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Poetry (adult)

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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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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David Huebert

David Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, appeared several times in Best Canadian Stories, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. Huebert’s first story collection, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, among other accolades. His second story collection, Chemical Valley, won the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, received glowing reviews, and was a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the ReLit Award. His first novel, Oil People, will be published by McClelland & Stewart in August 2024. David teaches in the MFA in Fiction at the University of King’s College in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), where he lives with his partner and their two children.

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Kate Watson

Kate Watson is a freelance writer. She is the theatre critic for Halifax’s alternative weekly newspaper The Coast. She is also a columnist and reporter for the Dartmouth/Cole Harbour and Halifax/Clayton Park weeklies.

She has written pieces for Our Children, Rural Delivery, Our Times, and Halifax Magazine, among others. She frequently does book reviews for Atlantic Books Today.

Kate also writes poetry and fiction, and has had her poems published in Ascent Aspirations and Regina Weese. She has a short story coming out in A Maritime Christmas, published by Nimbus in the fall of 2008.

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Shauntay Grant

Shauntay Grant is a children’s author, poet, playwright, and multimedia artist. She is the author of Africville (Groundwood Books), shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Awards and winner of the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award. A multidisciplinary artist with professional degrees in creative writing, music, and journalism, she “creates artworks that are engaging and accessible, but also challenging, rigorous, and informed by deep research” (The Royal Society of Canada). Her honours include a Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Writing and Publishing (Canada Council for the Arts), an Established Artist Recognition Award (Arts Nova Scotia), a Best Atlantic Published Book Prize for Up Home (Atlantic Book Awards), a Robert Merritt Award for The Bridge (Theatre Nova Scotia), and a Poet of Honour prize from the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.

She shares her blend of words and music internationally at festivals and events, and collaborates with visual artists and art galleries to create poetry-themed artworks, installations, and exhibitions. A former poet laureate for the City of Halifax, her poetry for children and adults has been published in educational resources, anthologies and literary journals. She lives in Halifax and teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University.

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Andre Fenton

Andre Fenton is an award-winning African Nova Scotian writer, performer, and arts educator who has represented Halifax at eight national spoken word festivals across Canada, and the director of the  Narrative Program at The Bus Stop Theatre Co-Op.

Andre is the 2023 recipient of the Portia White Protege Award and a 2022 recipient of an Emerging Artist Recognition Award from Creative NS Awards. Andre is the author of three young adult fiction novels, Worthy of Love. ANNAKA, which was the 2022 recipient of The Community & Place Award from Digitally Lit, and The Summer Between Us, which won Gold in The Coast’s 2022 Best Of Awards.

Andre has facilitated writing and performance workshops in over 100 classrooms across Nova Scotia, and founded The Ink Collective, a Black writers workshop series. He is currently screenwriting the film adaptation of his novel, ANNAKA with Fine Devil Films, and is repped by CookeMcDermid and Meridian Artists. Andre is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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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