Luminous Ink (by Tessa McWatt; Rabindranath Maharaj & Dionne Brand)

Tessa McWatt is an acclaimed author whose work includes novels for adults and young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards and the OCM Bocas Prize. Most recently, she published the novel Higher Ed and co-edited Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada with Rabindranath Maharj and Dionne Brand. She is the author of the forthcoming Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging, an analysis of the race debate from a personal perspective. She is also a librettist and professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Where Are You, Agnes? is her first picture book.

Two-time Governor General’s Award winner for her poetry, Nicole Brossard has published more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, and essays since 1965. She has co-founded and co-directed the literary magazine La Barre du Jour (1965-1975), co-directed the film Some American Feminists (1976), and co-edited the acclaimed Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec (1991 and 2003). Her work has been widely translated into English and Spanish and is also available in many other languages. Nicole has won numerous awards, including winning the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival Grand Prix Québecor in 1989 and 1999, the Prix Athanase-David in 1991, and the the first Violet Prize awarded by the Blue Metropolis Festival in 2018. One of her novels, Mauve Desert, has been presented as a multidisciplinary creation in 2018 and is slated for an opera adaptation in 2020-21. She is an officer of the Order of Canada, chevalière of the National Order of Quebec, and a member of l’Académie des lettres du Québec. Nicole currently lives in Montreal.

Dionne Brand is a Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist. She has won many awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Toronto Book Award, the OCM Bocas Fiction Prize, and the Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize. Brand is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

LAWRENCE HILL is a professor of creative writing at the University of Guelph. He is the author of ten books, including The Illegal; The Book of Negroes; Any Known Blood; and Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. He is the winner of various awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize, and is a two-time winner of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill delivered the North America-wide 2013 Massey Lectures, based on his non-fiction book Blood: The Stuff of Life. He co-wrote the adaptation for the six-part television miniseries The Book of Negroes, which attracted millions of viewers and won eleven Canadian Screen Awards. The recipient of nine honorary doctorates from Canadian universities, Hill served as chair of the jury of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. He is a volunteer with Book Clubs for Inmates and the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, and is an honorary patron of Crossroads International, for which he has volunteered for more than thirty-five years and with which he has travelled to Niger, Cameroon, Mali, and Swaziland. A 2018 Berton House resident in Dawson City, he is working on a new novel about the African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in northern B.C. and Yukon in 1942–43. He is a Member of the Order of Canada, has been inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame, and in 2019 was named a Canada Library and Archives Scholar. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and in Woody Point, Newfoundland.

Rawi Hage is a writer, a visual artist, and curator. His debut novel, De Niro’s Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was translated into several languages. Cockroach, his second novel, was a finalist for many prestigious awards, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Montreal.

Lisa Moore (English, Memorial University of Newfoundland) has written two collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, and three novels, Alligator, February, and Caught, as well as a stage play based on her novel February, by the same title. Lisa’s most recent work, Flannery, is a young adult novel. She is the coeditor of Great Expectations: 24 True Stories about Birth by Canadian Writers and the editor of the anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary Short Stories by Canadian Women.

Rita Wong is an award-winning writer of four books of poetry, her latest titled undercurrent (2015). She is co-editor of downstream: reimagining water (WLU Press 2017), nominated for the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize. She teaches at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, on the unceded Coast Salish territories also known as Vancouver, where she learns from water.

Hiromi Goto is the author of the story collection Hopeful Monsters (Arsenal Pulp Press) as well as the novels The Kappa Child and Chorus of Mushrooms, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for First Book (Canada-Caribbean) and co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award, and the children's book The Water of Possibility, a selection of the Canadian Children's Book Centre. Her most recent novel is a YA fantasy, Half World and she's co-written a book of poetry with David Bateman entitled Wait Until Late Afternoon. She is the 2009/10 writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

David Chariandy lives in Vancouver and teaches in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. His novel Soucouyant has received great attention, including a Governor General's Literary Award nomination for Fiction, a Gold Independent Publisher Award for Best Novel, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. His most recent novel, Brother, won the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Fiction.

Richard Van Camp Richard Van Camp es orgulloso de ser de ascendencia tli cho y es de Fort Smith, Territorios del Noroeste. Graduado de la Escuela Internacional de Escritura En’owkin, Licenciado en Escritura Creativa de la Universidad de Victoria y Máster en Escritura Creativa de la Universidad de British Columbia, Richard es el autor de más de veinte libros en casi todos los géneros, incluyendo la novela gráfica A Blanket of Butterflies, que ha sido finalista para los Premios Eisner. Su novela The Lesser Blessed es ahora un filme de First Generation Films.

Stephen Henighan is the author of four books of fiction, including The Places Where Names Vanish and North of Tourism. His short fiction has been published in journals and anthologies in Canada, Great Britain, Europe, and the United States. Recently he published the controversial When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing. Henighan teaches Spanish-American literature and culture at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

Michael Ondaatje (born 12 September 1943) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet of Colombo Chetty and Burgher origin. He is perhaps best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, which was adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film.

He moved to England in 1954, and in 1962 moved to Canada where he has lived ever since. He was educated at the University of Toronto and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and began teaching at York University in Toronto in 1971. He published a volume of memoir, entitled Running in the Family, in 1983. His collections of poetry include The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1981), which won the Canadian Governor General’s Award in 1971; The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989); and Handwriting: Poems (1998). His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), is a fictional portrait of jazz musician Buddy Bolden. The English Patient (1992), set in Italy at the end of the Second World War, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996. Anil’s Ghost (2000), set in Sri Lanka, tells the story of a young female anthropologist investigating war crimes for an international human rights group.

Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto with his wife, Linda Spalding, with whom he edits the literary journal Brick. His new novel is Divisadero (2007).

Lee Maracle is the author of numerous books, including Ravensong.