Biblioasis Authors

Michèle Adams’ stories have been published in literary journals, dramatized on CBC Radio, and performed at festivals. Currently she’s working on a novel and a radio drama; she’s also active as a screenwriter, with two features in development. Her short script, Beachbound, won the CBC/BC Film Signature Shorts 2003 competition, was nominated for a Leo, and is upcoming on CBC television. In addition to writing, she has taught at UBC and SFU, and works as a freelance story editor and script analyst

Caroline Adderson grew up in Alberta but has been a Vancouverite now for many years. Her first book, Bad Imaginings (The Porcupine’s Quill 1993), was nominated for a 1993 Governor General’s Literature Award, the 1994 Commonwealth Book Prize and won the 1994 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Adderson's first novel, A History of Forgetting (Key Porter 1999), was nominated for the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her second, Sitting Practice (Thomas Allen), won the 2004 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

Salvatore Ala was born in Windsor, Ontario in 1959. He studied philosophy and literature, and has worked at various jobs. His first book, Clay of the Maker, was published by Mosaic Press in 1998. He has also published five broadsides of his work. His poems have appeared in numerous journals; and most recently, in the anthology Sweet Lemons, Writings with a Sicilian Accent ( Legas, 2004). Salvatore lives in Windsor with his wife and children.

Chris Banks' first book Bonfires received the 2004 Jack Chalmers award for poetry and was also nominated for the 2004 Gerald Lampert Award. He recently received an Ontario Arts Council works-in-progress grant this year for his current manuscript. His poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, Modomnoc, Eye Weekly, and Echolocation. He writes and teaches in Waterloo, Ontario.

Mike Barnes is the author of Calm Jazz Sea, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, Aquarium, winner of the 1999 Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of stories by a Canadian, The Syllabus, a novel, and the short fiction collection Contrary Angel. His stories have appeared twice in Best Canadian Stories, three times in The Journey Prize Anthology, and won the Silver Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards. He lives in Toronto.

Website: www.reasonableogre.com

Biblioasis is a Canadian publisher of fine books as well as Canadian Notes and Queries magazine.

Clark Blaise (1940-), Canadian and American, is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. A longtime advocate for the literary arts in North America, Blaise has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre. In 1968, he founded the postgraduate Creative Writing Program at Concordia University; he after went on to serve as the Director of the International Writing Program at Iowa (1990-1998), and as President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story (2002-present). Internationally recognized for his contributions to the field, Blaise has received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy (2003), and in 2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Blaise now divides his time between New York and San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, American novelist Bharati Mukherjee.

Chef Rino Bortolin has been in the hospitality industry for 22 years. He has cooked at Il Gabbiano, Nico Ristorante, Porcino, and Spring Wine Bar; he has also owned and managed three Windsor-area restaurants (Vivo! Ristorante, 2000-2005, Th e Black Kettle Bistro, 2008-2010, and Rino’s Kitchen, 2010-present). His restaurants have been praised as Best New Restaurant (BizX), Best Wait Staff (Room), and have won the Hospitality Hero Award. This is his first cookbook

Laura Boudreau was born and raised in Toronto. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s MA in English and Creative Writing program. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including The New Quarterly,  Grain, The Fiddlehead, 10: Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories 22. Her freelance journalism has been published in Canada, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

She currently works in the publishing department of a children’s charity, and she lives with her husband in London, England.

Alex Boyd writes poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and has published work in magazines and newspapers such as The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and on websites such as Nthposition. His first book of poems Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications, 2007) won the Gerald Lampert Award. He edits the online poetry journal Northern Poetry Review, and recently helped establish Best Canadian Essays, co-editing the first two editions of selections from Canadian magazines.

C. P. Boyko lives and writes in Victoria, BC. 

Grant Buday’s novels include the award-winning White Lung, A Sack of Teeth, and Rootbound. His short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology and is forthcoming in Best Canadian Short Stories. Buday has traveled widely and now lives on a small island in B.C. with his wife and son.

Colin Carberry was born in Toronto and raised in Ireland. He is the author of the poetry collections The Crossing (Bearing Press, 1998), The Green Table  (Exile, 2003) and Ceasefire in Purgatory (Luna, 2007),  and is the translator of Love Poems (Biblioasis, 2011), by Jaime Sabines. Colin has read from his work on radio and television, and at book fairs, embassies, literary festivals and universities,  in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. He lives in Mexico.

