Currently based in Toronto, David Bateman is a visual artist, performance poet, and playwright whose most recent performance piece, Does this Giacometti Make Me Look Fat? or Art Immuno Deficiency Syndrome, was presented in New Orleans in the spring of 2010. A Brief History of White Virgins or The Night Freddy Mercury Kissed Me was presented across Canada in 2009, and his spoken word monologue What’s It Like? has been presented in Montreal, Toronto, Peterborough, and Cyprus (2010). He has taught literature and creative writing at a variety of Canadian post-secondary institutions. His three collections of poetry, designation youth, Invisible Foreground and Impersonating Flowers, have been published by Frontenac House (Calgary). Frontenac has also published his collaborative long poem entitled Wait Until Late Afternoon, written with poet/novelist Hiromi Goto.

His spoken word monologues and solo plays have been presented both nationally and internationally over the past twenty years. He has a PhD from the University of Calgary (English Literature; specialization Creative Writing) and has taught at a variety of Canadian post-secondary institutions including Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver), Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops), and Trent University (Peterborough). His arts and entertainment reviews have appeared in XTRA, IN Toronto, and at <a href=”http://www.batemanreviews.blogspot.com”>batemanreviews.blogspot.com</a></p>

Eric Barstad currently lives with his partner Erin and their two cats — Finnegan and Pickles — in Brooks, Alberta. Eric completed his MA in English and Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick in 2001 and now runs Shadow Box Creative Media, a web development company that builds websites for non-profit organizations. Eric published A Gloss on Our Painted Gods with Frontenac House in 2003.

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a Ph.D. candidate and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is also a 2016 Rhodes Scholar and holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford and Wadham College. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt was awarded a 2019 Indspire Award, which is the highest honor the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders. In January 2020, he will be an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

In 2018, Billy-Ray was named by CBC Books as one of “14 Canadian poets to watch,” one of “18 emerging writers to watch,” and a “Writer to know.” That year, he was also named one of “ten young Canadians to watch” by the CBC.

Trudy Cowan has worked and volunteered in the heritage and museum field for many years.  Her service on heritage organization boards includes roles as Alberta governor and chair, Heritage Canada Foundation/Canada’s National Trust; Alberta member and vice chair, Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada; and board member with numerous local, provincial and national groups. Awarded an honorary doctorate for her heritage contributions by the University of Calgary in 2003, she is a published author of articles, children’s stories including Clarence’s Engine and Quarantine: Keep Out! and has brought her one-woman theatrical “In-Person-Ations” of historical Canadian women to stages across the country. When she retired from full-time work in the heritage world, she began quilting, bringing her life-long creativity in the needle arts, painting and drawing and her love of textiles and colour together with her long experience as a storyteller.

Tanis MacDonald is the author of three books of poetry including Rue The Day (Turnstone Press, 2008), as well as the non-fiction The Daughter’s Way (WLUP, 2012). Her fourth collection, Mobile, is forthcoming from Book*hug. Her instructional memoir, Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City, was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2018. She is associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways (Palimpsest Press, 2014), won the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She is currently writing creative non-fiction about Winnipeg’s urban forest. Recent projects include a Synonym Art Consultation residency, where she sat on the patio of the Tallest Poppy restaurant for a weekend and wrote poems to the boulevard elm.

Rosanna Deerchild is an award-winning Cree author and broadcaster. Her family is from the O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation located near South Indian Lake, Manitoba; she grew up in Thompson, Manitoba. Her debut poetry collection, this is a small northern town (Muses’ Company), won the 2009 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry, and she launched her second book, Calling Down the Sky (Bookland Press) in 2015. She is a co-founder and a member of the Indigenous Writers Collective of Manitoba. She lives in Winnipeg and works as the host of Unreserved for CBC Radio One.

Dr. Micheline Maylor was Poet Laureate of Calgary from 2016 until April 2018. Micheline attained her Ph.D. at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in English Language and Literature with a specialisation in Creative Writing and 20th Century Canadian Literature. She teaches Creative Writing at Mount Royal University in Calgary where she won the 2015 Teaching Excellence Award, and was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry. She is a University of Calgary Senator, a Tedx talker, a Walrus talker, and she was the Calgary Public Library’s Author in Residence (2016). Micheline serves as Poetry Editor at Frontenac House Press. She is the co-founder of Freefall Literary Society and remains a consulting editor. Her most recent book Little Wildheart (U of A Press, 2017) was long listed for both the Pat Lowther and the Raymond Souster Awards.

A seasoned essayist, George Melnyk has returned to the form with a flourish. Essay is his ideal genre. From the French, “essayer,” to try, it provides the same pleasures as the short story – pithiness, reverberating in ambiguity. After all, no one is ever guaranteed certainty of outcomes from one’s “trials.”

While Melnyk has always deployed the first person singular pronoun as a narrator, in First Person Plural he invites his readers to encounter him (in his encounter with artistic, literary and cinematic projections) as a plurality of persons (for which he devises a clever taxonomy, variations on “person”).

Recently, such writers as Lorna Crozier, Sue Olding, Myra Coulter and Jane Silcott have turned to the essay in the form of intensely personal, even interior, narratives. Melnyk’s essays, by contrast, contain multitudes, as he juggles public, social, private and secret selves in relationship with the desired “other.” But the main effect is of a cross-examination of the personae that constitute an autobiography, which he now makes public.

