Curtain Call

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. After 25 years he quit The Fiddlehead over their censorship of a good story he had accepted and is now a fiction editor with Camel magazine. Burn Man, (Biblioasis, 2023) was an Editors’ Choice with The New York Times.

Adèle Barclay is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry, The Fiddlehead’s 2022 Fiction Prize, and a 2025 National Magazine Gold Award. They are the author of If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Renaissance Normcore.

Richard Brait is a corporate lawyer living in Toronto. He has degrees in Engineering Physics, Law and (41 years later) his MFA in Poetry from Bennington College.

Sandra Davies is a poet from Kingston whose first book, Giacometti’s Girl, was published by Cormorant Books, in the fall of 2018.

Ingrid Dolan lives in Ontario, a place of many beautiful waters.

Jean Eng is a visual artist and poet from Toronto. She is the author of the poetry collection Festival of All Souls (Inanna Publications). Her writing has appeared in CV2, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Room, and Vallum, and is also included in Best Canadian Poetry 2024. She has work forthcoming in Queen’s Quarterly.

Dagne Forrest belongs to Painted Bride Quarterly’s senior editorial and podcast teams. Her chapbooks include Un/becoming (Baseline Press, 2025) and the forthcoming Falldown Lane (Whittle Micropress, 2026).

Atma Frans’ writing has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, Lighthouse Literary Journal, Obsessed with Pipework, and Prairie Fire. Her poetry was a finalist in contests run by Freefall Magazine, Oxford Brookes University, The Malahat Review, CV2 and Sunspot Literary Journal and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. She lives on the traditional territory of the Skwxwú7mesh people, in Gibsons, B.C.

Kikki Guerard is a Two-Spirit Cree from Taykwa Tagamou First Nation. Their work weaves identity, magic, and vulnerability into stories of community, opening spaces for healing and transformation.

Susan Haldane lives and works on a farm in Northern Ontario. Her work has been published in several Canadian journals. Her collection Hard Bargain Road is published by Gaspereau Press.

Nancy Holmes has six collections of poetry, most recently Arborophobia. She won the 2024 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize with The Fiddlehead. She lives in Kelowna BC.

Anita Lahey’s latest poetry collection, While Supplies Last, was published in 2023 (Véhicule). She’s co-author, with Pauline Conley, of Fire Monster (Palimpsest) and series editor for Best Canadian Poetry.

Chantel Lavoie teaches English, Culture, and Communication at the Royal Military College in Kingston. Her verse has appeared in Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, and Prairie Fire, as well as in three collections of verse: Where the Terror Lies
(Quattro, 2012), This is about Angels, Women, and Men (Mansfield, 2021) and (with Meg Freer) Serve the Sorrowing World with Joy (Woodpecker Lane, 2020).

Trent Lewin is a UK born Canadian, with roots in India. He has been a finalist in the CBC Short Story Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize and other contests, winner of Grain’s Short Grain contest in 2022 and 2023, and Boulevard’s Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers in 2022. His focus is on climate change, and as an immigrant and a BIPOC writer, he’s interested in themes of belonging.

Sneha Madhavan-Reese is the author of the poetry collections Observing the Moon (Hagios Press, 2015) and Elementary Particles (Brick Books, 2023), which was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award and was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. She lives with her family in Ottawa.

Colette Maitland has published two books: Keeping the Peace and Riel Street. Recent fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly and Best Canadian Stories 2021. Overtime: Stories is forthcoming with Biblioasis.

Rose Maloukis’ poetry appears in the Global Poetry Anthology, has won prizes from both Geist and Arc Poetry, been published in The Fiddlehead, Vallum, among others.

Callista Markotich’s 2024 collection, Wrap in a Big White Towel (Frontenac House) was a finalist for the 2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial First Book Award. Gillian McKee’s poems have appeared in The Yukon Review and Alaska Women Speak. She has published nonfiction on the history of a Yukon First Nation and an essay in an anthology on murdered and missing Indigenous women.

Shane Neilson is a poet and physician from New Brunswick. His nonfiction has appeared in journals like Image, The Walrus, and Maisonneuve. He won the Gwen L. Memorial Award for Nonfiction in 2025.

Leslie Palleson’s lifelong pursuit to craft the written word has been supported by many mentors to whom she is grateful including Zsuzsi Gardner, Jack Hodgins, the late Timothy Findlay, and, currently, Maureen Medved.

Pardis Parker is a comedian who created and starred in Comedy Central’s Mideast Minute, and whose writing has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, and McSweeney’s.

Anthony Purdy is an East Coast writer living in Mi’kma’ki. His most recent publication is the chapbook, No Sound is Dissonant: Poems of Hearing and Seeing (Lunenburg, NS: Spot of Poetry, Little Books Collective, October 2024.)

Kaitlin Ruether’s (she/her) work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Freefall, Brick Magazine and other publications. She is a graduate of the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA and the Creative Writing program at the University of Victoria. She lives in Toronto/Tkaronto, Ontario.

Theressa Slind is a writer and librarian in Saskatoon. Her debut short story collection, Only If We’re Caught (Thistledown Press), won the 2022 Saskatchewan Book Awards First Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Rob Taylor is the author of five poetry collections, including Weather and The News. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Fraser Valley and lives with his family in Port Moody, BC.

Florence Treadwell, born in France, is a poet and a photographer, whose work has appeared in Canadian literary magazines, both in French and English. She is the author of Cleaving, a collection of poems and photographs (Ronsdale Press), and of a chapbook, Death Sentences (littlefishcartpress). She lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

Shelley Wood’s short stories have appeared in the CNQ, Grain, The Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, Saturday Evening Post, carte blanche, F(r)iction, and Room and won the Frank McCourt prize for Creative Nonfiction, the Nonfiction prize from Causeway Lit, and the Fiction prize from Freefall Magazine. Her second novel is The Leap Year Gene (HarperCollins Canada and Union Square Press (US) 2024).

Terence Young lives on Vancouver Island. His most recent book is a collection of poetry, Smithereens (Harbour Publishing, 2021), and he has a collection of fiction forthcoming in the fall, Give Us This Day, with Signature Editions.