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Amanda Peters

BIOGRAPHY
Amanda Peters is a writer of Mi’kmaw and settler ancestry. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award (IVA) for unpublished prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers Trust Rising Stars program. Her debut novel The Berry Pickers has been shortlisted for the 2023 Writers Trust of Canada Atwood Gibson Award, the 2023 Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize, the 2023 Carnegie Medal of Honour for Fiction and the 2024 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award from the Ontario Library Association. Her work has appeared in the Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, The Alaska Quarterly Review, the Dalhousie Review, and fillingStation Magazine. Her short story collection Waiting for the Long Night Moon will be published in the summer of 2024. Amanda has a certificate in creative writing from the University of Toronto and she is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe New Mexico. Amanda teaches in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University. She lives and writes in the Annapolis Valley Nova Scotia with her fur babies Holly and Pook.  

PUBLICATIONS

The Berry Pickers

AWARDS

2024 Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction Shortlist

2023 Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize for Debut Novel

2023 Amazon.com Best Book of the Year Finalist

2023 Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Year –  2nd Place

2023 Short List for the Atwood Gibson Fiction Award

2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose

2021 Rising Star Award from the Writers Trust of Canada

Nova Scotia Writers Federation Nova Writes Emerging Writers 2017, Short Fiction, Winner 

 

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Experience Levels

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) uses the following terms to describe writers’ experience levels:

  • New writers: those with less than two years’ creative writing experience and/or no short-form publications (e.g., short stories, personal essays, or poems in literary magazines, journals, anthologies, or chapbooks).
  • Emerging writers: those with more than two years’ creative writing experience and/or numerous short-form publications.
  • Early-career authors: those with 1 or 2 book-length publications or the equivalent in book-length and short-form publications.
  • Established authors: those with 3 or 4 book-length publications.
  • Professional authors: those with 5 or more book-length publications.

Please keep in mind that each form of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, writing for children and young adults, and others) provides you with a unique set of experiences and skills, so you might consider yourself an ‘established author’ in one form but a ‘new writer’ in another.

The “Recommended experience level” section of each workshop description refers to the above definitions. A workshop’s participants should usually have similar levels of creative writing and / or publication experience. This ensures that each participant gets value from the workshop⁠ and is presented with information, strategies, and skills that suit their career stage. 

For “intensive” and “masterclass” workshops, which provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer feedback, the recommended experience level should be followed closely.

For all other workshops, the recommended experience level is just that—a recommendation—and we encourage potential participants to follow their own judgment when registering.

If you’re uncertain of your experience level with regard to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca