Poetry (adult)

Annick MacAskill

Annick MacAskill is a writer and translator based in Halifax. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad, including Best Canadian Poetry, The Stinging Fly, Canadian Notes & Queries, the Literary Review of Canada, Grain Magazine, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, Room Magazine, Plenitude, Arc Poetry Magazine, Lemon Hound, and Versal. Her first full-length poetry collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the J. M. Abraham Poetry Award. Her second collection will be published by Gaspereau in the spring of 2020.

MacAskill’s poetry has also been longlisted for the CBC’s Canada Writes Poetry Prize, longlisted for The Fiddlehead‘s Ralph Gustafson Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a member of Room Magazine‘s editorial collective.

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Margo Wheaton

Margo Wheaton is an award-winning poet and editor and is the author of Rags of Night in Our Mouths (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) and Wild Green Light (with David Adams Richards, Pottersfield Press, 2021). She lives and writes in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the traditional and ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq.

Her debut poetry collection The Unlit Path Behind the House (McGill-Queen’s, 2016) won the Fred Kerner Award (Canadian Authors’ Association) for Book of the Year and the Alfred G. Bailey Award from the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. It was also shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the J.M. Abraham Award, the Fred Cogswell Award for Literary Excellence, and the Relit Award.

Margo holds a Masters degree in English and a Certificate in Adult Education, both from Dalhousie University. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in a number of publications, including The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, the Guernica Series on Writers, Pottersfield Portfolio, The Antigonish Review and The Coast.

Her poetry has appeared in magazines and literary journals across the country including The Literary Review of Canada, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Prism International. Her poems have been set to choral music and performed at the University of Toronto.

Comments about Rags of Night in Our Mouths (McGill-Queen’s, 2022):

”Rags of Night in Our Mouths is a haunting masterpiece of intimate negotiation. Harnessing all powers of the senses, these poems reach out to feel their way through darkened rooms, wild weather, and lost landscapes of the past and present. This is an unforgettable performance, and perhaps the most viscerally honest book of poetry to come out of Atlantic Canada in the last decade.” – Alexander MacLeod, author of Animal Person and Light Lifting

”Margo Wheaton’s poetry of brooding hours and raw intensities is polished by phrasing of rare precision. In places both outer and inner, we hear a ‘primal/speech of branches clanking’ and learn that ‘family’s/an old night, its chaos Miltonic.’ Readers will find themselves riveted, their lives expanded by this strong-hearted book packed with truthfulness, tenderness, and music.” – Brian Bartlett, author of Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal

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Shelley Thompson

Shelley Thompson is an actor, screenwriter, and activist based in Wolfville, in Mi’kma’ki (NS). She trained at The Royal Academy of Drama.c Art, the Canadian Film Centre, Women in the Directors’ Chair, the New York Writers’ Lab, and the Whistler Producer’s Lab.

As an actor she’s received and been nominated for Gemini and ACTRA awards for her work in film and television, including THE TRAILER PARK BOYS, and feature films SPLINTERS, and THE CHILD REMAINS among others.

Her short films have screened internationally with the most
recent, DUCK DUCK GOOSE, winning Best Atlantic Short at FIN Halifax. It was selected by Telefilm Canada’s Not Short on Talent at Clermont-Ferrand, and was a finalist in CBC’s Short Film Faceoff.

Her first feature film, Dawn, Her Dad & The Tractor premiered at INSIDE OUT International Film Festival in Toronto,selling out in Toronto, Halifax and London. (BFI Flare) and also screened in Whistler, BC, (Nominated for the Borsos Prize) Amsterdam’s Roze Filmdagen and many others across the US, Canada and in Germany. Among many prizes and awards, the film recently won the 2022 Nova Scotia MasterWorks Award.

Thompson is working on a full slate of projects: a second novel (GALILEE JUMP), and TV and cinema projects under the banner of her emerging production company, Rusty Tractor Productions Inc.

A committed LGBTQ+2SP ally, Thompson is proud parent to singer/ songwriter T. Thomason, a trans man who inspires her, every day.

ROAR, her first novel, is being published by Nimbus/Vantage Press in Nova Scotia, in late October 2023.

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Matt Robinson

Matt Robinson lives in Halifax, NS with his family.

His newest collection of poems, Tangled & Cleft, was published by Gaspereau Press in Fall 2021.

His previous publications include Against (Gaspereau Press, 2018); The Telephone Game (Baseline Press, 2017); Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau Press, 2016); a fist made and then un-made (Gaspereau Press, 2013), which was short-listed for the bpNichol Chapbook Award; Against the Hard Angle (ECW Press, 2010); no cage contains a stare that well (ECW Press, 2005); how we play at it: a list (ECW Press, 2002); A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking (Insomniac Press, 2000), which was short-listed for both the Gerald Lampert Award and the ReLit Award for Poetry; and additional chapbooks from Frog Hollow Press (tracery & interplay, 2004) and Greenboathouse Press (against the hard angle, 2009). Robinson has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others.

His poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, including The New Canon, Breathing Fire 2, Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada, Exact Fare Only 2, Mess: The Hospital Anthology, and Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land; been adapted into cinepoems and short films that have screened at festivals including HIFF and the Atlantic Film Festival; and featured in programs such as Halifax Regional Municipality’s Art in Public Places and Poetry in Motion initiatives.

He works at Saint Mary’s University.

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Patrick Woodcock

Patrick Woodcock is the author of 10 books of poetry and countless reviews. His work has been translated and published in 14 languages. Since travel is so essential to his work, Mr. Woodcock has lived and worked in such diverse countries as Iceland, Poland, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, The Sultanate of Oman, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, The Kurdish North of Iraq and Azerbaijan. Within Canada he has travelled from the West to East coasts, as well as working as a volunteer for almost a year with the elders of Fort Good Hope, NT – 20km south of the Arctic Circle. His seventh book Always Die Before Your Mother was shortlisted for Canada’s ReLit award in 2010 and reached the number one spot on the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list. His 8th book Echo Gods and Silent Mountains was extremely well reviewed all over the world and was called “…the most beautiful, deep and touching collection of poetry written on Kurds by a non-Kurd.” by the Kurdish media network, Rudaw. He has read at International poetry festival’s in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, the Kurdish North of Iraq, Azerbaijan, England, The Republic of Georgia, Tanzania, Kenya and Canada’s Winnipeg International Writers Festival. While living in Colombia he read at the Ibague Poetry Festival, The XVIII Medellin International Poetry Festival and was the first poet from outside of Latin America to ever read at the Bogota Poetry Festival. Patrick’s ninth book of poetry You can’t bury them all which is set in the Kurdish North of Iraq, Fort Good Hope, NT Canada and Azerbaijan was published by ECW Press in 2016. You can’t bury them all won the Alcuin Society Book Design Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the JM Abraham Poetry Award in 2017. After living for two years in Tanzania as a volunteer at Baraa Primary School, Arusha, Patrick moved to the hamlet of Paulatuk in the Inuvik region of the Northwest Territories to work while completing his new manuscript Farhang Book I which was published by ECW Press, Toronto, Canada, September 5th 2023 and called by CBC Books one of Canada’s must reads in 2023. The album “Bill Pritchard Sings Poems By Patrick Woodcock” was released by Tapete records May 5th, 2023. He now lives in between Iqaluit, Nunavut and Toronto Ontario where he is the Regional Instructor/ Coordinator for United for Literacy. In September 2024 he was awarded the 2024 Council of the Federation Award in recognition of his outstanding achievement in literacy from the Premier of Nunavut, The Honourable P.J. Akeeagok. Farhang Book II will be published by ECW Press in 2026 along with his first collection of short stories entitled Animare (Tidewater Press, 2026).

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Joanne Light

Joanne Light holds degrees in psychology, education and fine art (painting) from Acadia and NSCAD universities (influences ranged from Blake, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, Vanier, Frye, Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and Roethke to Rothko, Borduas, Riopelle and Beuys). She taught in six provinces in Deschambault and Big Trout Lakes and Davis Inlet, Whapmagoostui and Kuuguarapik, Kimosoompotnak, Kitchee Nuhmay Koosib and Natuashish and five countries in Korea, Brunei Darussalam, Hong Kong and in Abu Dhabi.

She has three juried acceptances at the Banff Centre’s Wired Writing Studio and Advanced Seminar in poetry with mentors Irving Layton, Barbara Klar, Sid Marty, Fred Stenson and Alison Pick; also, Yvonne Trainor at the Maritime Writers’ Workshop; Daphne Marlatt at Sage Hill Writing Experience’s Poetry Colloquium; Mick Burrs at the Saskatchewan Writer’s Guild and Thomson Highway and Allen Ginsburg at the WFNS. Her most recent journal publication was two poems in Toronto’s Arc Magazine.

Light has published two trade books with Nimbus Publishing and three titles under her own press–Tapwema. She is presently finishing up a memoir: On, On, On, On: Stories of Teaching and Travelling.

Having travelled to twenty-five countries, she has lived for the past six years in her birthplace–Halifax.

She has given writing workshops in poetry nd travel writing at Dalhousie University and the Saint John Arts Centre and is a seasoned teacher and facilitator.

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Francene Gillis

Welcome to my profile. I am who I am, or am I… a paradoxical enquiry worth pondering. “What is most personal is most universal,” –Alistair MacLeod, yet another truth. And the mosaic—picking up pieces and putting them back together again into people who are stronger and better than before—those are the fulcrums, the wheels, and philosophies that drive my writing. I hope you will find information of interest that leads to a partnership or invitation. In brief…I am looking for publishers, freelance writing projects, possible editing depending on genre, and educational and human-interest writing for a fair fee of course as I am now retired, not through choice but injury. That you can read about in my upcoming memoir plus published by OC Publishing this June 22, 2025. Lots more on that on my Facebook page, instagram and soon to be website. I love writing and have been doing so since the tender age of 14. My first poem written at 16 was dedicated to my nine-year-old brother who drowned below our house. I am a professional writer living in Cape Breton, and I am working on several writing projects with the hope of being published in a much bigger circle. Following are highlights of my career thus far: Columnist: 30 plus years with a weekly newspaper: The Inverness Oran; Author: A Rose In November, collection of human interest stories, (1994); English teacher and Educator: 30 plus years, high school for the last 23 and as a substitute prior, while working in adult education and literacy; Masters in Education: Multicultural Diversity, Administration & Leadership, St. Francis Xavier University, 2013; Tribes Trained & Piloted …(2013–2015) Program created by Dr. Jeanne Gibbs, 2006 to help educational institutions and businesses become more successful; Winner of several national, regional writing and educational awards; Reviewer Pearson Canada of educational materials designed for grade nine students; Freelance Editor of several weekly and monthly rural magazines; Worked on several Nova Scotia Department of Education committees…Literacy Success 11 & 12, Advanced English 12 Pilot, Provincial Advisory Board, Grade 12 Provincial Exam; Presenter: Numerous conferences through Literacy, Adult Education, and Public School System such as ATENS Conference 2013, Strait Regional Inservices, Provincial Literacy Conferences; Consultant: (1994–1997) through my own business prior to coming back into the public education system, specializing in education, literacy, editing, and writing; Worked with CCLOW (Canadian Congress Learning Opportunities for Women) writing a chapter in a collective resource for female adult learners across Canada on issues such as self-esteem, confidence, motivation, and upgrading; Mentored by author Alistair MacLeod; I am presently working on a war book that tells the story of four brothers who fought in the Second World War from the time they were boys in rural Canada their struggles after enlisting as boys who become soldiers, and men, and which unlike other war books follows them to their deathbed whether in the war or after. The stories are funny, and serious, and devastating, and deal with battles on and off the frontlines. Called Momma Cried, it will be published this fall by Cape Breton Soul Food Publishing. I also have a fictional manuscript that evolved from true feature stories with men who were sexually abused called Truth Be Told looking for a home and publication in 2026. It is necessary for those silenced too long to be heard. It carries and awareness and educational piece that needs coverage. I also have collections of short stories, educational materials for high school students and teachers, a collection of poems, and several book length manuscripts. I would very much like to work with other professional writers or editors, and to fine a reputable agent for my writing. I would like to branch out as a columnist for human-interest or educational magazines. I guess now that I’m feeling better I wanna do everything because for eight years I could not until I found the right therapies and support and education, thus the memoir where did I go coming out in June. My intent, my hope with all of these books is to be a voice for those silenced too long because of invisible injuries, being different, and those who are called to step up to the plate and be courageous when they are anything those but. Please check me out on my other social platforms. Take care, Francene Gillis

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shalan joudry

shalan joudry is a writer, performance artist and storyteller. She has published two books of poetry, “Generations Re-merging” (Gaspereau Press 2014) and “Waking Ground” (Gaspereau Press 2020). She published the theatrical play, “Elapultiek” (Pottersfield Press 2019) and was recently the editor of “The Art of Mi’kmaw Basketry” (Formac 2023). shalan lives with her family in Bear River First Nation, Nova Scotia.

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Janet Barkhouse

Janet Barkhouse retired from professional theatre in 1982, and from teaching high school English in 2005. She’s written and directed plays for children from ages 8 to 18, written innovative English curriculum for the Province of Nova Scotia, and given workshops and readings for young people, teachers and writers across the Province.

In 2006 she fell in love with writing poems. Since then she has studied with many extraordinary poets, at universities in Halifax, and at the Banff Centre. Her debut book of poems, Salt Fires (Pottersfield, 2018) follows on two chapbooks, Silence and Sable Island Fieldnotes. In 2013-14, through their Humanities-HEALS program, she was Artist in Residence (Writing) at Dalhousie University’s Medical School.

Janet lives near Mahone Bay on Nova Scotia’s South Shore.

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Dr. Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran

Dr. Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran holds B.A. in Celtic Studies from the University of Toronto, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Maine, and a PhD in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. She’s also an author, poet, and musician under the names Ceallaigh S. MacCath-Moran and C.S. MacCath. Her long-running Folklore & Fiction project integrates these passions with a focus on folklore scholarship aimed at storytellers, and she brings a deep appreciation of animism, ecology, and folkloristics to her own storytelling.

Work from Ceallaigh’s two fiction and poetry collections has been shortlisted for the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and nominated for the Rhysling Award. Recently, her podcast radio drama “The Belt and the Necklace,” was produced by the Odyssey Theatre in Ottawa. She’s a member of the American Folklore Society, the International Society for Folk Narrative Research, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and many other professional societies for folklore scholars and authors.

Ceallaigh is also the CEO of Triskele Media Inc., a family-owned and operated technology company specializing in enterprise and government web applications, and she’s a Sail Canada certified celestial navigator who is learning to sail and hoping to chart her course by the stars across the ocean while she writes. Meanwhile, she lives on Cape Breton Island with her husband Sean, who hopes for the stars and the ocean too. You can find her online at csmaccath.com, folkloreandfiction.com, and linktr.ee/csmaccath.

Dr. MacCath-Moran is represented by Kelly Thomas at Serendipity Literary Agency. To inquire about her books, please write to info@serendipitylit.com.

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