George Webber, the photographer/author of books on Hutterites (A World Within), natives (People of the Blood ) and the last days of Calgary’s nowdemolished downtown taverns (Last Call ), has turned his lens toward what many feel is his finest work, a portrait of the real Calgary as it approached, then passed, the million mark. In his own words, “Calgary is always becoming something else, moving on, moving up, moving out, making room for something new, breaking your heart in little ways. But perhaps there is something here that no amount of steel and glass and asphalt can conceal. These pictures make me hungry for the way the city was.”

Ken Mitchell is a well-known Canadian playwright, actor and novelist, with over 25 books to his credit, including the legendary “country opera” Cruel Tears His drama about Norman Bethune,Gone the Burning Sun, toured the world in the 90s. Mitchell grew up on a family ranch near Moose Jaw, and went on to become a professor of English at the University of Regina. His most recent theatrical work, No Ordinary Cowboy, a tribute to the rodeo man Bill Gomersall, will tour Western Canada in 2007. He lives in Regina with his wife, the scholar Jeanne Shami.

Jocko Benoit was born in Montreal and raised in Cape Breton, and explored the rest of Canada one university at a time until arriving in Edmonton, where he lived as a poetic marauder with the Stroll of Poets. He has written one collection of poetry, An Anarchist Dream, and his poems have appeared in magazines in Canada, the U.S., England and Australia. His stories have appeared inOn Spec and Tesseracts. His screenplays have been shortlisted in competitions in Canada and the U.S. He divides his time between Calgary and Washington, DC.

Nikki Reimer is a poet, blogger, curator, arts event planner, and cat photographer, in East Vancouver. Recent work has appeared in W, West Coast Line, Matrix, Front, Prism International and BafterC, and two of her poems were featured in the poetryinspired dance show “Larimer St.” performed by Decidedly Jazz Danceworks in 2005. Her chapbook, fist things first, was published by Wrinkle Press in 2009. Reimer was a founding editor of (orange) magazine, a co-editor and designer of KSW’s W12: All Music issue, and creator of the disjunct! performance series. She has blogged for Lemon Hound and the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival. Reimer lives in Vancouver where she is a member of the Kootenay School of Writing and a board member at W2 Community Media Arts. She blogs at http://www.nikkireimer.com/blog.php. [sic] is her first full-length book of poetry.

Catch Rob McLennan’s interview with Nikki on his blog.

William Nichols is a public policy consultant based in Edmonton. Born in Moose Jaw, his travels have always brought him back to the prairies. Poetry is a counterpoint to the words he produces for business and government. When words fail he likes bird watching and woodworking.

Adebe D. A. is a writer whose words travel between Toronto and New York City. She recently completed her MA at York University, where she also served as Assistant Editor for the arts and literary journal, Existere. Her work has been published in various North American sources, such as Canadian Woman Studies Journal, The Claremont Review, Canadian Literature, CV2 and The Toronto Star. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate. Ex Nihilo is her debut collection.

S. McDonald was born, raised and continues to live in Toronto. Ze grew up in pre-gentrification Cabbagetown and Regent Park. Ze has performed zir alternative spoken word performance pieces at various venues including Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s annual Rhubarb! Festival and Paddy’s Playhouse. Ze is the love child of Christine Jorgensen & John Rechy & the spiritual godchild of Jacqueline Susann.

Lori Cayer’s first book Stealing Mercury (The Muses’ Company) won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award and was a finalist for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She is a past winner of the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Lori is the co-founder of the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/prix Lansdowne de poésie.

Douglas Burnet Smith is the author of over a dozen books of poetry. His work has won the Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, and has been nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. He has been Writer in Residence at a number of universities in Canada and the U. S., and has served as President of the League of Canadian Poets, as well as Chair of the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada. He teaches at St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and at the American University of Paris. He divides his time between Canada, France, and Argentina.

Jannie Edwards was born in South Africa and now lives and writes in Edmonton, Alberta. Her second book of poetry, Blood Opera: The Raven Tango Poems, was a collaboration with visual artist Paul Saturley and was adapted for the stage by Edmonton’s Theatre Prospero. Her videopoem, Engrams: Reach and Seize Memory, is a collaborative work inspired by the installation tryptych of Edmonton artist Darci Mallon. The work features Edwards’ poetry translated into American Sign Language and performed by Deaf actor and translator Linda Cundy. Jannie Edwards’ website ishttp://www.jannieedwards.ca.

Kirk Ramdath is a mainstay among Calgary’s poets and spoken-word artists. His “Passion Pitch” poetry series has brought together a wide range of writers to share their words and music, drinks and discussion in an era when the open mic reading, so fertile a ground for many writers practicing today, has been abandoned. He has organized poetry in the park readings and as well as some of the readings in the Single Onion series. Kirk’s poetry has appeared in chapbooks, journals, and on stage – he was one of the first readers in the Calgary Spoken-Word Festival’s “Smart Men, Hot Words” readings. His poetry is noted, appropriately, given the reading series he founded, for its passion and sensuality.

