist, creator of Word Fight! and use their poetry to create beauty in vulnerability and display strength through art.

Rebecca Thomas is a Mi’kmaw woman living in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). She is the daughter of a residential school survivor. Rebecca is outspoken when it comes to confronting Indigenous stereotypes, as well as educating her colleagues and the general public about cultural safety and integrity. She is Halifax’s current Poet Laureate. Most of her work focuses on the relationships between Canada’s First Peoples, their relationship with the federal government, and how First Nations’ people are perceived publicly.

2017 Writer in Residence Richard Van Camp is a proud member of the Dogrib (Tlicho) Nation from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. An internationally renowned storyteller and best-selling author, he is also a writer of multiple talents, with baby books, children’s books, comic books, graphic novels and films all to his credit. His work has been translated into a variety of indigenous languages and adapted for the screen.

Richard is a graduate of the En’owkin International School of Writing, the University of Victoria’s Creative Writing BFA Program, and the Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

He wrote for CBC’s North of 60 television show under their Writer Internship Program and was a script and cultural consultant with them for four seasons. He has taught Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, worked as a Creative Writing and Storytelling instructor with the Emily Carr Institute and was the Writer in Residence at the University of Alberta for 2011 and 2012, and at MacEwan University in 2013 and 2014.

Richard is currently shooting the movie Three Feathers in his hometown, in each of the official languages of the South Slave Region: Dene, Bush Cree, South Slavey and English. You can visit Richard on Facebook, Twitter or at his website: www.richardvancamp.com.

Gisèle Villeneuve is a Calgary-based bilingual writer working in multiple genres. As a novelist, short story writer, poet, and translator, she delights in alternating freely between French and English. Rising Abruptly, a collection of stories in English that are a distillation of her mountain experiences, won the Fiction & Poetry Award at the international Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and the Alberta Book Publishing Awards, Trade Fiction category. Her other works include the bilingual novel Visiting Elizabeth; a writer’s notebook in French, nue et crue lettre au poète disparu, in which poetry, prose, fiction and non-fiction share the page; and Outsiders, a collection of stories in French. Gisèle has also worked as voice coach, narrator, editor, radio journalist and documentarian, scriptwriter, TV researcher, magazine writer and playwright. Originally from Montréal, she has resided in England and the United States and has travelled five continents. When not at her desk, she can be found roaming the Rockies.

Auteure bilingue de Calgary, Gisèle Villeneuve pratique plusieurs genres littéraires. Romancière, nouvellière, poète et traductrice, elle prend grand plaisir à passer librement du français à l’anglais. Ses œuvres les plus récentes incluent Rising Abruptly, un recueil de nouvelles en anglais couronné de plusieurs prix et dont les textes s’appuient sur son expérience en montagne; nue et crue lettre au poète disparu, un carnet d’écrivain dans lequel la prose et la poésie, la fiction et l’essai partagent la page; Outsiders, un recueil de nouvelles en français; et Visiting Elizabeth, un roman bi-langue. Gisèle fut également coach de voix, narratrice, rédactrice, journaliste et documentariste de radio, scénariste, recherchiste et dramaturge. Originaire de Montréal, elle a habité en Angleterre et aux Etats-Unis et elle a voyagé sur cinq continents. Entre ses travaux d’écriture, elle va souvent prendre l’air dans les Rocheuses.

Donovan Waskahat is Nehiyawak. He is a talented wordsmith who uses various storytelling art forms to share his stories, history, and feelings. His strength, wisdom, and sense of humour are infused in his art. Donovan is heavily involved with iHuman’s music program and Edmonton’s Hip Hop community. He believes in the importance of youth to take action and be a voice in situations when people aren’t speaking up. Donovan was a member of the 2016 Edmonton Slam team that competed in the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.