Nonfiction (adult)

Paul W Bennett

Paul W. Bennett, Ed.D. (OISE/Toronto) is a Halifax author, professor, and commentator. He is the author of ten books, most recently The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools (2020). He’s an education columnist for Saltwire Network and Brunswick News and a regular contributor to The National Post, The Globe and Mail, and Post Media regional papers across Canada. His book reviews appear regularly in The Literary Review of Canada.

Paul is founding Director of Schoolhouse Institute, and Adjunct Professor of Education at Saint Mary’s University. Over a career spanning four decades in three different provinces, Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia, Dr. Bennett has written or co-authored ten b ooks, sixteen major education policy studies, and dozens of articles in both the popular media and the academic press.

Dr. Bennett is a widely recognized leader and commentator in Canadian education. From 1997 until 2009, Paul served as Headmaster of two of Canada’s leading independent coeducational day schools, Halifax Grammar School and Lower Canada College. Since 20009, he’s devoted his time and energy to the cause of public education reform. His Blog, Educhatter, was honoured as the Top Education Blog in Canada in 2018 and 2022.

Paul is also a public-spirited and active citizen. He served as Chair of the Board of the Halifax Public Libraries (2010-17) and guided the development and opening of Halifax Central Library. From 2011 to 2016, he served as President of the Halifax Branch of the Canadian International Council, then as Board Chair at Churchill Academy in Dartmouth (2016-2022). For the past six years, he’s been National Coordinator of researchED Canada, guiding its development from coast-to-coast.

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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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Søren Bondrup-Nielsen

Søren Bondrup-Nielsen was born in Denmark, but at the age of 13 his family immigrated to Canada. After a year in Toronto they moved into the country, and as a teenager, Søren spent as much time as he could outdoors. His outdoor interests eventually led to a PhD in Zoology from the University of Alberta. Søren moved to Nova Scotia in 1989 where he joined the Biology Department at Acadia University, teaching Ecology and Conservation Biology.

Søren is passionate about the outdoors and how we humans relate to nature. With many scientific articles and edited books dealing with ecology and conservation, Søren tackled writing for the general public with the publication of “Winter on Diamond: An encounter with the Temagami Wilderness”, which was published through Res Telluris in December 2004. In 2008 Gaspereau Press published Winter Nature. Common Mammals, Birds, Trees and Shrubs of the Maritimes. In 2009 Gaspereau Press published Søren’s third book A Sound Like Water Dripping: In Search of the Boreal Owl.

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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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Judith Meyrick

Judith’s writing has appeared in various publications in both Canada and New Zealand. Her articles and essays appear in the NZ Listener, the NZ Woman’s Weekly, Pandora Publishing, The Avondale Press, Atlantic Books Today, the Landscape Architectural Review and the Canadian History Association magazine. For about three years, she wrote a book review column for the Halifax Herald which are collected here at reviewbites2.blogspot.com. Her children’s book, Gracie the Public Gardens Duck (Nimbus 2007), won Best Published Book and Best Illustrated Book at the Atlantic Book Awards. Most recently, she wrote an essay which appears in Dwelling on the Margins of History (Bloomsbury, 2025).

She returned to university in 2019, graduating in 2023 with an Honours BA and, in 2024, with a master’s, both in history. Her master’s thesis researched a little acknowledged 1911 amendment to the Indian Act.

She is currently researching and writing a non-fiction book which links Scotland, Nova Scotia and New Zealand in a fascinating history of migration and adventure. After university, she moved to Ottawa to be near her daughter and grandchildren.

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Meryl Cook

Meryl Cook is an author, contemporary fibre artist, speaker, creativity expert and former homeopath. She specializes in connecting people with their creativity. She shares her process for unblocking creativity as a way of finding a renewed sense of purpose and discovering your next steps in business and in life.

Since 2016 Meryl has spoken and taught creativity workshops across Canada and in the US. She holds a Masters of Science in Applied Clinical and Industrial Psychology.

Meryl’s first book One Loop at a Time, a story of rug hooking, healing and creativity, (December 2016) is the story of her reinvention through creativity. Her second book One Loop at a Time, The Creativity Workbook (November 2017), shares tools for beginning the process of reinvention through journaling and sketching.

Meryl teaches her self care framework through her popular and often sold out creativity workshops such as: Journaling to Reignite your Business (Teaching) Creativity; Journaling as a Life Skill; Creativity as Healing Energy – Design your own Healing Image; Hook a Healing Mat; Chakra Colour Love; Hooking from the Inside Out – Inspired Design for Healing Energy; and The Creativity Workbook Toolkit – Looking inside for Answers (this is a writing and sketching/journaling workshop). She works at the individual, group and corporate level.

Meryl travels and speaks widely about how to use creativity as a vehicle for self care. Her main messages are that small steps can have a massive impact if we take it One Loop at a Time, and that we all have a wisdom and a capacity within us. We can turn inside for answers. Her message is as practical as it is inspiring.

Meryl is a Council member of the International Association for Journal Writing and a member of the Writers’ Council for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

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Allison Watson

Allison Watson is the author of Transplanted: My cystic fibrosis double lung transplant story. She was born with cystic fibrosis and grew up in New Brunswick. After undergoing a double lung transplant and subsequently getting post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder, she hopes her days of medical turmoil are in her past. Allison has a BSc in biology and recreational therapy from Dalhousie University. She loves board games, reading, and hiking.

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Rita Wilson

Rita Wilson is a former elementary school teacher and author of the newly published, A Pocket of Time, a children’s book about the poet, Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood in Great Vilage, Nova Scotia.

She is currently working on a collection of poetry about the importance of place in our lives, from her vantage point on the Caribou River. She has published non-fiction in Saltscapes Magazine, poetry in various publications, and is one of the founders of Writing on Fire, promoting writing experiences for teens on the North Shore. She finds pleasure in her garden, the beach, books, her children and grandchildren, and the company of friends.

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