Coffee Chats advisor

Janet Barkhouse

Janet Barkhouse retired from professional theatre in 1982, and from teaching high school English in 2005. She’s written and directed plays for children from ages 8 to 18, written innovative English curriculum for the Province of Nova Scotia, and given workshops and readings for young people, teachers and writers across the Province.

In 2006 she fell in love with writing poems. Since then she has studied with many extraordinary poets, at universities in Halifax, and at the Banff Centre. Her debut book of poems, Salt Fires (Pottersfield, 2018) follows on two chapbooks, Silence and Sable Island Fieldnotes. In 2013-14, through their Humanities-HEALS program, she was Artist in Residence (Writing) at Dalhousie University’s Medical School.

Janet lives near Mahone Bay on Nova Scotia’s South Shore.

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Darryl Whetter

Dr. Darryl Whetter is the author of 4 books of fiction and 3 poetry collections. His collection of stories, A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, was named to The Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books of 2003. His debut novel, The Push & the Pull, was released in Spring 2008. Origins, his 2012 collection of poems, concerns energy, evolution and extinction as they can be observed at Joggins, Nova Scotia. Professor Whetter edited the nomination dossier of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in their successful bid for inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. He has published nearly 20 stories in journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Stories, The Fiddlehead, PRISM, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly and Best Asian Short Stories 2020. In 2021, he won the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award.

Darryl holds a PhD in English from UNB and has published or presented papers on contemporary literature in France, Sweden, Canada, Germany, the United States, India, Singapore, Australia and Iceland. Nearly 100 of his commissioned book reviews have appeared in venues such as The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Vancouver Sun, The Montreal Gazette, The Globe and Mail, and Detroit’s Metro Times. Darryl Whetter has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at various universities in Canada and was the coordinator of the creative writing program at Dalhousie from 2008-2010. In the mid-2000s, he was a regular panelist on the national CBC Radio program “Talking Books.”

His most recent books are the climate-crisis novel Our Sands, from Penguin RH (2020) and the anthology Teaching Creative Writing in Asia, from Routledge (2021)

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Jaime Forsythe

Jaime Forsythe is a writer living in Halifax. Her writing has appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including This Magazine, Geist, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Lemon Hound, Matrix, The Rusty Toque, and more. Her first full-length poetry collection, Sympathy Loophole, was published in Spring 2012 by Mansfield Press. Her second, I Heard Something, was released by Anvil Press’ A Feed Dog Book imprint in Spring 2018.

Jaime has twice been a mentor in the WFNS Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Program, and has taught writing workshops in a variety of venues, including elementary schools, at Dalhousie University and Mount Allison University, and to youth and adults in the community.

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Christina McRae

Christina McRae lives and works in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Her work appears in many literary journals including Grain, Arc, Descant, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Room, Windsor Review, and Understorey Magazine. Several poems also appear in Letting Go: An Anthology of Loss and Survival, published by Black Moss Press (2004). Her first full-length collection, Next to Nothing, was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2009.

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Melanie Mosher

In grade two, Melanie received a silver dollar for winning an essay contest and she has been fascinated with writing ever since. She has many freelance articles to her credit and her first picture book was published by Fifth House Publishers in May 2014. Her YA novel, Goth Girl, was published in April 2017 by Nimbus Publishing and A Beginner’s Guide to Goodbye, a middle-grade novel, was published in June 2020, again with Nimbus Publishing. A Beginner’s Guide to Goodbye was a finalist in the TD Canadian Children’s Literature award and nominated for the Hackmatack Award. It won the “It Made me Feel” Award presented by Digitally Lit. Her fourth book, a middle-grade novel entitled Bertie Stewart is Perfectly Imperfect, was published by Nimbus in 2024, and was nominated for the Silver Birch Fiction Award.

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Alice Burdick

Alice Burdick lives and writes poetry in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Alice moved to Halifax in 2002 from Toronto, Ontario, where she was born and raised. She has also lived in Espanola, Vancouver, and on the Sechelt Peninsula in BC. She is a poet, essayist, and cookbook author who also edits, proofreads, does manuscript evaluations, and leads workshops for adults and children.

