Alison Smith is the author of three books of poetry and one chapbook from Gaspereau Press. Her most recent collection, This Kind of Thinking Does No Good, was awarded the 2019 J.M. Abraham Award for Atlantic Poetry and was shortlisted for the 2020 Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award. She has written for radio, the stage, and has taught poetry workshops in prison, schools and other community settings. Alison lives in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia.
Dr. Darryl Whetter is the author of 4 books of fiction and 3 poetry collections. His collection of stories, A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, was named to The Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books of 2003. His debut novel, The Push & the Pull, was released in Spring 2008. Origins, his 2012 collection of poems, concerns energy, evolution and extinction as they can be observed at Joggins, Nova Scotia. Professor Whetter edited the nomination dossier of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in their successful bid for inclusion on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. He has published nearly 20 stories in journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Stories, The Fiddlehead, PRISM, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly and Best Asian Short Stories 2020. In 2021, he won the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award.
Darryl holds a PhD in English from UNB and has published or presented papers on contemporary literature in France, Sweden, Canada, Germany, the United States, India, Singapore, Australia and Iceland. Nearly 100 of his commissioned book reviews have appeared in venues such as The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Vancouver Sun, The Montreal Gazette, The Globe and Mail, and Detroit’s Metro Times. Darryl Whetter has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at various universities in Canada and was the coordinator of the creative writing program at Dalhousie from 2008-2010. In the mid-2000s, he was a regular panelist on the national CBC Radio program “Talking Books.”
His most recent books are the climate-crisis novel Our Sands, from Penguin RH (2020) and the anthology Teaching Creative Writing in Asia, from Routledge (2021)
Jaime Forsythe is a writer living in Halifax. Her writing has appeared in a number of magazines and journals, including This Magazine, Geist, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Lemon Hound, Matrix, The Rusty Toque, and more. Her first full-length poetry collection, Sympathy Loophole, was published in Spring 2012 by Mansfield Press. Her second, I Heard Something, was released by Anvil Press’ A Feed Dog Book imprint in Spring 2018.
Jaime has twice been a mentor in the WFNS Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Program, and has taught writing workshops in a variety of venues, including elementary schools, at Dalhousie University and Mount Allison University, and to youth and adults in the community.
Christina McRae lives and works in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Her work appears in many literary journals including Grain, Arc, Descant, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Room, Windsor Review, and Understorey Magazine. Several poems also appear in Letting Go: An Anthology of Loss and Survival, published by Black Moss Press (2004). Her first full-length collection, Next to Nothing, was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2009.
Gloria Ann Wesley is an African Nova Scotian writer. She is a graduate of St. Francis Xavier University and has taught at all grade levels. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Mount St. Vincent University. She resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia. To My Someday Child (1975), enables her to hold the distinction of being the first published Black Nova Scotian poet. Wesley’s poetry appears in three Canadian anthologies. Her novel’s include Chasing Freedom (2011), short-listed for the Ann Connor Brimer Award. If This Is Freedom(2013) One Book Nova Scotia Award 2016. Abagail’s Wish, 2016) and Righting Canada’s Wrongs Africville (2019) Ontario Library Association’s Best Bets Award. Bringing a unique and interesting perspective about African Nova Scotians, her Black Loyalist history presentation and readings are exciting and designed for students from Grades 3-12.
