Fiction (adult)

Annick MacAskill

Annick MacAskill is a writer and translator based in Halifax. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad, including Best Canadian Poetry, The Stinging Fly, Canadian Notes & Queries, the Literary Review of Canada, Grain Magazine, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, Room Magazine, Plenitude, Arc Poetry Magazine, Lemon Hound, and Versal. Her first full-length poetry collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J. M. Abraham Poetry Award. Her second collection will be published by Gaspereau in the spring of 2020.

MacAskill’s poetry has also been longlisted for the CBC’s Canada Writes Poetry Prize, longlisted for The Fiddlehead‘s Ralph Gustafson Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a member of Room Magazine‘s editorial collective.

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Carolyn Ann Vaughan

I have been writing for many years, wrote community news columns for Bedford Sackville News, wrote 500 word articles for National Review of Medicine published in both print and online, and for a time I had a column with the Dartmouth Lakers, mostly consisting of health related articles. I wrote and self published “Secret Diaries of a Nurse and other short stories” and Electronic Nicotine Delivery System. Writing has always paid me a little but my bred and butter and money to pay the mortgage came from nursing.

Carolyn Ann Vaughan RN

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Elizabeth Peirce

Elizabeth Peirce is a Halifax-based author, editor, teacher, and gardener. For Nimbus Publishing, she has authored and co-authored two historical fiction books about infamous cases of piracy in Nova Scotian history, Saladin and The Pirate Rebel, one guide to vegetable gardening in a tough climate (Grow Organic, winner of the 2011 APMA Best Atlantic Published Book award) and a preserving cook and guide book, You Can Too! Her book for children, The Big Flush, is dedicated to her young son and his horror of loudly-flushing public toilets. In 2019, she published Lost and Found: Recovering Your Spirit After a Concussion, a toolbox of strategies for healing from a difficult injury. When she’s not writing and editing, she enjoys cooking, canning, and encouraging people to tear up their lawns and grow some vegetables! Visit her website at https://elizabethpeirce.ca

Elizabeth will be offering virtual workshops based on her books through the WITS program in 2020-21, including:

(for P-2) How your biggest fears can make the best stories

(for grades 3-9) What is food security and where does our food come from?

(for grades 9-12) Writing to heal: surviving and thriving under challenging circumstances

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Dana Mills

Dana Mills released his debut collection of short stories, Someone Somewhere, with Gaspereau Press in 2013. He has been published in many of Canada’s top literary journals, including Geist, The New Quarterly and subTerrain, and has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize. He lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

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Shelley Thompson

Shelley Thompson is an actor, screenwriter, and activist based in Wolfville, in Mi’kma’ki (NS). She trained at The Royal Academy of Drama.c Art, the Canadian Film Centre, Women in the Directors’ Chair, the New York Writers’ Lab, and the Whistler Producer’s Lab.

As an actor she’s received and been nominated for Gemini and ACTRA awards for her work in film and television, including THE TRAILER PARK BOYS, and feature films SPLINTERS, and THE CHILD REMAINS among others.

Her short films have screened internationally with the most
recent, DUCK DUCK GOOSE, winning Best Atlantic Short at FIN Halifax. It was selected by Telefilm Canada’s Not Short on Talent at Clermont-Ferrand, and was a finalist in CBC’s Short Film Faceoff.

Her first feature film, Dawn, Her Dad & The Tractor premiered at INSIDE OUT International Film Festival in Toronto,selling out in Toronto, Halifax and London. (BFI Flare) and also screened in Whistler, BC, (Nominated for the Borsos Prize) Amsterdam’s Roze Filmdagen and many others across the US, Canada and in Germany. Among many prizes and awards, the film recently won the 2022 Nova Scotia MasterWorks Award.

Thompson is working on a full slate of projects: a second novel (GALILEE JUMP), and TV and cinema projects under the banner of her emerging production company, Rusty Tractor Productions Inc.

A committed LGBTQ+2SP ally, Thompson is proud parent to singer/ songwriter T. Thomason, a trans man who inspires her, every day.

ROAR, her first novel, is being published by Nimbus/Vantage Press in Nova Scotia, in late October 2023.

