Carol N. Shaben is an award winning Vancouver-based author and recipient of two National Magazine Awards, including a gold medal for Investigative Journalism. In 2008 she was nominated as Canada’s Best New Magazine Writer. Her first book, Into the Abyss, sold to Random House Canada within two hours and has since become a national bestseller. The book has been published in the United States, UK, Brazil, Spain and throughout the Spanish speaking world. It was also optioned for film in 2013.
Into the Abyss received the 2013 Edna Staebler National Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the BC Book Prizes Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize.
Victoria Bell is an editor and writer living in Ottawa. She graduated from the UBC Optional Residency Master of Arts in Creative Writing program in 2010, with a focus on the novel. She is represented by Jennifer Udden of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. Find her on Twitter: @VictoriaMBell
Born in Calgary, Alberta Jessica is nevertheless a devoted British Columbian and proud University of British Columbia alumni – both from Secondary Education and Creative Writing. After completing her MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre in 2006, Jessica Cullen continued to teach high school English and Drama in Vancouver and then went on to teach in Nanaimo, before returning to Calgary to complete her Master of Architecture degree at the University of Calgary in 2011. She has since gone on to work and study both in the Netherlands, and Australia. This wanderlust and multidisciplinary background was fuelled by an intense curiosity in the world around her, resulting in both extensive travelling and multidirectional creative pursuits.
As a trained architect, high school teacher and writer, she brings to bear a wide and interdisciplinary scope to her work, melding playful sensitivity with a devotion to the development of designs with firm conceptual grounding and social purpose.
Currently working for Mecanoo Architects, in Delft, the Netherlands, Jessica has not published since her time in the Creative Writing department at UBC but reminds all those that have experienced success in the publishing world, that she is available for any design work they might require – cabins on Salt Spring Island, backyard writing workshops, or Vancouver Special renovations and refurbishments.
Jean is an Ottawa native, married to another one, mother of two more and grandmother of three Ottawa granddaughters. An unrepentant throwback in the age of mobility.
After a career as an executive in the federal public service and as head of a national industry association, Jean plunged into the world of creative writing. Hooked by the end of her first workshop in short fiction at Carleton University, she followed up with more. Gradually she added to her Honours BA in Political Science (Carleton) and MA in Political Studies (Queen’s) a graduate diploma from the Humber School of Writing and an MFA in Creative Writing through UBC’s Optional Residency Program.
She now indulges in poetry as well as short fiction and is a happy member of the active and supportive writing community in Ottawa.
Publications:
Where Are You Going?” Room, Issue 37.1, Winter/Spring 2014.
Stardust, Queen’s Quarterly, re-publication Summer 2013, as part of the quarterly‚ 120th anniversary celebrations; Journey Prize Stories 19, McClelland and Stewart, November 2007; originally, Queen’s Quarterly, Summer 2006.
Account of a Trip to Tuscany Together With Certain Useful Italian Phrases, non-fiction, Prairie Fire, Volume 33, 2, Summer 2012. 3rd place in annual competition for creative non-fiction.
Noah’s Dive, The New Quarterly, Volume 109, Winter 2008.
Pest Control, Ottawa Magazine (sister publication to Toronto Life), July 2007.
Gracie‚ Luck, The New Quarterly, Volume 98, Spring 2006.
Thunder Lake, winner of The Summer Place fiction contest, The New Quarterly, Issue 91, Summer/Fall 2004.
Life List, The Dalhousie Review, Issue 84.1, Spring 2004. 
Other Recognition
Public reading from Pest Control‚ at Library and Archives Canada, September, 2007, sponsored by Ottawa Magazine and the Ottawa International Writers Festival.
Beholden, finalist in the Malahat Review, 2005 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction.
Pest Control, finalist in The Writer’s Union of Canada 2001 Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers
Other Publications
My poetry and reviews have appeared in Queen’s Quarterly, Bywords Quarterly Journal, Bywords.ca, blogspotTRUCK, Room,Arc Poetry.
Rhea lives in Port Coquitlam, BC. While in UBC’s MFA program she focused on screen writing (Sara Graefe), poetry (Susan Musgrave) and writing for children (Maggie De Vries). Her stories and poetry have appeared in a collection of anthologies, both Canadian and US. She has had award nominations; including the Rhysling and Canadian Aurora award. Her most recent work is out in Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories and Tesseracts 17. Her first Zombie story appeared in Dead North, a Canadian Zombies anthology. She has no shame and will obviously write anything if she can get away with it. She also teaches at an alternative high school in Coquitlam.
J.T. Townley has published in Collier, Harvard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, and other places. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in English from Oxford University, and he spent time at Fundación Valparaíso, Spain as a fiction fellow. A Pushcart Prize nominee and Fulbright Scholar, he teaches at the University of Virginia.
Susan Olding is the author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays, winner of the Creative Nonfiction Collective’s Readers’ Choice Award for 2010. Her writing has appeared widely in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies across Canada and the United States, including TNQ,The L.A. Review of Books, The Malahat Review, Maisonneuve, and the Utne Reader, and has won a National Magazine Award, two Edna Awards, and many more. She lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario.
andrea bennett is a National Magazine Award–winning writer and editor and the author of two travel guides, one book of poetry, and, most recently, the essay collection Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary (Arsenal Pulp Press), a CBC Books’ pick for the top Canadian nonfiction of the year, and one of Autostraddle’s best queer books of 2020.
Janette Fecteau is a poet and artist living in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She is a graduate of the Optional-Residency program in its first (and most radical) cohort. Attending the residencies provided an opportunity to go wildly astray with anarchists like Susan Musgrave, Zsuzsi Gartner, Tom Hansen, Tadzio Richards, and many other excellent sorts. Since then, Janette has been trying to write poems in between teaching Fine Art at StFrancis Xavier University and saving the world for democracy.
Roslyn Muir is an award winning screenwriter, story editor and producer. Her script, The Birdwatcher, an indie micro-budget feature in post production was funded by Telefilm; starring Camille Sullivan, Gabrielle Rose, and Garwin Sanford; director, Siobhan Devine, producer, Ines Eisses, Executive Producer, Alex Raffe. Her MOW thriller script, Anatomy of Deception, starring Natasha Henstridge, was produced in 2013 by Odyssey Media and Reluctant Witness starring Mia Kirshner, and Driven Underground in 2014. Her fourth MOW, Evidence of Truth, goes to camera in 2015. Roslyn’s feature comedy, Unravelled, is a winner of the Praxis Screenplay Competition and her drama Hold the Sky, has development funding from Corus Made with Pay and BC Film. She wrote and produced the short film, OMG, starring Gabrielle Rose, which premiered at VIFF in 2012, at Palm Springs in 2013, and was broadcast on CBC. Roslyn also story edits feature films, has worked on the W Network production, Smart Cookies, and analyzed scripts for Movie Central. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.