Wayne Clifford is the author of seven books of poetry. His most recent collections are The Book of Were and On Abducting the ’Cello, both published by The Porcupine’s Quill. Clifford has published poems in an incredibly broad range of journals – from Canadian Forum to avant-garde magazines like bill bissett’s Blewointment, bpNichol’s ganglia, and Sheila Watson’s White Pelican. He lives in Halifax where the benign seclusion of obscurity is conducive to sonneteering.

Mia Couto was born in Beira, Mozambique in 1955. He dropped out of medical school to join the struggle against Portuguese colonialism in his country. When Mozambique became independent, in 1975, Couto was named Director of Information in the revolutionary government, and served as editor of two newspapers. In the 1980s, he returned to university to study environmental biology while beginning his writing career.

Couto is the author of more than 25 books of fiction, essays and poems. His novels and short story collections have been published in 20 languages. Two of his novels have been made into feature films and his books have been bestsellers in Africa, Europe and South America. In 2002, a committee of African literary critics named his novel Sleepwalking Land one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century. His novels have been awarded major literary prizes in Mozambique, Portugal,  Brazil and Italy.

Mia Couto lives with his family in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as an environmental consultant and a theatre director.

Nancy Jo Cullen is the 4th recipient of the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award for an Emerging Gay Writer. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph Humber. Her fiction has appeared in The Puritan, Grain, filling Station, Plenitude and Prairie Fire. Her short story “Ashes” was selected for the Journey Prize Anthology in 2012. 

Cullen is also the author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry with Frontenac House Press.  Her first collection, Science Fiction Saint, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Alberta Publishers Trade Book Award. Her second collection Pearl was shortlisted for the W.O. Mitchell Calgary Book Prize and won the Alberta Publishers Trade Book Award. A transplanted westerner, Cullen lives in Toronto with her partner and children. She is at work on a novel and a fourth collection of poetry.

Currently the sports columnist for the Windsor Star, Bob Duff has covered the NHL since 1988 and is a contributor to The Hockey News and MSNBC.com.  Duff's book credits include: The China Wall: The Timeless Legend of Johnny Bower, Hockey Dynasties, Without Fear, Nine: Salute to Mr. Hockey, On the Wing: A History of the Windsor Spitfires, and The Hockey Hall of Fame MVP Trophies and Winners. Duff lives in LaSalle, Ontario, with his wife Shira and daughter Cecilia.

At 87, Hans Eichner (Canada) was about to become a debut novelist for Anglophone readers. His powerful story of displaced European Jews was a bestseller in Austria and Germany in the '90s, and has recently been published in Canada. The Austrian-born author of Kahn & Engelmann passed away in April 2009. Eichner's widow, Kari Grimstad, reads from the novel in tribute to her husband's life and work.

Sharon English has published two collections of short stories, Uncomfortably Numb (Porcupine's Quill, 2002) and Zero Gravity (Porcupine’s Quill, 2006). Zero Gravity was long-listed for the 2007 Giller Prize, short-listed in the 2007 ReLit Awards, and included in the Globe and Mail’s Best 100 new titles of 2006. Works by Sharon have also appeared in journals such as Best Canadian Stories and Canadian Notes and Queries. She’s now working on a novel called What Has Night to Do with Sleep? Sharon also teaches creative and academic writing at the University of Toronto.

Cynthia Flood’s stories have won numerous awards, including The Journey Prize and a National Magazine award, and have been widely anthologized. Her novel Making A Stone Of The Heart was nominated for the City of Vancouver Book Prize in 2002. She is the author of the acclaimed short story collections The Animals in Their Elements (1987) and My Father Took A Cake To France (1992). She lives on Vancouver’s East side.

Charles Foran is the author of seven books. He lives with his family in Peterborough, Ontario.

Novelist, playwright, short story writer and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman was born in New York City. Friedman published his first novel Stern in 1962 and established himself as a writer and playwright, most famously known for his off-Broadway hit Steambath (1973) (TV) and his 1978 novel The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life. In addition to short stories and plays, Friedman has also published another seven novels, and has written numerous screenplays, including the Oscar-nominated Splash (1984). He resides in New York City with his second wife, educator Patricia J. O’Donohue.

