POETS
Kelley Aitken is a writer and visual artist. Her story collection Canadian Shield, Tightrope Books, 2016 earned an IPPY bronze medallion and has been shortlisted for the 2017 ReLit awards. Love in a Warm Climate, The Porcupine’s Quill, 1998 was nominated for the Commonwealth Prize, Best First Book. Kelley teaches drawing at the Art Gallery of Ontario and leads plein air painting trips in France. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript, A Larger Wheel.
David Clink is a poet, poker player, and punster. His poem, “A sea monster tells his story” won the 2013 Aurora Award for Best Poem/Song. His poetry has appeared in over 50 journals, including Analog five times and Asimov’s three times. He has two speculative poetry collections, Monster, published by Tightrope Books, and, The Role of Lightning in Evolution (Chizine Publications). He has had poems appear in the last four even-numbered Tesseracts anthologies, and in genre journals Star*Line; On Spec; and, Pulp Literature. His poem, “After Midnight,” is a finalist for the 2018 Aurora Award in the Poem/Song category.
Sonia Di Placido is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. She is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, The Writers’ Union of Canada, Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, and The Association of Italian-Canadian Writers. She has had poems published by Carousel, The Puritan, The White Wall Review, Jacket2, Canthius, and The California Journal of Women Writers. Her first book Exaltation in Cadmium Red was published with Guernica Editions in 2012. Flesh is her second full-length book of poetry. For more information and works: diplacido.wordpress.com
Kate Finegan has a short story chapbook forthcoming with Penrose Press in November 2018. Her work has won contests with Thresholds, Phoebe Journal, Midwestern Gothic, and The Fiddlehead; been runner-up for The Puritan’s Thomas Morton Memorial Prize; and been shortlisted for the Cambridge Short Story Prize. katefinegan.ink
Joan Hofmann is Professor Emerita at the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut. She serves on the Executive Boards of Riverwood Poetry and the Connecticut Poetry Society, is a member of the Connecticut Coalition of Poets Laureate and is the Poet Laureate of Canton, Connecticut. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, and in two chapbooks: Coming Back (Antrim House, 2014) and Alive (Grayson Press, 2017).
Maureen Hynes’s first book of poetry, Rough Skin, won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award, and her fourth, The Poison Colour, was shortlisted for both the Raymond Souster and Pat Lowther Awards in 2016. Her work has been included in over 20 anthologies, including Best Canadian Poems in English 2010 and 2016. Maureen is poetry editor for Our Times magazine. (www.maureenhynes.com).
Laurie Koensgen is a cultural worker living in Ottawa. Her poems have appeared in ARC Poetry Magazine, Literary Review of Canada and In/Words. She was shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry 2018. Laurie is a founding member of the Ruby Tuesday poetry collective.
Pierre L’Abbé is from the Ottawa Valley of Franco-Ontarian heritage. He is the author of two books of poetry, Lyon (Letters, 1996) and Ten Days in Rio (Watershed Books, 1998) as well as a book of stories, Kiss of the Beggar (Guernica, 2005). He has translated from the French, Benjamin Fondane’s Exodus: the face of poetic resistance under the Holocaust (Joseph Norman, 2008) and Palestine (Guernica, 2014) a novel by Hubert Haddad.
Lois Lorimer was born in Brockville. Her first collection, Stripmall Subversive, (Variety Crossing Press) was published in 2012. Her poems appear in several anthologies. She has also published poems in Arc, Literary Review of Canada, and Hart House Review. Lois teaches mindfulness to educators and parents and is working on her second collection of poems.
Michael Mirolla describes his writing as a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction. Publications include three Bressani Prize winners: the novel Berlin (2010); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). The short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and “The Sand Flea” was a Pushcart Prize nominee. Michael lives in Oakville. For more, go to: www.michaelmirolla.com/index.html.
John Nyman’s debut poetry collection, Players (Palimpsest Press), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 2017. John is also the author of the manifesto chapbook Slogan, Substance, Dream: keywords for a responsible poetry (Anstruther Press) and has recently completed a PhD in Theory and Criticism at Western University.
Debbie Okun Hill is a Canadian poet/blogger and an Ontario Arts Council Writers Reserve grant recipient. To date, over 400 of her poems have appeared in such publications as Descant, Existere, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, and The Windsor Review in Canada plus several publications in the United States. Drawing From Experience (Big Pond Rumours Press) and Chalk Dust Clouds (Beret Days Press) are her recent chapbooks. Follow her blog at Kites Without Strings.
Molly Peacock is the author of The Analyst (Biblioasis/W.W. Norton) a collection of poems that tell the story of a decades-long patient-therapist relationship that reverses and continues to evolve after the analyst’s stroke and reclamation of her life through painting. Her other volumes of poetry include The Second Blush and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems. Peacock is the author of the noted biography The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, named a Book of the Year by The Economist, The Globe and Mail, Booklist, The London Evening Standard, The Irish Times, and The Sunday Telegraph. Passionate about bringing poetry to a wider public, she inaugurated The Best Canadian Poetry series, now in its eleventh year, as well as Poetry in Motion on New York City’s subways and buses, now in its 26th year. Peacock also wrote and performed “The Shimmering Verge,” a one-woman theatre piece in poems. One of the subjects of the documentaries A Life Outside Convention and My So-Called Selfish Life, both about women’s choices not to have children, she is married to the James Joyce scholar Michael Groden.
Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, lived for many years in Alberta, and moved to the Ottawa area in 1999 to work as Director of Exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Nature. His first full-length book, Karst Means Stone (NeWest), appeared in 1979. Since then he has published many books, including The Life of Ryley (Thistledown), Flat Side (rdc), Crawlspace (Anansi), The Luskville Reductions (Brick) and Garden (Chaudiere). His chapbook and magazine publications have appeared in many countries. He has won Alberta’s Stephansson Award for Poetry (x3), 3 national magazine awards, and is a 3-time nominee for the Governor-General’s Award for Literature. He was Arc Poetry Magazine’s Managing Editor for many years and is currently the Director of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.
Dane Swan is a spoken word artist, an emerging editor and the author of 4 books including, A Mingus Lullaby which was a finalist for the 2017 Trillium Book Prize for Poetry. Currently, Dane is shopping a poetry manuscript inspired by the life of comedian Lenny Bruce, co-editing the inaugural edition of Quattro’s Best New Poets in Canada Series with Kate Marshall Flaherty and editing an anthology celebrating diverse voices in Canada’s literary scene for Guernica Editions – which is scheduled to be published in 2020. The former poetry slam champ can regularly be seen performing with multi-arts collective Mixtape Cultures (MXTP_CLTRS), of which he is a founding member.
Robin Turner is the author of bindweed & crow poison (Porkbelly Press). Her work has most recently appeared in Whale Road Review, SWWIM, Psaltery & Lyre, and in the magical White Rock Zine Machine. She lives, works, and daydreams in Dallas, Texas.
Karli Woods is an assistant poetry editor for The Missing Slate Magazine and her creative work has been recently published in the academic journal of Canadian Journal of Family and Youth.
Artists
Susan Winemaker works as a food photographer and recipe developer in Toronto. She’s a certified chef, a nutrition consultant, an entrepreneur, a writer, an internationally published novelist, an art photographer, an urban observer, and a soon-to-be licensed paralegal. View her art photography here: https://susanwinemaker.com/
— contributors from Juniper Volume 2, Issue 2