Jim Nason is the author of seven previous volumes of poetry, a short story collection, and three novels. He has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Award in both the fiction and poetry categories. His poetry book Rooster, Dog, Crow was Shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award, and his poems have been included in anthologies across Canada, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, 2010, and 2014.

Basma Kavanagh is a poet and visual artist who lives and works in Nova Scotia. To make her work, she spends time outdoors, attending to the diverse and complex organisms and forces animating our living world. Her artwork has been exhibited in Canada and the US. She has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and the Penland School of Craft. She produces artist’s books under the imprint Rabbit Square Books, and is the author of two poetry collections: Distillō (2012), and Niche (2015), which won the 2016 Lansdowne Poetry Prize.

Laurie Fuhr’s writing has been published in anthologies such as Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament (Mansfield Press 2010), Leonard Cohen: You’re Our Man (Foundation for Public Poetry Montreal, 2009), and in periodicals in Canada and abroad like THIS Magazine, White Wall Review, Carleton Arts Review, Nod Magazine, Go! Magazine (San Francisco), and Journal of Literature & Aesthetics (India). She used to live in Germany, Cold Lake, Ottawa, and Winnipeg, but has lived in Calgary since 2004, serving as Managing Editor for filling Station Magazine from 2008-2011 and now as a poetry instructor at the Alexandra Writers Centre Society and host of the Single Onion OPEN MIC.

Tanya Evanson is a Montreal poet, performer and director of Banff Centre Spoken Word. Her book of poetry Bothism is forthcoming from Ekstasis Editions in fall 2017 and Nouveau Griot from Frontenac House in 2018. She performs internationally and has released four audio recordings including the latest ZENSHIP (Mother Tongue Media 2016). Recent spoken word performances include The Banff Centre, Suoni per il Popolo, Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, Australia’s Story-Fest, Tasmanian Poetry Festival, Edinburgh Book Festival, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Glastonbury Festival. Evanson is a past recipient of the Golden Beret Award and was Poet of Honour at the 2013 Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. She moonlights as a whirling dervish.

Laura has been a family physician in Toronto since 1990. In 2018 she completed her Creative Writing Certificate at University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and was the recipient of the Marina Nemat Award for Poetry. She was a finalist in 2016 for the Janice Colbert Poetry Award and in 2018 for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Poetry Contest. In 2017 she attended the Emerging Writer’s Intensive at the Banff Centre. Her poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, CV2, and The Malahat Review.

Conrad is a graduate of the 2010 Spring Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts. His poetry has appeared in such publications as Freefall magazine and The Enpipe Line. Conrad achieved his PhD in English at the University of Alberta, where he contemplates the dystopian and environmentally apocalyptic zeitgeist of today, and remnants of our places and spaces in those futuristic settings. His creative work takes a step to the side and urges us to look askance at our society and our sense of place in the world

Natalie Meisner is a poet and playwright from the Mi’kma’ki /South Shore of Nova Scotia and Calgary/ Mohkinstsis 5th Poet Laureate. She combines survivor comedy with hopepunk in the service of social change. Baddie One Shoe (2019) is her book of odes to renegade women. Legislating Love: The Everett Klippert Story is a stage play based on the true story of the beloved Calgary bus driver whose plight spurred the decriminalization of homosexuality. Speed Dating for Sperm Donors  is a  comedy for the stage based on her family’s story, and was a  hit at Neptune and Lunchbox Theatre.  Double Pregnant: Two Lesbians Make a Family topped non-fiction lists and My Mommy, My Mama My Brother & Me is her children’s book about a two-mom biracial family finding community. She is a wife, mom to two great boys and a Full Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta.

Keith Garebian is the author of nineteen books of non-fiction and ten previous poetry collections. He is the winner of the William Saroyan Medal (Armenia), and numerous other awards for writing. His poetry has been translated into French, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Armenian, and Hungarian.

The eye is an inveterate collector.
– Walker Evans

The art of photographer, media producer, and mixed media artist Mark Vitaris is sweeping in style and scope. Through his art, he preserves that which is ephemeral. He believes there is an intimate connection between the forms his art takes and the circumstances from which it derives.

For much of his professional and artistic career, location photography has been his chosen métier. His work is project-based, honed from decades of professional assignments employing natural light and conditions to interpret visual concepts. His art is also projected-based and interdisciplinary. Five years of research and travel went into the production his current project, Borderlands, the book of the same title being a key aspect of this endeavour.

Vitaris earned a B.A. in Communications, from the University of Ottawa (Canada). His award winning work has been widely exhibited and is included in private and public collections provincially, nationally, and internationally. He resides in Calgary, Alberta.

Sheri-D Wilson (aka The Mama of Dada) is the award-winning author of 12 books, the creator of 4 short films, and has released 3 albums which combine music and poetry.

Known for her electric performance-style, making her a favourite of festivals around the world – she’s read, performed & taught in festivals across Canada, USA, UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Mexico, and South Africa.

Recognized for her environmental awareness and activism, she was headliner at the 2014 Emerald Awards, and in 2013, she read with David Suzuki. Her tenth collection of poetry, Open Letter: Woman against Violence against Women; was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award & CanLit. Her collection, Re:Zoom (2005), won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry.

Sheri-D Wilson was appointed to the Order of Canada in December 2019. In 2018, Wilson was appointed the distinction of Poet Laureate of Calgary, and in 2017, she received her Doctorate of Letters – Honoris Causa from Kwantlen University. Of the beat tradition, in 1989 Sheri-D studied at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in Boulder, Colorado.

Poet Laureate of Calgary 2018 – 2020