Marty Gervais is an award winning journalist, photographer, poet, playwright, historian, editor and teacher. In 1998, he won the prestigious Toronto’s Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian letters and to emerging writers. In 1996, he was awarded the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award for his book, Tearing Into A Summer Day. He has twice won the City of Windsor Mayor’s Award for literature, and has been the recipient of nearly two dozen Ontario Newspaper Awards for journalism.

Adam Getty has had his poetry published in journals in both the USA and Canada. His first full length book, Reconciliation, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry and was shortlisted for the 2003 Trillium Award. He currently lives in Hamilton, ON, where he teaches poetry at Mohawk College.

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based journalist and scholar. He has labored as a bicycle shop manager and skateboard courier, a busboy and barrel-washer, a researcher and teacher, a handyman and housepainter a bartender and espresso jerk, and also as a magazine and newspaper editor. The only work he has ever done was: publishing Hermenaut, an intellectual zine; contributing regular columns to Feed.com, The Idler (UK), Britannica.com, The London Observer, and The Boston Globe’s Ideas section; and editing Taking Things Seriously, a 2007 collection of essays and photos devoted to oddly significant objects.

Douglas Glover (1948-) is the award-winning Canadian author of five story collections, four novels (includingElle), and two works of non-fiction. In 2003 he won the Governor-General's Award for Fiction; in 2005 he was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; in 2006 he won the Writers' Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award. His critically acclaimed novel The Life and Times of Captain N. was listed by the Chicago Tribune as one of the best books of 1993 and as a Globe & Mail top-ten paperback of 2001.

He was recently the subject of a TV documentary in a series called The Writing Life and a collection of critical essays,The Art of Desire, The Fiction of Douglas Glover, edited by Bruce Stone. And he appeared in several segments of the TV series Writers' Confessions.

Since he washed up in the hinterlands of upstate New York in the early 1990s, Glover has taught at Skidmore College, Colgate University, Davidson College, and the State University of New York at Albany. In addition, he has been writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick, the University of Lethbridge, St. Thomas University and Utah State University. He is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.

Terry Griggs is the author of the Cat’s Eye Corner Trilogy, which, consisting of the books Cat’s Eye Corner, The Silver Door and Invisible Ink, have been nominated for multiple children’s writing awards. She is also the author of three novels for adults, including Thought You Were Dead, listed as a Globe 100 pick, and the Roger’s Trust nominated Rogue’s Wedding. Her short fiction collection Quickening was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, and she has been awarded the Marian Engel Award in recognition for a distinguished body of work. She lives in Stratford, Ontario, with her family.

website: www.nievesworld.com/

Liliana Heker was born in 1943 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is the author of two novels and many books of short stories and essays, in addition to being a founder of two important Argentine literary magazines. Her collected short stories were published in Spanish in 2004 and translated into Hebrew; her stories have been included in anthologies in many countries and languages. Her collection, The Stolen Party and Other Stories, is available in English. 

The End of the Story was not only a literary success, but a cultural event that provoked controversy and avid discussion of how best to remember the years of the Argentine dictatorship.

David Helwig is the author of more than 35 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction including, most recently, The Year One (Gaspereau Press), Duet and his autobiography The Name of Things (Porcupine’s Quill). The founder of the Best Canadian Short Story Series, he has edited more than 25 books for Oberon Press. His avocation, however, is not writing but vocal music. After abandoning this for some years, he returned to it in his forties and has sung with a number of choirs in Kingston, Montreal and Charlottetown. He has appeared as bass soloist in Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and Mozart’s Requiem. He currently lives in an old house in the village of Eldon in Prince Edward Island.

Stephen Henighan is the author of eleven books, a columnist for Geist magazine, and a contributor to publications such as The Walrus and The Times Literary Supplement (London). Henighan is well-known across the country in literary, academic and journalism circles and has the beginnings of a popular following.

