Fiction (short stories)

Martine Jacquot

Martine Jacquot is a prolific writer who writes in French but can make presentations in either French or English. She has published over 30 books so far (novels, poetry, short-stories, essays and novels for young readers).

She has been invited to many literary events across Canada and abroad, namely to Lafayette’s book festival during the 2nd World Acadian Congress in 1999, to Tunisia to attend a panel of women writers in 2000, the International Poetry Festival in Trois-Rivières, the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival and to the Paris Book Fair in 2004 and 2006.

She did several reading tours: Tunisia in 2000, Russia and Cameroon in 2008, Morocco in 2010, Roumania in 2011, India in 2012.

She holds several degrees: BA from La Sorbonne, Paris, 3 MA degrees from La Sorbonne, Acadia and Dalhousie, a BJ from the University of Kings College and a PHD from Dalhousie University. She has studied and lived in France, England, Switzerland and Canada.

Past Vice President of the Association des Écrivains Acadiens, past president of the Conseil Culturel Acadien de la Nouvelle-Écosse, she has been on many editorial committees, member of several juries, has received creation grants and travel grants both from the Canada Council for the arts and the NS Arts Council. Her novel Les oiseaux de nuit finissent aussi par s’endormir was short listed for the Antonine-Maillet-Acadie Vie award. She was thrice finalist for the Éloizes awards, once as a writer, and twice as a cultural journalist. She was shortlisted for the France-Acadie Award three times for Au Gré du Vent (2006), Le jardin d’herbes aromatiques (2006) and Le silence de la neige (2008). She won the Award Prix Européen de l’ADELF with a special mention 2007 for Au gré du vent. She has also been chosen on 2 occasions to advise beginning authors, once by the Talent Trust of NS, once by the Association des auteurs de l’Ontario. Some of her poems and short stories have been broadcast on SRC. One of her stories was staged in Ottawa at the Théâtre Trillium. She was a member of the Board of Governors of the NS Museum for 12 years and an author in residence with the ArtsInfusion program and Fecane program

Her articles and interviews have appeared in LittéRéalité, Ancrage, Arcade, Alpha Arts magazine, Eloizes, Femmes d’Action, The Fiddlehead, Liason, Studies in Canadian Literature, Vent’d’est, Waves, Ashtarowt and Al Quds, among others. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Concerto pour huit voix, La Diversité: 15 nouvelles francophones á travers le monde, Ecphore Anthology 1987, Eloizes, Les Elytres du Hanneton, Herspectives, Liaison, Lieux d’être, Littéréalité, Les Maritimes, Mensuel, 25 Offerta Speziale, Poetry Halifax-Dartmouth, The Pottersfield Portfolio, Reflets Maritimes 2, Voices and Echoes: Stories and Poems of Women’s Spirituality, Walk through Paradise, La Poésie acadienne and Pour l’Amour de toi, among others. Some of her work is being translated into English, Russian, Portugese, Italian, Basque and Arabic.

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Joanne Jefferson

Joanne Jefferson has been passionately involved in the Nova Scotia writing community ever since she helped create Quod Libet, the QEH arts and literary magazine in 1981. She was a contributing editor with the Halifax-based newspaper, Pandora; a founding member of the Oxford Street Writers Group; and she helped establish Community of Writers, a Tatamagouche Centre program. Joanne has also been a teacher at Write Here, Write Now, the Centre’s March Break program for young writers. She facilitates hands-on writing, performance, and zine-making workshops for creators of all ages.

Joanne’s first novel, Lightning and Blackberries, was released by Nimbus Publishing in April 2008. Her short fiction, poetry, and personal essays have been published in various anthologies, including The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, and her non-fiction work has appeared in Saltscapes, The Chronicle Herald, and The Globe and Mail. She also works as a freelance editor.

Born and raised in Halifax, Joanne now makes her home in West LaHave, Lunenburg County. She received a BA from Acadia and an MA from Dalhousie. er other passions include music, visual art, history, and baseball.

