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).

Kevin Chong: The Plague

Timothy Taylor: The Rule of Stephens

Maureen Medved: Black Star

Keith Maillard: Twin Studies

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Lindsay Wong: The Woo-Woo

In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons when they should really be on anti-psychotic meds.

Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother and a mother who was deeply afraid of the “woo-woo” — Chinese ghosts who come to visit in times of personal turmoil. From a young age, she witnessed the woo-woo’s sinister effects; when she was six, Lindsay and her mother avoided the dead people haunting their house by hiding out in a mall food court, and on a camping trip, in an effort to rid her daughter of demons, her mother tried to light Lindsay’s foot on fire.

The eccentricities take a dark turn, however, and when Lindsay starts to experience symptoms of the woo-woo herself, she wonders whether she will suffer the same fate as her family.

At once a witty and touching memoir about the Asian immigrant experience and a harrowing and honest depiction of the vagaries of mental illness, The Woo-Woo is a gut-wrenching and beguiling manual for surviving family, and oneself.

arsenalpulp.com/Books/T/The-Woo-Woo