Eleonore Schönmaier’s Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete was published in 2021 (McGill-Queen’s University Press). Wavelengths of Your Song (MQUP) was published in German translation as Wellenlängen deines Liedes in 2020 by parasitenpresse (Cologne). Dust Blown Side of the Journey (MQUP) was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Awards (Greece). Treading Fast Rivers (MQUP) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. She has taught advanced fiction courses at St. Mary’s University, creative writing at Mount Saint Vincent University, and has worked as a poetry mentor for the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. Her poetry has been set to music by Canadian, Dutch, Scottish, American and Greek composers and she has performed her poetry in concert with The New European Ensemble among others. She has won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the Earle Birney Prize, and the National Broadsheet Contest 2019. Published in League of Canadian Poets Poem in Your Pocket Day Brochure in 2018, 2019 and 2021, she has also been widely anthologised in the United States and Canada including in Best Canadian Poetry. Her poetry was presented in a twelve page feature by The New Quarterly. “Live-Retrieved Memory: the Poetry of Eleonore Schönmaier.” https://eleonoreschonmaier.com
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Paul is a versatile author: adult novel: A Real Son of a ‘Vitch; children’s books: The Aussie Six in Canada, The Aussie Six in Australia, The Aussie Six in Spain, and The Weirdest Class; book of satirical essays: You’ve Gotta be Kidding!; plays: Strike! and The Parasite/s; poetry book: Crouching at the Keyhole; numerous poems and stories in Canadian, U.S., Australian, and Spanish journals.
Alice Burdick lives and writes poetry in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Alice moved to Halifax in 2002 from Toronto, Ontario, where she was born and raised. She has also lived in Espanola, Vancouver, and on the Sechelt Peninsula in BC. She is a poet, essayist, and cookbook author who also edits, proofreads, does manuscript evaluations, and leads workshops for adults and children.
Burdick has been involved with the small press community in Canada since the early 1990’s, when she was co-editor, with Victor Coleman, of The Eternal Network. This very small ongoing imprint produced chapbooks, including several of her own works, such as Signs Like This, Fun Venue, and Voice of Interpreter. Her work has been published by other small presses in Canada, including: Proper Tales Press (a Time, My Lump in the Bed: Love Poems for George W. Bush); Letters Press (Covered); and BookThug (The Human About Us). It also has appeared in various magazines, such as Hava LeHaba (from Tel Aviv, Israel), Event Magazine, Canadian Poetries, Two Serious Ladies (from the US), Dig, What!magazine, subTerrain, fhole, This Magazine, and Who Torched Rancho Diablo? From 1992-1995, Alice was assistant coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Fair. She has also done numerous readings over the years in many different venues, including the VerseFest Ottawa, Ottawa International Writers Festival, The Scream in High Park in Toronto, and the Halifax Word on the Street. She co-owned the former Lexicon Books in Lunenburg from 2014 to 2020, where she organized and promoted readings and events, including Lexicon Salons, where poets and musicians collaborated.
Her sixth book of poetry, ”Ox Lost, Snow Deep” was released in Fall 2024 from Anvil Press/a feed dog books.
”Deportment”, a book of selected poems from the early 1990s onward, was released by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in the autumn of 2018. Book of Short Sentences came out in the spring of 2016 from Mansfield Press following Holler, 2012, and Flutter,2008 (both Mansfield Press). Two collaborative poems have shown up in Our Days In Vaudeville by Stuart Ross and 29 Collaborators (Mansfield Press, Fall 2013). Her poems have appeared in Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2005), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2004), and in Pissing Ice: An Anthology of ‘New’ Canadian Poets, (BookThug, 2004, as well as other anthologies. Her first perfect-bound book was Simple Master, published in 2002 by Pedlar Press.
Her essays have appeared in three recent anthologies: “Home” from MacIntyre Purcell, 2018, “Gush” from Frontenac House, 2018, and “Locations of Grief” from Wolsak & Wynn, 2020.
Her poem ”Terms and Conditions” was shortlisted for the first Lemon Hound Poetry Prize in 2014.
Read more about Alice Burdick in interviews conducted by Alex Porco on Open Book Toronto and on Lemon Hound and in gallery form here. You can watch and listen to Alice read some poems on a beach here.
Andrew was born in Toronto and has lived in NS since 1972. He is McCulloch Emeritus Professor in English, with a speciality in Canadian and contemporary literature. His influences include Patrick White, Lawrence Durrell, and Bob Dylan. He has received Canada Council grants for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. He lives in Halifax with his partner Marjorie Stone.
In 2019 he won the Guernica Literary Prize for his unpublished manuscript This Cleaving and This Burning, which will be published by Guernica editions in 2020.
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The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (WFNS) uses the following terms to describe writers’ experience levels:
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
