Fiction (adult)

Geoff Butler

Geoff Butler is a painter, writer and book illustrator. He was born on Fogo Island, Nfld., near Brimstone Head which has been designated by the Flat Earth Society as one of the four corners of the earth.

Geoff practices his art daily so as not to fall over the edge. He has self-published five books: Art of War: Painting it out of the Picture (1990); The Look of Angels: Angels in Art (2004), a collection of poems, songs, stories, paintings and drawings; and With Every Breath We Take (2007), a modern fable in which a snowflake helps put an end to war; Our Own Little World: in paintings and verse (2013); and One Swallow Makes a Summer Meal: allegories in paintings and verse (2016). Every now and then, he strolls down Alphabet Soup Road to write and illustrate children’s books.

He is a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland and Syracuse University. He also studied at the Art Students’ League in New York City. His paintings have been exhibited at, and toured by, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. He has been a visual arts recipient of a Nova Scotia Arts Council Creation grant and a Canada Council Established Artist grant. In 2006, he was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. He lives in the small village of Granville Ferry, N.S.

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Jonathan Campbell

Jonathan Campbell is the author of short stories, plays, and television dramas. Born in Montreal, raised in Cape Breton, he received a B.A. from Acadia University and an English M.A. from Dalhousie University. He lives in the Annapolis Valley with his wife, painter Lindee Climo.

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Wanda Campbell

Wanda Campbell was born and grew up in Andhra Pradesh, South India. She completed a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the University of Windsor under the supervision of Alistair MacLeod, and a PhD in Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario. She now teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

Wanda Campbell has published six collections of poetry, most recently Spring Theory (Pottersfield Press 2025), a title inspired by her poem “String Theory,” a finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her other five collections are Kalamkari and Cordillera, Daedalus Had a Daughter, Grace, Looking for Lucy, and Sky Fishing, as well as a chapbook, Haw [Thorn]. Campbell’s debut novel Hat Girl, winner of the 2010 H.R. Percy Prize in the WFNS Atlantic Writing Competition, was published in 2013 by Signature Editions. Her work appears in several anthologies including the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology, Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land, and Body Language, and in literary journals across Canada including Antigonish Review, Between the Lines, Contemporary Verse II, Dalhousie Review, Descant, Driftwood, existere, Fiddlehead, Gaspereau Review, Grain, Harpweaver, New Quarterly, Northern Cardinal Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Room, Vallum, Wascana Review, and Windsor Review. She has also edited books on Early Canadian Women Poets and on Bronwen Wallace. She has given readings from St. John’s to Victoria and always welcomes the opportunity to share her passion for poetry and fiction with others.

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Lesley Choyce

Lesley teaches part-time at Dalhousie University, runs Pottersfield Press and has published over 86 books for adults and kids. His Young Adult novels concern things like skateboarding, surfing, racism, environmental issues, organ transplants, and rock bands. Lesley surfs year round in the North Atlantic and is considered the father of transcendental wood-splitting. He’s worked as a rehab counsellor, a freight hauler, a corn farmer, a janitor, a journalist, a lead guitarist, a newspaper boy and a well-digger. He lives at Lawrencetown Beach overlooking the ocean. He also hosts a nationally syndicated TV talk show on Vision TV. His recent novel, Cold Clear Morning, is currently being developed as a feature length movie. In 2002, Goose Lane Editions published Choyce’s best-selling circumferential history book, The Coasts of Canada. That same year, his animal epic film, The Skunk Whisperer, was broadcast across Canada and heralded at the Maine International Film Festival. Along with the Surf Poets, he has released two poetry/music albums, Long Lost Planet and Sea Level.

To read excerpts from Lesley’s books and download free samples of his music, visit www.lesleychoyce.com.

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Carol Ann Cole C.M.

Carol Ann Cole is a best-selling author with four non fiction books and a growing number of novels in The Paradise Series. In July 2020 Paradise on the Morrow, third fiction in the Series was published by Moose House Press in Granville Ferry, Nova Scotia. www.moosehousepress.com .(Publisher Brenda Thompson/Editor Andrew Wetmore)

Paradise on the Morrow: Although they are half a world apart, Paradise and Thomas are joined by trouble after trouble. Will the mountain of troubles divide them forever?

Paradise has unpleasant discoveries about the police officers she works with in rural Nova Scotia, and puzzles to solve about her dad and daughter. Pops is acting increasingly mysterious, and Hope is in a tangle of teenage temptations.

In Hawaii, Thomas is single-parenting T.J. while trying to help Wikolia through her hospital stay and keep their private-detective business afloat. There is something odd going on among the crew at 2.0, too.

Carol Ann has received the Order of Canada, the Golden and Silver Jubilee Medals, the Terry Fox Citation of Honour, the elite Maclean’s Honour Role and numerous other awards. Carol Ann is profiled in ‘Canadian Who’s Who’ and in the 2005 edition of ‘1000 Great Women of the 21st Century,’ published by the American Biographical Institute in Raleigh, North Carolina. Carol Ann is the founder of The Comfort Heart Initiative and has raised over one and one half million dollars for cancer research through the Canadian Cancer Society.

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Ian Colford

Ian Colford is a fiction writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His stories, reviews, and commentary have been widely published in print and online. From 1995 to 1998 he was editor of the literary journal Pottersfield Portfolio. He has served on the Steering Committee of One Book Nova Scotia, the board of directors of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, and the board of the Atlantic Book Awards Society. He has completed residencies at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers and Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers Summer Workshop.