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B.R. Myers

Always in the mood for a good scare, B.R. Myers spent most of her teen years behind the covers of Lois Duncan, Ray Bradbury, and Stephen King. She is the author of the Mary Higgins Clark Award winning novel, A Dreadful Splendour, as well as numerous books for teens. Her YA novels have been chosen by the School Library Journal, Reader’s Digest, and the CCBC as top picks. Before she became a full time writer, she was a registered nurse for thirty-two years. A member of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, she lives in Halifax with her family—and there is still a stack of books on her bedside table.

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Rachel Cooper

Rachel is a freelance writer, editor and instructor with 20+ years’ experience. Clients include fiction and memoir authors, businesses, government, not-for-profits, and universities.

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Patrick Woodcock

Patrick Woodcock is the author of 10 books of poetry and countless reviews. His work has been translated and published in 14 languages. Since travel is so essential to his work, Mr. Woodcock has lived and worked in such diverse countries as Iceland, Poland, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, The Sultanate of Oman, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, The Kurdish North of Iraq and Azerbaijan. Within Canada he has travelled from the West to East coasts, as well as working as a volunteer for almost a year with the elders of Fort Good Hope, NT – 20km south of the Arctic Circle. His seventh book Always Die Before Your Mother was shortlisted for Canada’s ReLit award in 2010 and reached the number one spot on the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list. His 8th book Echo Gods and Silent Mountains was extremely well reviewed all over the world and was called “…the most beautiful, deep and touching collection of poetry written on Kurds by a non-Kurd.” by the Kurdish media network, Rudaw. He has read at International poetry festival’s in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, the Kurdish North of Iraq, Azerbaijan, England, The Republic of Georgia, Tanzania, Kenya and Canada’s Winnipeg International Writers Festival. While living in Colombia he read at the Ibague Poetry Festival, The XVIII Medellin International Poetry Festival and was the first poet from outside of Latin America to ever read at the Bogota Poetry Festival. Patrick’s ninth book of poetry You can’t bury them all which is set in the Kurdish North of Iraq, Fort Good Hope, NT Canada and Azerbaijan was published by ECW Press in 2016. You can’t bury them all won the Alcuin Society Book Design Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the JM Abraham Poetry Award in 2017. After living for two years in Tanzania as a volunteer at Baraa Primary School, Arusha, Patrick moved to the hamlet of Paulatuk in the Inuvik region of the Northwest Territories to work while completing his new manuscript Farhang Book I which was published by ECW Press, Toronto, Canada, September 5th 2023 and called by CBC Books one of Canada’s must reads in 2023. The album “Bill Pritchard Sings Poems By Patrick Woodcock” was released by Tapete records May 5th, 2023. He now lives in between Iqaluit, Nunavut and Toronto Ontario where he is the Regional Instructor/ Coordinator for United for Literacy. In September 2024 he was awarded the 2024 Council of the Federation Award in recognition of his outstanding achievement in literacy from the Premier of Nunavut, The Honourable P.J. Akeeagok. Farhang Book II will be published by ECW Press in 2026 along with his first collection of short stories entitled Animare (Tidewater Press, 2026).

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Sarah Mian

Sarah Mian’s debut novel, When the Saints (HarperCollins), is about a dysfunctional family in rural Nova Scotia. It won the Jim Connors Book Award, the Margaret & John Savage First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. After completing the film adaption, she is currently working on a second novel, a ghost story titled, The World in Awful Sleep.

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Laurie Glenn Norris

Laurie is a writer of historical fiction and non-fiction, and is particularly interested in nineteenth-century Canadian history and the lives of girls and women during that period. She is the author of Found Drowned (Vagrant, 2019), Haunted Girl: Esther Cox & the Great Amherst Mystery (Nimbus, 2012; and Cumberland County Facts and Folklore (Nimbus, 2009).

Currently she is working on two projects, a biography of the Amos “King” Seaman family of Minudie, Nova Scotia, and an historical novel set in London, England.

She holds a B.A. in Anthropology, a B.Ed. in Social Studies and Language Arts and an M.A. in Art History.

Her first novel, Found Drowned, in 2024, was optioned by the Langley Fine Arts School, Langley, BC, and produced into a one-act play. In November of that year, it was performed at a Langley Theatre Festival.

Laurie lives in River Hebert, Nova Scotia, with her husband, Barry Norris, and kittycat Dinah.

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