Coffee Chats advisor

Heather Fegan

Heather Fegan is a freelance journalist and writer. She is a graduate of the University of King’s College School of Journalism. Heather has been a storyteller since age five, regaling her family with “updates” in her own “Heather Chronicles.” Gutsy, which explores her personal experience of navigating Crohn’s Disease over twenty-five years, is her debut book.

She lives in Halifax, NS, with her husband and two daughters. Follow her chronicles at heatherfegan.ca and @theheatherchronicles.

Heather Fegan Read More »

Lynette Richards

Lynette Richards has been cartooning as long as she can remember, and recently published her first graphic novel Call Me Bill (Conundrum Press 2022). She is a Craft Nova Scotia Master Artisan, who lives and works in Terence Bay NS, where she operates her business Rose Window Stained Glass. She chose Stained Glass as her professional medium because it was both a trade and an art that has used sequential narration for over 1000 years!

Lynette Richards Read More »

Sonja Boon

Sonja Boon is an award-winning researcher, writer, teacher, and flutist.

She is the author of the memoir What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home (WLU Press, 2019), and has published creative non-fiction and fiction in ROOM magazine, The Ethnic Aisle, Riddle Fence, and Geist, among others, as well as in anthologies.

Sonja has been longlisted and shortlisted for a number of literary prizes, including the CBC Nonfiction Prize, BMO Winterset Award, Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards, and ROOM Magazine’s Creative Non-Fiction Contest. In 2021, she won an NL Arts & Letters Award in Poetry.

As a researcher, Sonja is interested in bodies, stories, identities, and theories, and has published scholarly work on a variety of topics, including considerations of gender, class, embodiment, identity and citizenship in eighteenth-century medical letters, to breastfeeding selfies and virtual activism, autobiographies of infanticide, auto/ethnography and the embodiment of maternal grief, and craftivism in the feminist classroom.

She is the author or co-author of four scholarly books, most recently, The Routledge Introduction to Auto/Biography in Canada (with Laurie McNeill, Julie Rak, and Candida Rifkind, 2022) and Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands (with Lesley Butler and Daze Jefferies, 2018).

Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University from 2008-2023, she is the recipient of the Royal Society of Canada’s Ursula Franklin Award in Gender Studies (2020) and is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

For six years, Sonja was principal flutist with the Portland Baroque Orchestra. She has also appeared with the Toronto Symphony, the Hallé Orchestra (Manchester, UK), Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (San Francisco), and the Holland Festival of Early Music, among others. She has taught flute and performance practice at Bangor University, UBC, and Chetham’s School of Music.

Sonja is currently Vice President of WritersNL and a board member with Riddle Fence.

Sonja Boon Read More »

Sarah Butland

Biography:

Sarah Butland is a thriving freelance writer and reporter, an author loved by enough readers to make it worthwhile and a discombobulated conundrum who loves to hear new music, tell new tales and meet new authors. The recipient of a Writers Federation of New Brunswick competition with Blood Day the Short Story, her love of writing knows no genre. With articles and book reviews published in Maritime (EDIT), AH! At Home on the North Short, Atlantic Books Today, with some work with Pictou Advocate, Butland thrives through deadlines and diversity.

As a full time employee besides, and a mother to one young book lover, Butland volunteers with the Read by the Sea Literary Festival committee, hosts local workshops and manages the Pictou County Writers – New and Experienced Facebook group, highlighting the vast amount of talent on the North Shore.

Sarah Butland Read More »

Lori Weber

Lori Weber is the author of nine young adult novels, including The Ribbon Leaf (Red Deer Press), a historical novel set in WWII, which won the 2023 Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was nominated for the Red Maple Award and the Geoffrey Bilson Award; Yellow Mini (Fitzhenry & Whiteside), a novel in verse; and Deep Girls (Dancing Cat Books), a short-story collection. She has also published two middle grade novels, Lightning Lou (Dancing Cat Books) and Picture me (James Lorimer), as well as one picture book, My Granny Loves Hockey (Simply Read Books). She has also published short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction in several Canadian literary journals. She holds a BA in Creative Writing and English from Concordia University, an MA in English from Acadia University, and a Diploma in Education from McGill. A native Montrealer, she lived for several years in Atlantic Canada where she taught English in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Upon returning to Montreal in 1994, she taught English at Vanier College before moving to John Abbott College in 1996, a position she retired from in 2020. She has delivered workshops in writing for teens through the Quebec Writers’ Federation, and has been their young adult fiction mentor for many years. She has represented Quebec twice for TD Canadian Book Week and has been offering classroom workshops around Quebec as a member of the Culture-in-the-Schools and Artists Inspire Programs since 2005. After retiring, Lori returned to Nova Scotia, where she currently lives in Dartmouth.