David Hickey grew up on Prince Edward Island, in western Labrador, and along the north shore of Quebec. A past recipient of the Milton Acorn Prize and the Ralph Gustafson Prize, his work has appeared in magazines and journals across Canada an the United States. David is an avid runner and back yard astronomer, and he lives in London, ON.

Jessica Hiemstra is a visual artist and writer who lives in Sierra Leone. She is also the winner of two Malahat Review Open Season Awards (2011) and the Room Magazine Annual Poetry Contest (2009). Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle is her third volume of poetry.

Vancouver-raised Lorna Jackson began her working life as a musician and travelled throughout British Columbia for nine years as a bass player and singer. She has published two collections of short stories, Dressing for Hope and Flirt: The Interviews, and a novel, A Game to Play on the Tracks. Cold-Cocked: On Hockey, the first book to explore a woman’s way of watching the game poet Al Purdy called a “combination of ballet and murder,” was published by Biblioasis in 2007. As well, her non-fiction and literary journalism have appeared in Brick, Quill & Quire, The Georgia Straight, and Malahat Review. She teaches writing at the University of Victoria.

Amanda Jernigan is a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor. Her works have been published in Canada, the United States and Germany, and are represented in the online archive of the Poetry Foundation.

Author photo by John Haney.

Originally from Halifax, Amy Jones is a graduate of the Optional Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at UBC. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in several Canadian publications, including The New Quarterly, Grain, Prairie Fire, Event, Room of One’s Own, The Antigonish Review, and 08: Best Canadian Stories. In 2006, she was the winner of the CBC Literary Award for Short Story in English. Amy currently lives in Toronto.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Poland’s most celebrated journalist and author, was born in 1932. His first book, Busz po polsku [Bush in Polish] appeared in 1962 and was an immediate bestseller. Many of his later works, which include The Emperor, Another Day of Life, The Soccer War, Shah of Shahs, Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun and Travels with Herodotus, have been translated into 31 languages and become part of the modern canon. He was, moreover, a poet, and published his poetry throughout his fifty-year writing career. One of the most acclaimed writers of our time, KapuíciÕski died in Warsaw in January 2007.

W. J. Keith, FRSC, is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Canadian and English literature, including A Canadian Odyssey on Hood's 12-volume novel-series.

After some years of graduate education in Britain and the United States, Mark Kingwell found he had inadvertently perfected a form of idling for which he could get paid. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, and has written for publications ranging from Adbusters and the New York Times to the Journal of Philosophy and Auto Racing Digest. Among his twelve books of political and cultural theory are the national best-sellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), and Concrete Reveries. In order to secure financing for their continued indulgence he has also written about his various hobbies, including fishing, baseball, cocktails, and contemporary art.

Marius Kociejowski was born and raised in Canada and now lives in England. A poet, essayist and travel writer, he is the author or four collections of poetry, The Street Philosoher and the Holy Fool, and is the editor of Syria Through Writers' Eyes. He lives and works as a bookseller in London.

Andrea G. Labinger has translated novels by numerous Latin American writers, including Luisa Valenzuela, Sabina Berman, Alicia Steimberg and Ana María Shua. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature from Harvard University and is Professor Emerita of Spanish at the University of La Verne, California.

Rachel Lebowitz is the author of Hannus (Pedlar Press, 2006) which was shortlisted for the 2007 Roderick Haig-Brown  Regional BC Book Prize and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She is also the co-author, with Zachariah Wells, of the children's picture book Anything But Hank! (Biblioasis, 2008, illustrated by Eric Orchard). Her third book, Cottonopolis, will be out in 2013 with Pedlar Press. She lives in Halifax.

Photo: Trevor Cole

Annabel Lyon’s first book, the short story collection Oxygen, was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Award. Her second collection, The Best Thing for You, was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction and the City of Vancouver Book Award. Annabel Lyon lives in New Westminster, B.C. with her husband and two children.

