Curtain Call

Irfan Ali is a poet, essayist, and educator. His first full-length collection Accretion (Brick Books, 2020) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His writing has appeared in filling Station, Open Book, and The Ex-Puritan.

Vincent Anioke is a Nigerian Canadian software engineer and author. His short stories have appeared in The Ex-Puritan, The Rumpus, The Masters Review, Carve, and Passages North, among others. He won the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize and has been short-listed for the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Fiction Award and the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He reads literary submissions for SmokeLong Quarterly and Split Lip Magazine. In 2024, his debut short story collection, Perfect Little Angels, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Find him on Twitter at @AniokeVincent.

Gary Barwin’s most recent work is Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity. His novels include Yiddish for Pirates and Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at gary-barwin.com

Daryl Bruce (he/him) is a conflicted nihilist turned writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. An emerging voice in queer Canadian prose and poetry, his work has appeared in PRISM, The Antigonish Review and more. Chronically over-caffeinated, he is currently working on his MA at Concordia University.

Heather Debling is a fiction writer and playwright  based in Stratford, Ontario. Her fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, Agnes and True, The Antigonish Review, and Room.

Susan Glickman grew up in Montreal and lives in Toronto where she works as a freelance editor and is learning to paint. She is the author of seven books of poetry. She has published in journals across Europe, Asia, and North America, is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a fiction editor for The Fiddlehead literary journal. Burn Man, her Selected Stories, was published in 2023 by Biblioasis and was an Editors’ Choice with The New York Times.

Pamela Hensley is the Managing Editor of yolk literary journal and host of the new podcast How I Wrote This. Her writing has appeared in literary journals in Canada and the UK.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, 19 Knives and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. Published in journals across Europe, Asia, and North America, he is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a fiction editor for The Fiddlehead. Burn Man, published in 2023 by Biblioasis, was an Editors’ Choice with The New York Times.

Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer. Her novel Voices in the Air is upcoming from Palimpsest Press in winter 2025. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish- Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her short fiction was short-listed for Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010.

Kyo Maclear is an essayist, novelist, editor and children’s author. Her nonfiction books include the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017), winner of the Trillium Book Award, and Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets (2023), winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. She teaches writing at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA.

Pacinthe Mattar is an Egyptian-Canadian journalist and author of the National Magazine Award-winning essay “Objectivity Is a Privilege Afforded to White Journalists”. She was a 2022 Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Rishi Midha is a writer based out of Toronto, ON. He writes to figure out what he is trying to say. He still has a lot to figure out! Publishing details can be found at: rishimidha.com

Following the publication of his first novel, Alex Pugsley was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. His first story collection, Shimmer, was recently nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Short Fiction. “The Calvin Dover Show” is an excerpt from The Education of Aubrey McKee, a novel to be published later this year by Biblioasis. The second in a multi-part series, the book details Aubrey’s arrival in Toronto as a young adult.

Best known as a poet, Montreal writer Robyn Sarah has published in other genres including short fiction, personal essay, and literary criticism. Her tenth collection of poems, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 2015. Her most recent book was a memoir, Music, Late and Soon (2021), about her early education as a professional-track musician and her return at fifty-nine to study piano with the mentor of her youth

Nedda Sarshar is an Irani-Canadian writer and filmmaker based out of Tkaronto. Her work has been published in Best Canadian Poetry, the Rumpus, Prism International, and other amazing publications, including The New Quarterly. Her short film Unibrow was the recipient of the Audience Choice Award for a short film and the Air Canada Short Film or Video Award at the Toronto International Reel Asian Film Festival. She loves writing about diasporas, identity crises’ and star-crossed lovers.

Mina Sharif is a Producer and Afghan Rights Advocate. She was raised in Toronto and spent much of her adulthood living in Kabul. As an emerging author, she strives to portray vivid portraits of everyday people, defying stereotypes and transcending simplistic narratives about her homeland.

Kevin Shaw’s poetry has appeared in publications such as The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and elsewhere. He has received Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year Prize and first place in PRISM international’s poetry contest. His debut collection, Smaller Hours, was published by icehouse poetry (Goose Lane Editions) in 2017. Originally from London, ON, Kevin received a PhD in Canadian literature from Western University and now lives in Ottawa where he works as a writer and editor.

Bren Simmers is the author of four books, including the poetry collection If, When (Gaspereau Press, 2021) and the wilderness memoir Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press, 2019). She is the winner of the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize.

Carolyn Smart is the author of seven collections of poetry, including “Hooked” and “Careen”. She is a freelance editor and founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and lives in South Frontenac, Ontario. Her website is www.carolynsmartediting.ca

The author of 21 books of poetry, fiction, stories, memoir, biography, and translation, Guggenheim recipient Terese Svoboda is celebrating the publication of two books this year: The Long Swim, winner of the Juniper Prize, and the novel Roxy and Coco. Last year she published the novel Dog on Fire, and next year, she will publish her second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law.

Saeed Teebi is a writer and lawyer based in Toronto. His debut collection of short stories, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize, among others.

Madeleine Thien teaches at the City University of New York. Her 2016 novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the Giller Prize and a Governor-General’s Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Ayelet Tsabari is the author of The Art of Leaving and The Best Place on Earth, and co-edi- tor of Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language. Her novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted is forthcoming with HarperCollins in 2024.