Nonfiction (adult)

Donna Kane

Donna Kane is the author of four books of poetry–Asterisms (Harbour, 2024), Orrery (Harbour, 2020), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, Erratic (Radiant Press, 2007) and Somewhere, a Fire (Radiant Press, 2004)–a chapbook, Pioneer 10, I Hear You (Jackpine Press, 2016), and a non-fiction book, Summer of the Horse (Harbour, 2018). Her poems, short fiction, essays, and reviews have been published widely in journals such as Today in Science, Scientific American, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review as well as in several anthologies.

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RC Shaw

Travel Writing Workshop for Young People

With RC Shaw

When we think of travel writing, we often conjure up tales of exotic, far-away lands. The reality is that some of the best adventures happen in our own backyards! Why not write them down?

Welcome seasoned English teacher and travel writer, RC Shaw, as he takes your students on an energetic writers’ workshop journey, from note-taking to planning to crafting a unique and personal travelogue. He will share tips and tricks from his own practice, and challenge students to write in a low-stakes series of travel-based prompts. Students will walk away with a fresh perspective on how to capture their own adventures in words.

RC Shaw has taught middle and high school English and science for over 15 years. He has experience crafting activities that meet a diverse array of curriculum outcomes, and he looks forward to tailoring his workshop to meet your students’ needs.

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Judie Oron

Judie Oron is a Canadian/Israeli journalist and award-winning author. Born in Montreal, she lived and worked in Israel for nearly 4 decades and now lives in Halifax, NS. After completing her BA in Anthropology at McGill University and academic research in African Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she worked as a feature writer at The Jerusalem Post, including a 4-year stint as a weekly columnist. Her articles have appeared in Lifestyles Magazine, The Canadian Jewish News, Weekly Press Pakistan, The Jerusalem Report, Hawarya Canadian/Ethiopian Press, and the Australian editions of Christian Woman, Christian Daily.

Judie left the newspaper to recruit and direct an unofficial rescue unit that assisted Jews to find their way from Ethiopia to Israel. During that period, she returned to war-torn Ethiopia to search for a missing Ethiopian Jewish slave named Wuditu. She located the child, released her from captivity and took her into her family. Cry of the Giraffe tells the story of Wuditu’s 4 years in slavery.

“I paid cash and was handed a human being,” Judie explains, “that experience changed my life.” Since publication, Judie has been speaking out about child slavery, bride kidnapping and obstetric fistula in 2 languages and on 3 continents, in hopes of driving these tragic circumstances onto a wider public consciousness. “Wuditu was trapped into a form of slavery we would call debt bondage,” Judie reports. “My current novel in progress is focussed on another form of child slavery that is also wide-spread in Ethiopia, bride kidnapping.”

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Stephanie Domet

Stephanie Domet is a writer, editor, and teacher who lives in Kjipuktuk. She is the co-founder and co-executive director of the AfterWords Literary Festival

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Adam Foulds

I am a poet and novelist originally from the UK, now a Canadian resident. I’ve published four novels and a poetry collection and bunch of other things. I’ve won a number of literary awards, including being shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I’ve taught creative writing at workshops and universities in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

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Heather Fegan

Heather Fegan is a freelance journalist and writer. She is a graduate of the University of King’s College School of Journalism. Heather has been a storyteller since age five, regaling her family with “updates” in her own “Heather Chronicles.” Gutsy, which explores her personal experience of navigating Crohn’s Disease over twenty-five years, is her debut book.

She lives in Halifax, NS, with her husband and two daughters. Follow her chronicles at heatherfegan.ca and @theheatherchronicles.

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Lynette Richards

Lynette Richards has been cartooning as long as she can remember, and recently published her first graphic novel Call Me Bill (Conundrum Press 2022). She is a Craft Nova Scotia Master Artisan, who lives and works in Terence Bay NS, where she operates her business Rose Window Stained Glass. She chose Stained Glass as her professional medium because it was both a trade and an art that has used sequential narration for over 1000 years!

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Linda Pannozzo

Linda Pannozzo is an award-winning author and freelance journalist, with a degree in Journalism from the University of King’s College in Halifax. She is the author of two books: About Canada: The Environment, explores the philosophical, economic, and ideological landscape of our current environmental worldview. She also penned the award-winning The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: An Investigation into the Scapegoating of Canada’s Grey Seal, which looked into the science and politics behind the push for a massive cull of the grey seal population on Canada’s east coast. Over the years, Linda’s articles have appeared in This magazine, The Coast, The Ottawa Citizen, The Daily News, and the The Halifax Examiner. In 2022 Linda started a subscriber-supported newsletter on Substack called The Quaking Swamp Journal, which she describes as commentary, analysis and the occasional deep dive, all in the public interest.

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Tyler LeBlanc

Tyler LeBlanc was born and raised in Bayswater, a tiny fishing village on Nova Scotia’s south shore. He studied International Development Studies (with a focus on colonial history and political theory) and Journalism as an undergraduate and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from the University of King’s College in Halifax, NS. Acadian Driftwood (Goose Lane Editions 2020), his first book, won both the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award, and the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing at the 2021 Atlantic Book Awards.

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Sonja Boon

Sonja Boon is an award-winning researcher, writer, teacher, and flutist.

She is the author of the memoir What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home (WLU Press, 2019), and has published creative non-fiction and fiction in ROOM magazine, The Ethnic Aisle, Riddle Fence, and Geist, among others, as well as in anthologies.

Sonja has been longlisted and shortlisted for a number of literary prizes, including the CBC Nonfiction Prize, BMO Winterset Award, Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards, and ROOM Magazine’s Creative Non-Fiction Contest. In 2021, she won an NL Arts & Letters Award in Poetry.

As a researcher, Sonja is interested in bodies, stories, identities, and theories, and has published scholarly work on a variety of topics, including considerations of gender, class, embodiment, identity and citizenship in eighteenth-century medical letters, to breastfeeding selfies and virtual activism, autobiographies of infanticide, auto/ethnography and the embodiment of maternal grief, and craftivism in the feminist classroom.

She is the author or co-author of four scholarly books, most recently, The Routledge Introduction to Auto/Biography in Canada (with Laurie McNeill, Julie Rak, and Candida Rifkind, 2022) and Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands (with Lesley Butler and Daze Jefferies, 2018).

Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University from 2008-2023, she is the recipient of the Royal Society of Canada’s Ursula Franklin Award in Gender Studies (2020) and is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

For six years, Sonja was principal flutist with the Portland Baroque Orchestra. She has also appeared with the Toronto Symphony, the Hallé Orchestra (Manchester, UK), Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (San Francisco), and the Holland Festival of Early Music, among others. She has taught flute and performance practice at Bangor University, UBC, and Chetham’s School of Music.

Sonja is currently Vice President of WritersNL and a board member with Riddle Fence.

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