Burdick has been involved with the small press community in Canada since the early 1990’s, when she was co-editor, with Victor Coleman, of The Eternal Network. This very small ongoing imprint produced chapbooks, including several of her own works, such as Signs Like This, Fun Venue, and Voice of Interpreter. Her work has been published by other small presses in Canada, including: Proper Tales Press (a Time, My Lump in the Bed: Love Poems for George W. Bush); Letters Press (Covered); and BookThug (The Human About Us). It also has appeared in various magazines, such as Hava LeHaba (from Tel Aviv, Israel), Event Magazine, Canadian Poetries, Two Serious Ladies (from the US), Dig, What!magazine, subTerrain, fhole, This Magazine, and Who Torched Rancho Diablo? From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair. She has also done numerous readings over the years in many different venues, including the VerseFest Ottawa, Ottawa International Writers Festival, The Scream in High Park in Toronto, and the Halifax Word on the Street. She co-owned the former Lexicon Books in Lunenburg from 2014 to 2020, where she organized and promoted readings and events, including Lexicon Salons, where poets and musicians collaborated.

Her sixth book of poetry, ”Ox Lost, Snow Deep” was released in Fall 2024 from Anvil Press/a feed dog books.

”Deportment”, a book of selected poems from the early 1990s onward, was released by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in the autumn of 2018. Book of Short Sentences came out in the spring of 2016 from Mansfield Press following Holler, 2012, and Flutter,2008 (both Mansfield Press). Two collaborative poems have shown up in Our Days In Vaudeville by Stuart Ross and 29 Collaborators (Mansfield Press, Fall 2013). Her poems have appeared in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2005), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), and in Pissing Ice: An Anthology of ‘New’ Canadian Poets, (BookThug, 2004, as well as other anthologies. Her first perfect-bound book was Simple Master, published in 2002 by Pedlar Press.

Her essays have appeared in three recent anthologies: “Home” from MacIntyre Purcell, 2018, “Gush” from Frontenac House, 2018, and “Locations of Grief” from Wolsak & Wynn, 2020.

Her poem ”Terms and Conditions” was shortlisted for the first Lemon Hound Poetry Prize in 2014.

Read more about Alice Burdick in interviews conducted by Alex Porco on Open Book Toronto and on Lemon Hound and in gallery form here. You can watch and listen to Alice read some poems on a beach here.

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Steve Vernon

Steve Vernon has been writing and telling stories for over 40 years. He’s read on CBC radio, Breakfast Television, Global Noon and at schools and libraries across Canada. Steve was a great hit with the kids at the inaugural FUNNY PAGES festival at the Halifax Central Library.

He has released five ghost stories collections, one young adult novel, one children’s picture book, and one collection of historical maritime murder tales, Maritime Murder with a second collection, More Maritime Murder due out in the fall of 2022 from local publisher Nimbus.

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Alice Walsh

Alice Walsh writes fiction and nonfiction for adults and children. Her published work includes nine books for children and young adults. Many of her books have been nominated for or won awards. A number of them have been listed as Best Books for Children and Teens in Canada. Her YA novel Pomiuk; Prince of the North (Dundurn 2005) won the Ann Connor Brimer award.

Alice graduated from St. Mary’s University with degrees in criminology and English, and from Acadia with a master’s in Children’s Literature. She has worked as a preschool teacher, volunteer probation officer, creative writing instructor, and hospital ward clerk.

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Jon Tattrie

Jon Tattrie is the editor of Atlantic Books Today and a freelance journalist with CBC and other media outlets. He’s the author of two novels and six nonfiction books, including Peace by Chocolate and The Hermit of Africville.

He holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Kings College and has taught writing and journalism at Kings and at Dalhousie University. He now helps people write their own books through Write Now! with Jon Tattrie at jontattrie.ca

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Ryan Turner

Ryan Turner’s short stories have been published in magazines such as the The New Quarterly, The Puritan, and Prairie Fire. His latest book, Half-Sisters & Other Stories, was shortlisted for the 2020 ReLit Award, and he has a story in Best Canadian Short Stories 2024, which will be published by Biblioasis in November. He is the co-founder and co-director of the AfterWords Literary Festival in Halifax.

Half-Sisters is comprised of “lovely, humane, gentle stories…very perceptive.” — Claire Armitstead, The Guardian Books Podcast

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