Evidence, a collection of short fiction, was published in 2008 by Porcupine’s Quill and won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award; Evidence was also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and the ReLit Award. A novel, The Crimes of Hector Tomás, followed in 2012. Published by Freehand Books, it won Trade Book of the Year at the 2013 Alberta Book Awards. Perfect World was published by Freehand in 2016 and shortlisted in the book design category at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. In 2019 A Dark House, a collection of short fiction, was published under the Vagrant Press imprint of Nimbus Publishing and subsequently shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize in Short Fiction, the Miramichi Reader “Very Best” Books, and the Relit Awards.

In 2022 his novel, The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, won the Guernica Prize and was published by Guernica Editions in 2023.

A collection of short fiction, Witness, is scheduled to be published in 2026 by Galleon Books of Moncton, N.B.

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Valerie Compton

Valerie Compton is the author of the novel Tide Road, a finalist for the 2012 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals across Canada and shortlisted for the CBC Literary Award. Her non-fiction articles and book reviews have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, Gourmet and elsewhere. Valerie has been leading writing workshops and mentoring writers since 2005. Visit her at http://www.narrativeagency.ca

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Christy Ann Conlin

Christy Ann Conlin’s debut novel, Heave, was a national bestseller and one of the Globe and Mail‘s top books of 2002. Her second adult novel, The Memento, will be published by Doubleday in April 2016. Her first YA novella, Dead Time, will be come out with Annick Press in 2011. Her fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best Canadian Stories. She has a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia where she wrote and studied fiction, stage and screenplay writing. She also holds a Bachelor of Education from Acadia University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from the University of Ottawa. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications including Canadian Geographic, Geist and Chatelaine. Christy Ann is also a regular book reviewer for the Globe and Mail and is an online instructor with the University of Toronto. She lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

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Jenni Blackmore

A new season just beginning! Definitely time to upgrade my bio; even though some things never change life’s experience continually morphs and expands. Have to love that 🙂

Part of me is still the kid from Manchester, England, who always wanted to be a writer, a painter and a farmer, living by the ocean, and much to my amazement, here I am, living my dream on a small island just east of Halifax. Of course I’m greatly influenced by the coastal environment and references to this locale have a way of sneaking into most of my work. I love my reality but I usually can’t resist adding a twist or two of magic to my work, especially my favorite genres of poetry, adult short fiction and childrens fiction.

As an illustrator and writer, I like to combine both these forms of expression, especially in my books for children. Recently, however the denizens of QuackaDoodle Farm, who take up a fair amount of my attention, have been demanding their space on the page and this has resulted in, Permaculture for the Rest of Us (New Society Publishing) a factual account of life here at QuackaDoodle, my blog site QuackaDoodle.Wordpress.com and occassional posts on the Mother Earth News Site.

My latest book The Foodlovers’ Garden (New Society) is scheduled for release May 2017 and I was delighted to be able to illustrate this with thirty+ illustrations and forty digital images, all celebrating the wonders of homegrown food. Yum! And oh so colourful.

The second edition of Gully Goes to Halifax flew into my life recently. The story remains mostly unchanged but this edition has twice the page size and all the illustrations are in full colour, so I’m delighted about that.

I believe everyone is writer at heart because of course we all have things to say, ideas to share. This is one of the reasons why I particularly enjoy leading writing workshops for both children and adults but mostly, it’s about the stories that get shared. Surely story is the thread that binds us all together while, equally importantly, poetry tends to magnify and perhaps suggest a new way of seeing both the mundane and the magical.

Please visit me at: Quackadoodle.wordpress.com for sporadic but ongoing news of life down here on the farm

Jenni has been mentioned in “Our Choice Book List” and “Outstanding Canadian Children’s Books” by the Children’s Book Centre, Toronto. Her recent novel Island of Dead Souls came first in the Atlantic Writing competition YA category.

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Don Aker

A former high school teacher, literacy mentor, and university instructor, Don Aker fell into writing in 1988 after attending the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Writing Workshops, where instructors encouraged participants to write with their students. Encouraged by winning the short fiction and nonfiction categories of the 1989 and 1990 WFNS Atlantic Writing Competitions as well as Canadian Living’s 1990 National Literary Competition, Don went on to publish numerous stories and articles and has written more than 20 books.

Because he taught hundreds of teenagers during his teaching career, it isn’t surprising that young adults are the focus of most of his work. What subjects does he choose to write about? “Things that bother me, that don’t go away,” he says. For example, Don wrote his first novel after a student shared with him that she was being physically abused by her father. Of Things Not Seen tells the story of sixteen-year-old Ben Corbett, who, along with his mother, is physically abused by his domineering stepfather. Besides domestic violence, Don’s novels have focused on peer pressure, bullying, youth crime, suicide, sexuality, teen gambling, and a variety of other social issues. However, he is quick to point out that the strongest stories are never about issues or events–“They’re about how characters are affected by those issues and events.”

Don holds a Master of Education from Acadia University and, besides working as an educator and writer, he has been a freelance reviewer and consultant for various educational publishers, including Nelson Education, Pembroke Publishers, and Pearson Education. He has written several books for classroom use, among them Hitting the Mark: Assessment Tools for Teachers (Pembroke, 1995) and a series of language arts texts for grades 8 to 11 (Nelson Education), and he has had articles and fiction published in The International Journal of Reading, Quill & Quire, Books in Canada, Canadian Living, The Toronto Star, Our Family Magazine, The Pottersfield Portfolio, Dandelion Magazine, The Chronicle Herald, and various anthologies.

The father of two daughters, Don lives with his wife in Bedford.

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