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K.V. Johansen

Originally from Kingston, Ont., K.V. Johansen studied English and History at Mount Allison, received a Master’s in Medieval Studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and another Master’s in English, from McMaster. She writes mostly epic fantasy, as well as fantasy and science fiction for young readers; she has also written short stories and literary criticism for adults. Ancient and Medieval history and languages are one of her main interests. Johansen taught workshops at the spring 2010 MASC Young Authors and Illustrators Conference in Ottawa. She has worked with the elementary or elementary/intermediate sessions of Writers in Electronic Residence (WIER) over a number of terms and has visited schools from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario, to Austria and Macedonia. She has in the past written a large number of articles for the Nova Scotia based farm magazines Rural Delivery and Atlantic Beef Quarterly, as well as other non-fiction. She was the editor of Stalin Versus Me, the final volume of the late Donald Jack’s triple Leacock-Award-winning Bandy Papers series (Sybertooth 2005). Johansen currently lives in Sackville, NB.

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Susan Kerslake

Born in Chicago in 1943, Susan immigrated to Canada in 1966 and now lives in Halifax.

She has worked in a bookstore, the Killam Library at Dalhousie University, as a child care worker at St Joseph’s Children’s Centre, and in Child Life at the I.W.K. Grace Hospital for Children. She has worked as a volunteer with children with cystic fibrosis for over 20 years.

“Seasoning Fever is Little House on the Prairie had it been written by Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner or Cormac McCarthy. In limpid, dreamlike prose, Susan Kerslake serves up an epic myth of the West with perceptiveness both wise and innocent. All of life’s elemental zest is here: deprivation and survival, love and lust, the magical and the mundane and the sometimes unbridgeable distance between male and female. No simple tale of prairie homesteading, this long-awaited novel imposes the ingenuous resource of a soaring poetic mind upon the grass ocean of an inscrutable land. If the measure of such fusion is an assessment of spirit, then the spirit of Seasoning Fever is original and triumphant.” – Richard Cumyn

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Jane Finlay-Young

Jane Finlay-Young was born in England’s Lake District and emigrated to Canada when she was six. Since that time she has lived in the bush in Manitoba, by the ocean on Cape Breton Island, and in various places in Ontario, including Toronto. She moved to Halifax in the Fall of 2006 and hopes to stay a good long time. Born into a family of atheists, scientists and artists she converted to Orthodox Judaism for a while and spent a fascinating, tumultuous year in Israel in the late seventies. She has since returned to her atheist roots. She has been writing since the age of nine (secretly in closets) but didn’t take herself seriously until the mid-nineties when she began her daily (except when life gets in the way!) commitment to writing.

Jane has taught writing (developing a writing workshop, The Mini Writing Career, with her friend and colleague, Annie Jacobsen, now deceased) and has edited the work of others.

In 2000 she published her first novel, From Bruised Fell (Penguin), and before that various short stories. From Bruised Fell has been optioned by the film production company Sienna (New Waterford Girl, Touch of Pink, Marion Bridge). Jane’s non-fiction piece, Ten Million Atoms Fit on the Head of a Pin, was published in the anthology First Man in My Life: Daughters Write About Their Fathers. (Penguin, Canada 2007).

Jane has co-authored a novel, Watermelon Syrup, with Annie Jacobsen. A novelist and a poet, Annie died in May 2005. She finished the third draft of her novel two weeks before she died and asked Jane to act on her behalf should it be accepted for publication. Watermelon Syrup was published in August of 2007.

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Melanie Furlong

Melanie Furlong is full-time journalist who writes for Fine Lifestyles magazines across Canada and the U.S. She freelanced for nearly 15 years for a wide range of North American publications including the Canadian Healthcare Network, The Rotarian, Latitudes In-Flight Magazine, Canadian Contractor, Meetings and Incentive Travel, The Chronicle Herald, The Medical Post, East Coast Living, Atlantic Progress, Nature Canada and Living Healthy in Atlantic Canada.

