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Genre

Lauren Soloy

Lauren is the author and illustrator of When Emily was Small and Etty Darwin and the Four Pebble Problem, and The Hidden World of Gnomes, and the illustrator of I’s the B’y and A Tulip in Winter. She has lived on both coasts of Canada, always within reach of the sea.  She currently lives in a 140-year-old house in the wilds of Nova Scotia with her librarian husband, two curious children, an ever-expanding collection of books, two hives of bees, and one cat.  She has a Visual Arts BFA with Honours from the University of Victoria, and a certificate of Fine Furniture from Camosun College.  Along the way, she has learned to make a Queen Anne Highboy, a pottery mug, a hand knit pair of socks, a headstand, and a mess.  She is represented by Jackie Kaiser at Westwood Creative Artists. 

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Kim Pittaway

Kim Pittaway is a writer, educator and publishing professional. She is an associate professor and cohort director of creative nonfiction in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of King’s College in Halifax. She is the co-author, with Toufah Jallow, of Toufah: The Woman Who Inspired an African #MeToo Movement (Random House, 2022), which the New York Times described as “riveting…harrowing and propulsive”; and, with Dr. Samra Zafar, co-author of Unconditional: Release Your Past to Transform Your Future (Harper Canada, 2025). She is the recipient of the National Magazine Award Foundation’s Outstanding Achievement Award, and former editor-in-chief of Chatelaine magazine.

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Tricia Snell

Tricia Snell writes books, stories, poems, essays/articles, and book reviews.

In summer, 2025, her story, “So Late in the Season,” will be published in an anthology, Not the Same Road Out (Tidewater Press, New Westminster, BC, Ed. K.J. Denny). Her story (fiction), “Out to the Horses,” was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Short Story Prize and published in Room Magazine (December 2019, Issue 42.4).

Past publications include a fiction chapbook, Nellie: An Imagined History (Little Books Collective, Lunenburg, NS, Sept. 2024) and a poetry chapbook, Rooted, published with the same micropress in 2023, and the nonfiction book / directory, Artists Communities, with Allworth Press in 1996 (2nd ed. 2000).

Her writing has also been published in Every Day Fiction, Art Papers, Oregon Humanities, The Oregonian, and The Grove Review, and been read by actor Barbara Rappaport on the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project / National Public Radio show, The Sound of Writing. She is currently working on a novel.

Tricia’s stories explore issues of identity, feminism, nature, work, music, and animals. Her background includes work as a writer and administrator for arts, education, and environmental organizations.

Tricia has taught writing workshops (generative, craft, and critique), literature courses, and novel study groups for a variety of universities, nonprofits, and community writing centres. She currently teaches from her home studio in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Tricia has an MFA (Fiction) from George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia) and an ARCT (Flute Performance) from the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto, Ontario).

Tricia is also a musician. In her South Shore area of Nova Scotia, she plays flute & Celtic whistles for an actively gigging trio called Trillium.

 

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Anne C. Kelly

Anne C. Kelly has loved to read and write for as long as she can remember. Her first publication was a class newspaper which she wrote with a friend in Grade four. She especially enjoys reading historical fiction and books about characters who discover who they really are after going through challenges in life.

 

Anne is an English teacher at heart. She taught English-as-an-Additional-Language (EAL) to adult newcomers to Canada for over twenty years. She loves learning about different cultures and traditions. She always says that she learned more from her students than they ever learned from her!

 

Anne’s first novel, Jacques’ Escape, was published by Trap Door Books in June 2019.  Jacques’ Escape, which tells the story of a fourteen-year-old Acadian boy who is deported with his family to Massachusetts in 1755, is a middle reader for children aged 9-12. It was shortlisted for the 2020-21 Hackmatack Children’s Choice Book Award.

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Maureen St. Clair

Maureen is an artist, peace educator, community facilitator, conflict resolution trainer, activist, writer and life-long learner.Maureen is deeply passionate about connections, entanglements, intersections, unravelling and weaving of relationships and the power of deep receptive compassionate listening in transforming interpersonal and community based conflict. As a collaborator, Maureen co-creates courageous inclusive spaces enabling people collectively to do the work of self and community building and healing with a social justice and trauma informed lens. Maureen’s novel, Big Island, Small was published by Fernwood Publishing in 2018 and won the Nova Scotia Atlantic Writers Award and the Beacon Award for Social Justice Literature.

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Amanda Peters

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 won the 2023 Barnes and Noble Discovery Prize, the 2023 Carnegie Medal of Honour for Fiction, the Dartmouth Book Award, the People Choice Award in Romania and the Crime Writers of Canada First Crime Novel award. It was also shortlisted for the 2023 Writers Trust of Canada Atwood Gibson Award, and the 2024 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award from the Ontario Library Association. The novel has since gone on to be published in 23 different languages. 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 was published in the summer of 2024 and has been longlisted for hte 2026 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. Her new novel The Birthing Tree will be published in September 2026. 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.  

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Anne Louise O’Connell

An author, developmental book editor and partner publisher, Anne can be found working on her latest novel, mentoring other authors, publishing books or leading writing workshops. Anne’s first book, @Home in Dubai – Getting Connected Online and on the Ground, was traditionally published in the UK by Summertime Publishing (2011) and re-released by Springtime Books. Her first novel, Mental Pause launched on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2013, and won an Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY). Her next novel, Deep Deceit, launched March 8, 2015 and is the first in a planned series called Deep Mysteries. Deep Freeze is scheduled for release March 2025. While living as an expat in Dubai and then Thailand, she was a content creator and a regular contributor to the Wall St. Journal Expat Blog and Global Living Magazine. In 2015, she also published a collection of expat and travel stories called Swimming with the Elephants and Other Adventures. Upon her return to Canada in 2016, after 23 years of expat life, she established OC Publishing in Halifax, NS.

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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, writing for 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.

Occasionally, WFNS uses the phrase “emerging and established writers/authors” to mean ‘writers and authors of all experience levels.’

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 info, strategies, and skills that suit their experience. 

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 uncertain about your experience level with respect to any particular workshop, please feel free to contact us at communications@writers.ns.ca