Megan Gail Coles: Small Game Hunting

February in Newfoundland is the longest month of the year.

Another blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off downtown St. John’s, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess from around the bay, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street. Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.

By turns biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles’ debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, building towards a climax that will shred perceptions and force a reckoning. This is blistering Newfoundland Gothic for the twenty-first century, a wholly original, bracing, and timely portrait of a place in the throes of enormous change, where two women confront the traumas of their past in an attempt to overcome the present and to pick up a future.

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Ian Williams: Reproduction

Paula Jane Remlinger: This Hole Called January

Caroline Goodwin: Custody of the Eyes

Katherin Edwards: A Thin Band

Joseph Hutchison, MFA 1974

Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado (2014-2018), is the award-winning author of 15 poetry collections, including The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015; The Satire Lounge; Marked Men; Thread of the Real; and Bed of Coals. He has co-edited two poetry anthologies; ”The FutureCycle Press anthology Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (all profits to the Malala Foundation) with Andrea Watson and, with Gary Schroeder, A Song for Occupations: Poems about the American Way of Work. At the University of Denver’s University College, he directs two programs for working adults, ”Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture” with courses both online and on campus. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, he lives in the mountains southwest of the city with his wife, Iyengar yoga instructor Melody Madonna.

Website: www.jhwriter.com

Tara Gilboy, MFA 2014

Tara Gilboy holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, where she specialized in writing for children and young adults. Her debut middle-grade novel, Unwritten, was published in October 2018 by Jolly Fish Press. She teaches creative writing for San Diego Community College District’s Continuing Education program and for the PEN Writers in Prisons program. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been published in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Cricket, Word Riot, and other publications.

Website: taragilboy.com

Anneliese Schultz, MFA 1977

Anneliese was shortlisted for the 2016 UBC/HarperCollins Best New Fiction Prize for her collection “The Edible, the Beauteous, and the Dead”. A 2014 Pushcart Prize nominee and former Bread Loaf Scholar, she has won the 2016 Stone Canoe Fiction Prize, the 2013 Meringoff Fiction Award and the 2013 Enizagam Literary Award in Fiction. Her short stories, travel pieces and poetry have been published by the Toronto Star, Literary Imagination, Stone Canoe, the Lascaux Review, Nowhere Travel Stories, Enizagam, and Moon Willow Press. Her fiction has also been recognized by Glimmer Train, Ruminate, The Writers’ Union of Canada, Cutthroat, New Millennium, Hidden River Arts, the Bath Short Story Award, and the Surrey International Writers’ Conference. A short play based on her story 27 Years was produced in Richmond,,and she has read her climate fiction at Word Vancouver, and presented the Culture Days event “Poems in the Pavement,” a reading of her poems on homelessness and addiction.

Anneliese is at work on the third title in her Young Adult climate fiction series: No phones, no cars, no internet. 2022-23 school year? Cancelled. And fifteen-year-old Kathleen is tracking her runaway little sister across a climate-devastated BC. The first title in the series, Distant Dream, is currently under consideration..

One day, she will get back to her novel in Italian, La Finta Italiana, and its translation, The Pretend Italian. (First, however, a middle-grade novel populated with rude ghosts.)

Website: laughinginthelanguage.com

Ellen Keith, MFA 2016

Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, Ellen Keith is a Canadian writer and a recent graduate of the University of British Columbia’s MFA program in creative writing. She currently lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New Quarterly and the Globe and Mail. Her debut novel, The Dutch Wife (Patrick Crean Editions) became an instant Canadian bestseller following its publication in April 2018, reaching #1 for Canadian fiction on The Globe and Mail’s bestsellers list. The Dutch Wife has since been published internationally in the United States (Park Row Books), the Netherlands (Uitgeverij Prometheus) and the Czech Republic (Pavel Dobrovský – Beta), and is forthcoming in Serbia (Vulkan izdavaštvo) and Italy (Newton Compton).