Alexander MacLeod was born in Inverness, Cape Breton and raised in Windsor, Ontario. His bestselling fiction debut (Light Lifting, Biblioasis 2010), released last year in the UK, was an ALA Notable Book for 2012, shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award, and the winner of an Atlantic Book Award. Light Lifting was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Prize. Alexander holds degrees from the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill; he currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

Colette Maitland has been writing short stories since her youngest son entered kindergarten in 1996. She has published widely in literary magazines – The Antigonish Review, Pottersfield Portfolio, Descant, Room of One’s Own, The Nashwaak Review, Wascana Review, The Prairie Journal, Freefall, The Puritan, The Fiddlehead, Event and frequently in The New Quarterly. She has also collected a few first place finishes in literary competitions: The Kingston Literary Awards (1998), The WFNB Literary Competition (2006), and The CAA Niagara Branch “Ten Stories High” Short Story Competition (2007). In addition, she was a finalist for the Writers’ Union of Canada 10th Annual Postcard Story Contest (2009), and in 2010, she was short-listed for the Metcalf-Rooke Award. Colette is a mother of four grown children, and grandmother to Laura and Rachel. She lives in Gananoque, ON with her husband of thirty-one years, Al Maitland.

David Mason became an antiquarian bookseller in 1967. He has since then had five different locations, and continues to insist on having an open shop in downtown Toronto in spite of the huge costs, general indifference, and the disappearance of most of his colleagues. 

Judith McCormack was born outside Chicago, and grew up in Toronto, with brief stops in Montreal and Vancouver. She has several law degrees, which have mostly served to convince her that law is a branch of fiction. Her first short story was nominated for the Journey Prize, and the next three were selected for the Coming Attractions Anthology. Her recent collection of stories, The Rule of Last Clear Chance, was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, and was named one of the best books of 2003 by The Globe and Mail. Her work has been published in the Harvard Review, Descant and The Fiddlehead, and one of her stories has been optioned for film by her twin sister, Naomi McCormack, an award-winning filmmaker. Judith lives in Toronto with her partner, Peter Dorfman, and their two children.

Nadine McInnis is the author of seven books, the most recent being Two Hemispheres (Brick Books, Fall 2007), a book-length poetic exploration of illness and health partially inspired by the first medical photographs of women patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in 1850, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award, the ReLit Award, the People’s Choice Award and the Lampman-Scott Award. Her other books include First Fire /ce feu qui devore, a bilingual selected and new poems, Quicksilver (short fiction) Hand to Hand (poetry); Poetics of Desire, a critical study of the love poems of Dorothy Livesay, The Litmus Body (poetry) and Shaking the Dreamland Tree (poetry). Her last collection of short stories, Quicksilver was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of short stories by a Canadian, The Writers Craft Award for best book of short stories by an Ontario author and the Ottawa Book Award. She’s also a past prize-winner in the CBC Literary Competition.

Robert Melançon is one of Quebec’s most original poets. He won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his collection Blind Painting and shared the Governor General’s Award for Translation with Charlotte Melançon for their French version of A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll. A long-time translator of Canadian poet Earle Birney, Melançon has been the poetry columnist for the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir and the Radio-Canada program En Toutes Lettres. He lives in North Hatley, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

John Metcalf was Senior Editor at the Porcupine's Quill until 2005, and is now Fiction Editor at Biblioasis. A scintillating writer and an almost magisterial editor and anthologist, he is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction and non-fiction, including Standing Stones: Selected Stories, Adult Entertainment, Going Down Slow and Kicking Against the Pricks. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, Myrna.

K. D. Miller is the author of two previous short story collections, Give me Your Answer and Litany on a Time of Plague, and an essay collection, Holy Writ. Her work has twice been collected in The Journey Prize Anthology and Best Canadian Stories, and she has been nominated for a National magazine Award for Fiction. She lives and writes in Toronto.

A. F. Moritz has written more than 15 books of poetry. He has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and he has won the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His recent collection, Night Street Repairs, published by House of Anansi Press in 2005, won the ReLit Award and The Sentinel was given Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize. A. F. Moritz lives in Toronto and teaches at Victoria University.

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in 1957 in Honduras, but grew up in El Salvador. He has lived in Guatemala, Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain and Germany. His work has been translated into German, French, Italian, and Portuguese. His novel Senselessness was published in English to universal critical acclaim in 2008 by New Directions. He has published eight novels and is now living in exile as part of the City of Asylum project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Shane Neilson is a physician whose first chapbook of poems, The Beaten-Down Elegies, was published in 2004 by Frog Hollow Press. In 2005 he edited Alden Nowlan and Illness, also with Frog Hollow. Subsequently, he has written a memoir, Call Me Doctor (Pottersfield Press, 2006), and Exterminate My Heart (Frog Hollow Press, 2008). Meniscus is his first trade book of poetry.

