HOLLY ALLERELLIE is a Toronto-based illustrator, dedicated to the art of visual storytelling, who believes wholeheartedly in the process of growing empathy via sharing stories and perspectives. You can find more of her work on Instagram at @hallerellie.

THÉODORA ARMSTRONG is a fiction writer, poet and photographer. Her first collection of short fiction, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility (House of Anansi Press, 2013) was short-listed for both the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She teaches in the creative writing program at UBC.

FRANCES BOYLE’s books include the poetry collection This White Nest (Quattro Books, 2019), the novella Tower (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2018), and the short-story collection Seeking Shade (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020). Her writing has appeared throughout North America and in the UK. Recent and forthcoming publications include Best Canadian Poetry 2020, Blackbird, Cypress, Prairie Fire and Dreich. Visit francesboyle.com.

NICHOLAS BRADLEY is a poet, literary critic and scholarly editor. He lives in Victoria, BC. Rain Shadow, a collection of poems, was published by the University of Alberta Press in 2018.

LEAH CALLEN is a Regina poet whose work has appeared in The Malahat Review, CV2, Scrivener Creative Review, Vallum, Kissing Dynamite and Barren Magazine, where she was a contributing poetry editor. She grew up in Ontario, wandered the West Coast for 2.5 decades, and now roams the Prairies.

ZACHERY COOPER studies at VIU in Nanaimo, BC. He was awarded the Mary Garland Coleman Prize in Lyric Poetry and won Portal’s 2018 Non-Fiction Contest. He manages VIU’s student press The Nav. His work appears or is forthcoming in EVENT, filling Station, Broken Pencil, Portal and The Nav.

ZACH DA COSTA hates writing bios. Some of his work has been published by HAG MAG, The Trinity Review, Acta Victoriana, BlazeVOX and Blood & Bourbon. He paints houses and lives in Toronto with his cat, Gin.

VÉRONIQUE DARWIN is an MFA candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Guelph. You can find her short stories in The Quarantine Review and Black Bear Review, and her non-fiction in Geist. She currently lives in Toronto and is working on a novel and a screenplay.

MOHAN FITZGERALD is a writer and musician from Toronto, currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Ohio State University.

ANDREW FRENCH is a writer from North Vancouver, BC. His chapbook Do Not Discard Ashes was published by 845 Press in 2020. His writing has previously appeared in Train: a poetry journal, PRISM international, long con magazine and a number of other journals across North America and the UK. In his spare time, he grills his favourite authors on Page Fright: A Literary Podcast.

BETH GOOBIE is the author of 25 books. Her recent poetry collection, breathing at dusk, won two Saskatchewan Book Awards. These poems were written on a SK Arts grant.

ROBERT HILLES won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and has published 22 books. His latest poetry collection is Shimmer (Black Moss Press, 2019). His novel Don’t Hang Your Soul on That (Guernica Editions) will appear in 2021. The poems included here are from a new book in the works, A Piece of Rag Wrapped Gold.

DAVID HUEBERT’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking (Biblioasis, 2017), won a Dartmouth Book Award, was short-listed for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. A second collection of short fiction, Chemical Valley, is forthcoming with Biblioasis.

ROZINA JESSA is an Indo-Canadian writer from Vancouver. She studied theatre acting & creative writing at UBC. She has been published in The Anti-Languorous Project, Rigorous, untethered magazine, carte blanche, Uncomfortable Revolution and Understorey Magazine. Her work can also be found on her Instagram page @rozinajessapoetry.

PENN KEMP is a poet, performer and playwright. She has been celebrated as a trailblazer from her first poetry collection to her latest: River Revery (Insomniac Press, 2019) and Fox Haunts (Aeolus House, 2018). She received the First Annual Muttsy Award for Renegade Creators in 2020. Forthcoming from Kalamalka Press is P.S., with Sharon Thesen. Visit pennkemp.weebly.com and pennkemp.wordpress.com.

ADINA KOPINSKY is an emerging poet living in Israel with her husband and three sons. She has work published or forthcoming in Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among other publications.

JHORDAN LAYNE is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University on Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe land. He is writing a dissertation on Jamaican religion and superstition in the novels of Marion James and Kei Miller. He loves to write poetry and fiction with one eye on the real, and the other on the speculative.

JILL MANDRAKE, originally from Surrey, BC, is a regular contributor to Geist. Her publications include the novella The Dodgem Derby (New Orphic Publishers, 2012) and an anthology for which she was the editor, Recovering Spirits: A Collection of True Ghost Stories (Sister DJ Press, 2020).

SARA MANG’s work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Room, Arc, The Minola Review, CV2 and other journals. She has an MFA from UBC, and is an alumni of the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio Program. Originally from Labrador, Sara currently lives in Ottawa with her husband, three children and rabbit.

CAROLYN NAKAGAWA is a fourth-generation Japanese-Anglo Canadian poet and playwright. She makes her home on unceded Indigenous territory colonized as Vancouver. Her poetry has been published in magazines across Canada, including The Malahat Review, Poetry is Dead and The New Quarterly.

CHAD NORMAN lives and writes in Truro, NS. His poems are from the manuscript A Small Parental Forest.

K.A. POLZIN’s fiction has appeared in Natural Bridge, and his short humour has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The American Bystander and elsewhere. He studied creative writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

KERRY RAWLINSON, autodidact/bloody-minded optimist, gravitated from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil decades ago. Now she stalks Literature & Art’s muses around the Okanagan, still barefoot. Recent achievements: Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction and the Fish Poetry Prize; published in Cagibi, Foreign Literary, Across the Margin, Tupelo Quarterly and Arc, amongst others. Visit on Tumblr; tweet @kerryrawli.

JESSICA ROSE is a writer, editor and reviewer who lives in Hamilton, ON. She is the book reviews editor at THIS Magazine, a senior editor at the Hamilton Review of Books, and marketing manager at gritLIT: Hamilton’s Readers and Writers Festival. She has 15 year of experience writing and editing publications for children.

KULBIR SARAN is from Surrey, BC. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Abstract, Spillway, Vallum, The Malahat Review, Dime Show Review, RHINO Poetry, Isthmus and Carousel.

KELLY SHEPHERD’s second full-length collection, Insomnia Bird: Edmonton Poems (Thistledown Press, 2018) won the 2019 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Kelly has written seven chapbooks, and is the poetry editor for the environmental philosophy journal The Trumpeter. Originally from Smithers, BC, Kelly lives and teaches in Edmonton.

TOSH SHERKAT is a young poet and fiction writer studying at the University of Victoria. He hails from Nelson, BC, and enjoys exploring themes of home, travel and heritage and its influence on identity and nostalgia. Outside of writing, he is a competitive climber.

ANUJA VARGHESE (anujavarghese.com) is a Pushcart-nominated writer based in Hamilton, ON. Her work appears in Hobart, The Malahat Review, Plenitude Magazine, Hamilton Review of Books and others. She is currently Fiction Editor at The Puritan and is at work on a debut novel.

BEN von JAGOW is a writer, poet and photographer from Ottawa living in Cape Town, South Africa. His work has appeared in literary journals such as Amsterdam Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Newfoundland Quarterly and The Literary Review of Canada, among others. He was long-listed for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. For more of Ben’s work, visit benvj.com.

TOM WAYMAN’s selected essays, If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free: Literature and Social Change (Guernica Editions, 2018) was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. His latest collection is Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time (Harbour, 2020). Visit tomwayman.com.