Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt is a Montreal-based writer, editor, and translator. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Malahat Review, Room, Matrix, Cosmonaut’s Avenue, Riddle Fence, (parenthetical), and elsewhere.
Bob Wakulich received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in 1999. He also holds a BFA in Writing with a Film Studies Minor from the University of Victoria (1996), a BA in Sociology from Lakehead University (1977), and he attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Summer Writing Workshop in 1979 and 1980. His short stories, poems, and commentaries have appeared in a number of journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies in Canada, the US, and Europe, as well as on CBC Radio and in cyberspace. He currently lives in Cranbrook, British Columbia.
Keri Korteling is a writer, editor and teacher with an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her work appears in Red Rock Review 38. She lives with her family in Vancouver, B.C.
A prolific writer, Aaron Bushkowsky is a Vancouver-based playwright, film-writer, poet, novelist, and educator. His plays have been produced across Canada, the US, and Europe, and have received 9 Jessie Richardson Theatre nominations, more than any other Canadian playwright, winning two for Outstanding Original Play. He has been a resident playwright at The Vancouver Playhouse, Rumble Theatre, and Touchstone Theatre. Aaron has written over 20 plays and received almost as many professional productions across Canada, the US, and Europe. Aaron also spent a year at the Tarragon Theatre playwrights unit in Toronto and is a graduate of the prestigious Canadian Film Centre in film-writing. His film-scripts have received many options and he is currently working to complete The Ancients, a feature about down-on-their luck university Greek Literature professors and their stunningly beautiful daughters who get them into trouble. Aaron’s short film The Alley was nominated for five Leo awards and won the National Screen Institute’s Drama Prize. Aaron teaches writing at Vancouver’s highly regarded theatre school Studio 58, and at Kwantlen University, Langara College, and Vancouver Film School. He has several published works, including two books of poetry Mars is for Poems (Oolichan Books) and Ed and mabel go to the moon (Oolichan Books) which was nominated for a BC Book Award for Poetry. His published drama includes Strangers Among Us, The Waterhead and other plays, My Chernobyl, all published by Playwrights Canada Press. His first book of fiction was a collection of short stories The Vanishing Man, published by Cormorant in 2005. Curtains for Roy, his first novel, was published in 2014. It’s a dark comedy about the Vancouver theatre world which garnered rave reviews from critics and made two Top Ten Book (2014) lists for Vancouver novels and subsequently nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award,Canada’s oldest literary award and only award for humour writing. Aaron received his MFA in Creative Writing from UBC in 2002. Aaron also heads Solo Collective Theatre, a professional Vancouver theatre company and has been an influential dramaturge, mentor, and teacher to hundreds of new West Coast writers and students. Aaron is represented in theatre by Marquis Entertainment, Toronto.
Ken McGoogan has survived shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, chased the ghost of Lady Franklin from England to Tasmania, and placed a memorial plaque in the Arctic overlooking Rae Strait. He is the author of a dozen books, among them four bestsellers about Arctic exploration: Fatal Passage, Ancient Mariner, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, and Race to the Polar Sea (all HarperCollins Canada). His awards include the Writer’s Trust of Canada Biography Prize, the Canadian Author’s Association History Award, the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography, and the Pierre Berton Award for History. Ken made a cameo appearance in the prize-winning docudrama based on his book Fatal Passage, and he also turns up in Franklin’s Lost Ships. For two decades, Ken worked as a journalist, moving from The Toronto Star to The Montreal Star and The Calgary Herald, where he served as books editor and literary columnist. His recent books include How the Scots Invented Canada, Celtic Lightning, and 50 Canadians Who Changed the World, and an ebook edition of his novel Kerouac’s Ghost. Ken has served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, and is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Explorer’s Club. He has worked as a writer-in-residence in Fredericton, Dawson City, and Hobart, Tasmania, and he teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Toronto (Continuing Studies) and in the MFA program at University of King’s College in Halifax. Ken sails in the Northwest Passage as a resource historian with Adventure Canada. In 2017, he will publish Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of Arctic Discovery.
Owen Laukkanen is the author of the bestselling Stevens and Windermere series of FBI thrillers, the fifth of which, The Watcher in the Wall, was published in 2016 to critical acclaim. He also publishes obnoxious YA fiction under the pseudonym “Owen Matthews.” A former commercial fisherman and poker journalist, Laukkanen lives in Vancouver with his girlfriend and his rescue pit bull, Lucy.
Tara’s first teen novella, Size of a Fist, was published in 2015 and nominated for two 2016 Saskatchewan Book Awards. Her debut novel, Saltus, is forthcoming from Nightwood Editions in spring 2021.
What are your most recent awards?
Her writing has been published in several Canadian literary magazines, and won Event Magazine’s 14th Annual Creative Non-fiction Competition, and the City of Regina Writing Award in 2016 and 2019. In 2017, she was a laureate of a REVEAL Indigenous Art Award from The Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2017.
Are you connected to any creative writing communities you’d like to mention (UBC alums, film and theatre communities, etc)?
Tara is a member of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and the Saskatchewan Aboriginal Writers’ Circle Inc.
What year did you graduate from the Creative Writing Program?
2001
Is there anything else about your writing career you’d like to share?
Tara also has an MA in Professional Communications from Royal Roads University, and was the recipient of the Gabriel Dumont and Napoleon LaFontaine Graduate Scholarships from the Gabriel Dumont Institute. Her thesis, which explores her Métis heritage and identity, won the Public Ethnography Award from the Canada Research Chair in Innovative Learning and Public Ethnography. An article based on her thesis was published in Briarpatch magazine.
From the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan, Tara spent her childhood years in Fort Qu’Appelle, her teen years in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and much of her adult life in Vancouver, B.C., before returning to her home on the prairie. She currently lives in Regina on Treaty 4 territory and homeland of the Métis.
American Suzanne Kamata lives in the prefecture of Tokushima in Japan. She is the author of the novels Losing Kei, Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible, and Screaming Divas, as well as the short story collection The Beautiful One Has Come. She has also edited three anthologies including Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs. She is currently a lecturer at Tokushima University.
Gillian Wigmore is the author of three books of poems, including Orient, published by Brick Books, Dirt of Ages, published by Nightwood Editions, and soft geography, published by Caitlin Press, which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay award and won the 2008 Relit award. She has also written a novella, Grayling, published by MotherTongue Publishing in 2014 and has a novel forthcoming in Fall 2017 with Invisible Publishing. Her work has been published in magazines and anthologized. She lives in Prince George, BC, where she is the coordinator of the Nechako Branch of the Prince George Public Library. Her work has been published in magazines in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Jordan Hall is an emerging artist whose work has been dubbed “stellar, insightful”by Plank Magazine, “thoughtful” by CBC Radio, and “vivid, memorable” by NOW. Her first full-length play, Kayak, won Samuel French’s 2010 Canadian Playwrights Competition, and has been produced to critical acclaim across North America. An Associate at Playwrights Theatre Centre from 2010-2013, she is currently Touchstone Theatre’s 2016 Flying Start playwright, and her most recent play, How to Survive an Apocalypse, will premiere with Touchstone in 2016. As a screenwriter, Jordan co-created the CSA-nominated Carmilla: The Series for SmokeBomb Entertainment. She has also been a finalist in both the LA Comedy Fest and Beverly Hills Short Screenplay Competitions, as well as a winner of the Crazy8s Short Film Production Competition. As a dramaturg, Jordan worked on The Hearing of Jeremy Hinzman at the 2012 Summerworks Festival, and spent five years as a mentor for UBC’s Booming Ground program.
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