She was mentored in the 2009/2010 Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Mentorship program by Stephens Gerard Malone. She has studied fiction with Gwen Davies, Russell Barton, Valerie Compton and the Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC.

Melanie holds a Bachelor of Arts from Acadia University, where she majored in Spanish, as well as a Bachelor of Education Teaching English as a Second Language from Brock University. She taught English to adults and children in Finland, England, the Czech Republic and Canada for more than five years before embarking on a writing career.

She published her first novel, The Last Honest Man in Havana, with CreateSpace in August 2015.

She blogs at melaniefurlong.wordpress.com.

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Monica Graham

Monica Graham is the author of several non-fiction books. Her newest, Senior Moment (Nimbus), an almost-humorous account of finding residential care for her aging mother, came out in the spring of 2021. In the Spirit, Reflections on Everyday Grace, is a collection of some of the best columns she wrote over eight years for the Chronicle Herald religion page. Cradle of Knowledge: Pictou Academy 1816-2016 tells the history of the 200-year-old school. A columnist as well as a freelance journalist and photographer, Monica has had her work published by the Halifax Chronicle Herald, Rural Delivery, Atlantic Business Magazine, The Pictou Advocate, Canadian Living, Trident, The Atlantic Fisherman, and other publications. She is a member of the Writers in the Schools program, and also presents writing and storytelling workshops for adults and literacy groups. Monica served as writer-in-residence at Pictou Antigonish Regional Library in 2011-12; and at Berton House in Dawson City, YT, in 2008. She lives in the woods in Pictou County, NS, with her husband, a dog, and visiting bears, deer and people. between She is working on an historical novel and a collection of short stories.

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Vicki Grant

After a career in advertising and television, Vicki wrote her first novel, The Puppet Wrangler, in 2004. Since then she has written sixteen YA/MG novels and been nominated for over twenty-five major awards. Her latest YA novel, 36 QUESTIONS THAT CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT YOU, has sold to 19 territories worldwide and will be translated into 15 languages.

Vicki has visited schools in Africa, South America and across Canada.

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Sylvia D Hamilton

Sylvia D. Hamilton is a Nova Scotian filmmaker and writer. Through her work as a filmmaker and artist, she has brought the life experiences of African Nova Scotians to the mainstream of Canadian arts. Her first film, Black Mother Black Daughter, has been seen in over forty film festivals throughout North America and Europe, and her films have gone on to win awards and be screened in festivals in Canada, the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. Speak It! From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia received both the 1994 Maeda Prize awarded by the NHK-Japan Broadcasting Corporation, and a 1994-Gemini Award. Her most recent film is Portia White: Think On Me, a documentary about the extraordinary Canadian contralto who was known as Canada? Marian Anderson. It has been widely broadcast on VISION TV, BRAVO! and national and regional CBC TV.

Her writing (literary and non-fiction) has appeared in a variety of Canadian journals and anthologies. She was a contributor to and co-editor of We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women’s History published by the University of Toronto Press in 1993.

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Renée Hartleib

Renée Hartleib is an author, writer, and writing mentor based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Her greatest passion is to help others connect with themselves and bring their creative dreams to life. Her first book, Writing Your Way: A 40-Day Path of Self-Discovery, was published in 2022. And her second book, Solo Camino: An Empowering Guide for Women was published in 2025.

As a writing mentor, Renée considers it an honour to work one-on-one with writers who are completing book drafts or who require a sensitive and thorough review of completed manuscripts.

Renée has also worked as a professional writer and editor for nearly 20 years. Her client list is long and has included the CBC, the National Film Board, the IWK Health Centre, Farmers Cooperative Dairy Limited, The Shaw Group, Saint Mary’s University, and Dalhousie University.

If you join Renée’s online community, you’ll receive inspiring blog posts on a variety of topics.

As a current member of the WFNS Board of Directors and a graduate of both the Humber School of Writers and the Alistair MacLeod Mentorship Program, Renée is proud to be part of the vibrant writing community of Atlantic Canada.

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