Nonfiction (adult)

Cindy Etter-Turnbull

Cindy Etter-Turnbull was born on November 24th, 1960 in Windsor Nova Scotia. After growing up in the village of Brooklyn, Hants County and educated in the West Hants school system, Cindy went on to further her university education at Mount Saint Vincent and Acadia. This was interrupted when the first of her two sons came along. With this new focus on raising her own young family, Cindy also started what turned out to be a twenty year career mentoring mentally challenged adults, both very rewarding jobs.

After a brief retirement, Cindy unexpectedly found herself writing her first book. Her outgoing personality, keen sense of humour, creativity and determination led to Fine Lines, a celebration of clothesline culture. A natural letter writer, avid gardener, and feisty fisherperson, Cindy also enjoys crewel embroidery, home decorating (or moving furniture all the time!) and community volunteer work. She is currently working on a play and a children’s book.

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Dr. George Burden

Dr. George Burden has had an active twenty five year career as a freelance writer, with a focus on travel, but with publications encompassing the gamut of medical-history, human interest, humour, poetry and fiction.

George has placed articles with markets as diverse as The Readers Digest, The Halifax Sunday Herald, The Medical Post, Funny Times, The Writer and Just For Canadian Doctors, among many others.

His adventures have taken him to the shores of all seven continents and into the waters of all five oceans. He has ventured from shipwrecks in the depths of the Atlantic to the cockpit of an airborne F-18 fighter jet, from the crater of an active Antarctic volcano to a private audience with the King of the Ashanti at his palace in Kumasi.

Dr. Burden is a past recipient of the Governor General’s Medal. He has served with the venerable Explorers Club as regional chairman for Quebec/Atlantic provinces and in the role of Director at Large for the organization. George became a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in 2012. In 2014 George succeeded his father as the 31st Baron of Seabegs (Seybeggis-traditional), Stirlingshire, Scotland. He is currently an associate member of the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs in Edinburgh as well as the Canadian Commissioner for the Scottish Clan Lamont.

George published his first book, Amazing Medical Stories, co-authored with Dorothy Grant, in May of 2003 with Goose Lane Editions. He was also the recipient of the Travel Media Association of Canada’s:

Choice Hotels Award of Excellence for Best Canadian Story-2005

Days Inn Canadian Family Travel Writing Award-2007

He won 3 awards at the 2010 North American Travel Journalism Awards.

Gold – Category 143: Resorts – “Chilling Out at Quebec City’s Le Chateau Entente”
(Published at Life As A Human on July 30th, 2010)

Silver – Category 128: Intergenerational and Family Travel – “Princess for a Day”
(Published at The Medical Post, April 6, 2010 Issue)

Bronze – Category 150: Cultural, Educational, Self-Improvement Travel – “Having a Ball, Vienna Style”
(Published at Life As A Human on June 12th, 2010)

At present his interest is focused on producing articles for the travel and adventure market.

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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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Richard Charlton

Richard Charlton is originally from Newcastle upon Tyne, England. After five years in Nairobi, Kenya, in East Africa, he finally emigrated to Canada in 1975 with wife June and their three children: Joanne, John and James, settling in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Richard is a professional electrical engineer with a variety of extracurricular writing and dramatic productions to his credit, spanning many years with many published and performed works. He recently created the Kippernickker Adventure Stories for his grandchildren in California who asked for the stories so often he decided to write them all down. There are now ten stories in all, published through Little Fishes Publishing. Check the website for details

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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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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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John Wall Barger

After a few years in the U.S., John Wall Barger grew up in Nova Scotia, and then moved away to Vancouver, Ottawa, Rome, Prague, and Dublin. He lived in the north end of Halifax for many years.

He is the author of six collections of poems. His book of essays on poetics and film, The Elephant of Silence, comes out in spring 2024 with LSU Press. He’s a contract editor for Frontenac House, lives in Vermont, and lectures in the Writing Program at Dartmouth College.

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Brian Bartlett

Brian Bartlett was born in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, in 1953, grew up in Fredericton, lived for 15 years in Montreal, and moved to Halifax in 1990 to teach creative writing and literature at Saint Mary’s University. He will retire from teaching in June 2018. He has published seven collections and six chapbooks of poems, as well as Wanting the Day:Selected Poems, which was published internationally (by Peterloo Poets of Cornwall, England, and Goose Lane Editions in Canada) and won the 2004 Atlantic Poetry Prize. His other honours have inclued two Malahat Review Long Poem Prizes, first prize in the Petra Kenney poetry awards, and the 2009 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. In 2014 Fitzhenry & Whiteside published his first book of prose, Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar (a 366-paragraph book of days going from April 1st to the following March 31st), followed by Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal (Gaspereau Press, 2017), a “plein air” experiment, drafted outdoors by various bodies of water (lakes, rivers, brooks, ponds, marshes, bays, waterfalls, etc.). A selection of Brian’s prose on poetry from over two decades is gathered together in All Manner of Tackle: Living with Poetry (Palimpsest, 2017).

He has also edited the Collected Poems of Alden Nowlan; a book of prose, Don McKay: Essays on His Works; selections of poetry: Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski and, all from The Porcupine’s Quill, The Essential James Reaney, The Essential Robert Gibbs, and The Essential Dorothy Roberts; and The Child Alone, an anthology of childhood poems from which parents and other adults are largely marginalized or excluded. His wife is Karen Dahl, a Halifax Regional Library system manager, and their two children are Josh and Laura.

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Michael Bawtree

Michael Bawtree was born in Australia, raised and educated in Britain, and came to Canada in 1962. Michael has worked in Canadian theatre and television for over forty years. Founding artistic director of the Atlantic Theatre Festival in Wolfville, he has also served as associate director of the Stratford Festival and was for many years director of drama at Acadia University. He is the author of a number of plays, including The Last of the Tsars, as well as a book on music theatre, The New Singing Theatre, and a young person’s novel, Joe Howe to the Rescue. He was the executive director of the Joseph Howe Initiative, celebrating Joe Howe in his two hundredth year birthday. His young adult novel, Joe Howe to the Rescue, was released by Nimbus in 2004. Today’s Joe Howe – “the greatest Nova Scotian” written by Trevor J. Adams and Michael Bawtree, was published by the Joseph Howe Initiative in 2004.

Other published works include a DVD about D-Day, and CDs of ‘Three Men In A Boat’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’.

He went on to write the first volume of his memoirs, As Far As I Remember, which was published by Like No Other Press in 2015. His latest publication is the second volume of his memoirs, The Best Fooling, published by Like No Other Press in 2017.

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