Richard Norman lives in Halifax. He has recently published poetry in The Malahat Review, The Puritan, and CV2, among other Canadian journals. Zero Kelvin is his first collection.

Since emerging onto the Vancouver poetry scene in 1992 and being named one of the Top Ten Young Artists of the year by The Vancouver Sun, Alexandra Oliver has gone on to receive two Pushcart Prize nominations, as well as a CBC Literary Award nomination. She has performed her work at Lollapalooza, The National Poetry Slam, the CBC Radio National Poetry Face-Off, the Bowery Poetry Club, the Spectacular Obsessions Fellini Retrospective at the Bell TIFF Lightbox and the Italian Contemporary Film Festival in Toronto. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and publications worldwide, including Orbis Rhyme International, Nexus, The Atlanta Review, The New Guard, Light Quarterly, Future Cycle Poetry, The Raintown Review, and The Vancouver Sun. Her first book, Where the English Housewife Shines (Tin Press, London, UK) was released in April, 2007. She is also co-editing (with Annie Finch) an anthology of metrical poetry. Alexandra divides her time between Toronto, Canada, and Glasgow, Scotland.

Ondjaki is a 32-year-old author with nine previously published books, translated now into five languages. Good Morning Comrades marks Ondjaki’s first appearance in English.

Eric Ormsby is the author of five collections of poetry, a book of essays, and a number of scholarly studies of Islamic thought. He was born in Georgia, raised in Florida, and worked for twenty years as director of libraries and professor of Islamic Studies at McGill University. His poetry has been widely published and anthololgized in Canada, the United States, and Britain. In 1992, he received an Ingram Merrill Award for poetry and in the same year was awarded the Qspell Prize for Bavarian Shrine. Since 2004, he has written a weekly column on literature for the New York Sun and regularly contributes essays and reviews to The New Criterion, Books in Canada, The Times Literary Supplement and Parnassus. He has two sons and now lives with his wife Irena, an architectural historian, in London.

New Zealander-Canadian Alice Petersen was the 2009 winner of the David Adams Richards Award, offered by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. Her stories, published in Geist, The Fiddlehead, Room, and Takahe, have variously been shortlisted for the Journey Prize, the Writers’ Union of Canada competition, the CBC Literary awards, and the Metcalf Rooke Award. Petersen lives in Montreal with her husband and two daughters. All the Voices Cry (Biblioasis, 2012) is her first collection.

Marsha Pomerantz grew up in New York, lived in Israel for twenty years, and now lives in Boston. Her poems and prose have been published in journals in the US, UK, and Israel, and she has translated poetry, short fiction, and a novel from the Hebrew. Her writing has been supported by two residencies at the MacDowell Colony and by a Massachusetts Cultural Council finalist grant, and she has twice been a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Award. She is managing editor at the Harvard Art Museums.

Born in the UK, Patricia Robertson grew up in British Columbia and received her MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. Her most recent book is The Goldfish Dancer:  Stories and Novellas. Her first collection of fiction, City of Orphans, was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology and been nominated for the CBC literary awards, the Pushcart Prize, and the National Magazine Awards (three times). She was the 2008 writer-in-residence at Green College, University of B.C., and the 2010-11 writer-in-residence at Haig-Brown House in Campbell River. Currently she is a creative writing instructor at Yukon College in Whitehorse, a freelance writer/editor, and a contributing editor for CNQ.

Ray Robertson is the author of the novels Home Movies, Heroes, Moody Food, Gently Down the Stream, What Happened Later, and David, as well as a collection of non-fiction, Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing. He is a contributing book reviewer to the Globe and Mail.

Leon Rooke is a novelist, short story writer, playwright, editor and critic. He was born in rural North Carolina, but has been a resident of Canada for many years. He has published 28 books, latest among these a novel, The Fall of Gravity, (2000). Painting the Dog: The Best Stories of Leon Rooke appears 2001. Nearly 300 short stories have been published. Over the course of his career, Leon Rooke has been writer-in-residence at numerous north american universities, including the University of Victoria, Southwest Minnesota State University and the University of Toronto. Rooke is also the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1981), the Governor General's Award for English Language Fiction for Shakespeare´s Dog (1985), and the North Carolina Award for Literature (1990).