Winnipeg-born Ron Charach is the author of eight books of poetry, among them Dungenessque, winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry in 2003. His work is widely published in national and international journals and anthologies of writing by doctors about their craft. He was contributing editor of The Naked Physician, the sole anthology of poetry by Canadian medical practitioners. A practicing psychiatrist now residing in Toronto, Charach combines a physician’s candid eye for the foibles and betrayals of the body with a psychiatrist’s compassion for the suffering of the mind. He creates poems around the memorable image, the anecdote that, on the surface, seems to say little, yet opens to reveal a great deal about the human condition. Ron’s humanistic convictions regularly find voice in the letters pages of Canadian and American newspapers. Essays that define and elaborate on his liberal humanist views are found in his 2009 collection, Cowboys and Bleeding Hearts, from Wolsak & Wynn.

Anna Marie Sewell lives in Edmonton.  Fifth World Drum is her first book-length collection of poetry. She also writes and performs theatre, prose and song; recent work includes 2007’s Honour Songs project, part of Edmonton’s Cultural Capital year; and editing the 2009 Stroll of Poets Anthology.

Pierrette Requier, a long time member of the Stroll of Poets Society of Edmonton, facilitates the Wind Eye Poetry Seminars. For the last ten years, she has been involved in spoken word performances as a student and as a group facilitator. She has performed her poetry and monologues in both English and French in festivals and readings across Alberta, including Edmonton’s 2007 Word! Gala, Calgary’s 2008 Francophonétique, the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival and Edmonton’s Night of Artists as a member of Tangent Lines. She has been a participant in a French writing and performance group Les déesses de l’écriture since 2005. Her poetry has appeared on CBC’s Wild Rose country, in Legacy: Alberta’s Heritage Magazine, Other Voices: Edmonton’s Journal of the Literary and Visual Arts, and in the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through its Poets.

Andrew Oko is a curator, educator, administrator, and historian of Canadian art. He holds a Bachelors degree in English Literature from the University of Calgary, and a Masters degree in the History of Art from the University of Toronto. From 1972 to 1977, Oko worked as curatorial assistant and later as assistant curator at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. He continued his professional career in central Canada, where he worked as curator of the Art Gallery of Hamilton. In 1986, he moved to Regina, where until 1996 he was director of the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Currently Oko lives and works in Calgary as an independent curator, and as an instructor in art history on contract at the Alberta College of Art and Design.

Richard Stevenson is the author of twenty-one books and a CD of original jazz and poetry with jazz/poetry troupe Naked Ear. Recent titles include Hot Flashes: Maiduguri Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka (Ekstasis Editions, 2001), A Charm of Finches: Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka (Ekstasis Editions, 2004), Parrot With Tourette’s (Black Moss Press, Palm Poets Series, 2004), and Flicker At The Fascia (Serengeti Press, 2005). He lives and teaches in Lethbridge, Alberta.

Karen Hofmann grew up in the Okanagan Valley, completed a BA and MA at the University of Victoria, and now teaches English and creative writing at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. She lives at the edge of a former pine forest with her husband, many children and small animals, and the constant fear that she has forgotten to do something important.

Sharron Proulx-Turner is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. Originally from the Ottawa river valley, she’s from Mohawk, Algonquin, Wyandot, Ojibwe, Mi’kmaw, French, Scottish and Irish ancestry. She’s a two-spirit mom of three adult children, Graham, Barb and Adrian, mother-in-law to Harold, and nokomis to Willow, Jessinia and Mazie. Sharron’s work appears in several anthologies and journals.

Carol Sheehan is a leading authority on Northwest Coast culture and art. Her experience includes the organization of major argillite gallery exhibitions of argillite, in particular the celebrated Glenbow presentation Pipes That Won’t Smoke; Coal That Won’t Burn: Haida Argillite Sculpture, generally regarded as the definitive modern presentation of the subject. Her book of the same name, written to accompany the exhibit, has had a major influence in stimulating interest in argillite sculpture.

Ms Sheehan’s other published work includes chapters on the Northwest Coast in Native American Myths and Legends and Native American Arts and Crafts; and numerous entries on First Nations Artists for The Canadian Encyclopedia.

In writing Breathing Stone, the author worked closely with collectors and galleries in the United States and Canada, and held extensive meetings and interviews with all the sculptors represented in the book, in Haida Gwaii, Victoria, Port Alberni, Courtney and Vancouver.

Throughout, the excitement and commitment of the Haida artists shines through. For them, argillite sculpture is a source of intense pride, a means of showing the world the richness of their culture. The result is a book that is authoritative, passionate, original and beautiful.