Lori Weber Read More »

Allison LaSorda

Allison LaSorda’s writing has been nominated for National Magazine Awards and the CBC Poetry Prize, and selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2021. A recipient of scholarships from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Vermont Studio Center residencies, she is a contributing editor at Brick, A Literary Journal. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Scientific American, The Walrus, CNQ, The Globe and Mail, Southern Humanities Review, Hazlitt, and other venues. Allison lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Allison LaSorda Read More »

Bruce W. Bishop

Bruce Bishop, originally from Yarmouth, N.S., has been writing professionally since the mid-1990s, primarily for travel, tourism and leisure freelance markets. He has written and contributed to several guidebook companies over the years, especially Fodor’s, Michelin, and DK Eyewitness Guides. From 2000 to 2002, he was the elected president of the Travel Media Association of Canada.

In 2020 at the outset of the pandemic, he began writing fiction for the first time, and his debut novel Unconventional Daughters (Icarus Press) was published the same year. Based on its popular appeal, he chose to embark upon writing a trilogy, and the second novel, Uncommon Sons, was released in 2021. The final novel in the trilogy, Undeniable Relations was published in 2022.

The coming-of-age Grow up, Rory Rafferty, set in 1979 Toronto, was published in 2024. Its follow-up, Stephanie Makes a Scene, is due to be released in May 2026. All his books are published in affiliation with Icarus Press Publishing in Fredericton, N.B.

He was one of five authors selected to read from Undeniable Relations at the Read by the Sea annual literary festival in July 2023.

Bishop is also a member of the Writers Union of Canada.

Bruce W. Bishop Read More »

Joseph Howse

Joseph Howse writes fiction and poetry, as well as technical books on computer programming and image analysis. He lives in a Nova Scotian fishing village, where he chats with his cats and nurtures an orchard of hardy fruit trees.

Joseph’s debut novel, The Girl in the Water, has won the 2023 Independent Press Award for Literary Fiction and the 2023 IAN Book of the Year Awards for Outstanding Multicultural Fiction. He is currently working on the sequel, The Circus and the Atom. These novels are the start of a multigenerational saga called Next Year’s Snow, which hinges on the friendship and strife of two families in the Soviet/post-Soviet world.

Some of Joseph’s latest work is published or forthcoming in Litbreak Magazine, Humana Obscura, paint me (37th Anthology of the New Zealand Poetry Society), Haiku Canada Review, and The Poetry Lighthouse Anthology (Volume II).

Joseph has experience doing business, volunteer work, and speaking engagements on six continents. He has won several awards from Bpeace (a pro bono consulting group) for his work on business mentorship projects in El Salvador and Guatemala.

As a graduate of Dalhousie University, Joseph holds a BA in French, MBA in International Business, MA in International Development Studies, and Master of Computer Science.

Joseph Howse Read More »

Carolyn Jean Nicholson

My interest is in researching and writing historical fiction and non-fiction. My book, William Forsyth: Land of Hopes and Dreams – a story from early Nova Scotia, was published in 2021 and my second book has the working title Traitors, Cannibals, Highlanders, and Vikings. It’s about the people who came to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island in the 1700s and early 1800s. It is due to be published in March 2023.

Carolyn Jean Nicholson Read More »

K.R. Byggdin

K.R. Byggdin is the author of Wonder World (Enfield & Wizenty 2022), a ReLit Award finalist and winner of the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. They hold a BA with honours in English and Creative Writing from Dalhousie University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and their short stories, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in anthologies and journals across Canada, the UK, and New Zealand. Born and raised on the Prairies, they now call Kjipuktuk home.

K.R. Byggdin Read More »