Rebecca Rosenblum’s fiction has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award, and she was herself a juror for the Journey Prize in 2009. Her first collection of short stories, Once, won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and was one of Quill and Quire’s 15 Books That Mattered in 2008. A chapbook, Road Trips, was published by Frog Hollow Press in 2010, and her second collection, The Big Dream, is forthcoming from Biblioasis in Fall 2011. Rebecca is from a small town near Hamilton, Ontario, and now lives, works, and writes in Toronto.

Jaime Sabines Gutierrez, Mexico's most influential modern poet, was born in Chiapas in 1926. His first collection, Horal, appeared in 1950 and met with widespread critical acclaim. Several of his later titles are considered classics, and his poetry continues to be anthologized and widely translated. He received numerous literary awards and honours over the course of his career, including the City of Mexico Prize, the National Prize for Literature, and the Belisario Dominguez Medal of honour. Often regarded as one of the major poets of the 20th century, he died in Mexico City in March 1999.

Robyn Sarah is the author of eight poetry collections, two collections of short stories, and a book of essays on poetry. Her most recent poetry collection is Pause for Breath (Biblioasis, 2009). Le tamis des jours, selected poems in French translation with parallel English text, was published in 2007, as was Little Eurekas: A Decade's Thoughts on Poetry. Her writing has appeared widely in Canada and the United States, and her poems have been anthologized in Fifteen Canadian Poets x 2 and x 3, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Norton Anthology of Poetry and in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times. She lives in Montréal.

Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. She contributes to the London Review of Books, The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, the Globe & Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. She has lived in London and Dublin, and now resides in Vancouver. Malarky is her first novel.

Website: www.malarky.ca

Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was one of the major Central European writers of the 1930s. Born in southeastern Romania, he worked in Bucharest as a lawyer, journalist, novelist and playwright until anti-semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years, was published in seven countries between 1996 and 2007, launching an international revival of his work. Sebastian’s novels and plays are available in translation throughout Europe, and also have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and Hebrew.

The Accident is Sebastian's first work of fiction to appear in English.

Mauricio Segura was born in Temuco, Chile in 1969 and immigrated to Quebec with his parents as a child. He studies economics at the Universite de Montreal and French literature at McGill University. The author of two novels and a book about French perceptions of Latin America, Segura lives in Montreal, where he is well known as a journalist and commentator on immigrant issues.

Norm Sibum has been writing and publishing poetry for over thirty years. Born in Oberammergau in 1947, he grew up in Germany, Alaska, Utah, and Washington before moving to Vancouver in 1968. He has published several volumes of poetry in Canada and England. A joint U.S.-Canadian citizen, Sibum currently lives and works in Montreal, Quebec.

Goran Simic was born in Bosnia in 1952 and has been living in Toronto since 1996. He has published eleven books of poetry, drama, and short fiction, including the acclaimed volume of poems in English translation, Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford University Press, 1997). In Canada, Simic has published Peace and War, a limited edition volume gathering poems by himself and by Fraser Sutherland; other books of his poetry and drama have been translated into nine languages. His poems are included in anthologies of world poetry, such as Scanning the Century (Penguin, 2002) and Banned Poetry (Index, 1997). He has received major literary awards from PEN USA and four times in former Yugoslavia.

A native of Mabou, Cape Breton, to which he has returned Ray Smith lived in Montreal for forty years, where he taught English literature at Dawson College. He is the author of, among others, A Night at the Opera (winner of the 1992 Qspell Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada, Century, and most recently, The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among the Virgins, all published by Biblioasis.

Russell Smith is the author of seven works of fiction. A well-know journalist and cultural commentator, he has been a CBC radio host and remains a Globe & Mail columnist. He lives and writes in Toronto.

David Solway is the author of many books of poetry including Modern Marriage, Bedrock, Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis, and Franklin’s Passage, winner of the 2004 Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. His most recent collection, The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat, was published in 2005. Currently an associate editor with Books in Canada, he lives in Hudson, Quebec.

A.J. Somerset has been a soldier, a technical writer, a programmer, and a freelance photographer. His non-fiction has appeared in numerous outdoor magazines in Canada and the United States, and his articles have been translated into French and Japanese.

David Starkey is the former Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, a senior Fulbright scholar, and a six-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Among his poetry collections are Starkey's Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey's Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) A Few Things You Should Know About the Weasel (Biblioasis 2010) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press's Spring 2000 chapbook contest.

Born in Montréal, Andrew Steinmetz is the author of a memoir (Wardlife) and two collections of poetry (Histories and Hurt Thyself). His novel, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre, tells the story of his great-aunt Eva who performed in one of first touring productions of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece The Threepenny Opera, in 1928. An unusual fiction about memoir, Eva’s Threepenny Theatre won the 2009 City of Ottawa Book Award and was a finalist for the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Steinmetz is also the founding editor of Esplanade Books, the fiction imprint at Véhicule Press.

Cathy Stonehouse grew up in the UK, where she received a BA in English from Wadham College, Oxford University, and subsequently moved to Vancouver, where she received an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. The author of a poetry collection (The Words I Know, Press Gang Publishers 1994), co-editor of the creative nonfiction anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008) and a former editor of award-winning literary journal EVENT, her creative nonfiction, poetry short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of Canadian literary journals and anthologies including Best Canadian Stories 2010.  A creative writing instructor and freelance writer/editor, she has two books forthcoming in 2011: Something about the Animal: Stories (Biblioasis) and Grace Shiver: Poems (Inanna Publications).

Claire Tacon’s writing has been short-listed for the Bronwen Wallace Award, the CBC Literary Awards and the Playboy College Fiction Contest, and has appeared in The New Quarterly, sub-TERRAIN and Room. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and is a past fiction editor of PRISM international.

The Caboto Club is southwestern Ontario’s oldest and largest Italian organization, boasting spacious reception and banquet facilities, a long history of community involvement and charitable donations, and a now-famous restaurant. Founded in 1925 and named for the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, the Club still serves its original purpose—to encourage camaraderie among new Italian-Canadian citizens—but it has also become an Essex County landmark, and a meeting-place for the Windsor community at large.

Sonia Tilson was born in Swansea, South Wales and educated at Monmouth School for Girls. She has taught English since 1964. The Monkey Puzzle Tree is her first novel.

Joshua Trotter lives and cooks in Montreal. All This Could Be Yours is his first book.

Zachariah Wells is a contributing editor for Canadian Notes & Queries, the author of Unsettled, a collection of poetry about the Arctic, and the editor of The Essential Kenneth Leslie. His three Biblioasis titles are the anthology Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, the children's story Anything But Hank! (with Rachel Lebowitz and Eric Orchard), and the poetry collection Track & Trace. He lives in Halifax, where he works as a freelance writer and editor and as a passenger rail attendant.

L.A. Wilk grew up in Toronto, completed her medical training in Vancouver, and now makes London, England her home. Her short fiction has been nominated for the McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize Anthology, long-listed for a CBC Canada Writes literary prize, and appears in Descant, Prairie Fire and Shortfire Press. She is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She practices medicine and lives with her husband and two children in London, UK.

Kathleen Winter is the author of the novella Where is Mario (Xx press, 1987), and two books of creative non-fiction entitled The Road Along the Shore (Killick, 1991) and The Necklace of Occasional Dreams (Killick, 1996). She has written dramatic and documentary scripts for Sesame Street and CBC Television and writes a weekly Saturday column for the St. John’s Telegram. Her short fiction has appeared in leading Canadian literary journals.

Patricia Young is the author of eight books of poetry, and one book of short fiction, Airstream (Biblioasis, 2006). A two-time Governor General’s Award nominee, she has also won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the CBC Literary Competition, the British Columbia Book Prize for Poetry and the League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Competition. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Terence Young is the author of four previous books, including The Island in Winter (nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Gerald Lampert Award), Rhymes with Useless (nominated for the Danuta Gleed Award) and Moving Day, which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award. He helped co-found The Claremont Review, a journal for young writers, and lives with poet and fiction writer Patricia Young.