Lola Lemire Tostevin was born into a French-speaking family in Timmins, Ontario although she writes mainly in English, and wonderfully so. That being the case, her poetry, novels, and essays communicate her interest in “contamination” (over ideologue-ish notions of purity or concepts that limit expressions of the individual), promulgating creative work that combines aspects of one language or culture with another, or for that matter, one genre with another.
Born in Norway and raised in Colorado and Virginia, Erling Friis-Baastad emigrated to Toronto in 1969 and has spent most of his adult life in the Yukon Territory. He is a widely published journalist, essayist, and book reviewer, and works as an editor with the Yukon News in Whitehorse. With Canadian short story maven Patricia Robertson, he has edited (if not pioneered) Writing North, an anthology of Yukon writers from the last decade of the twentieth century. Friis-Baastad’s accomplished collection Wood Spoken: New and Selected Poems showcases the thirty-year career of the poet who is credited with bringing contemporary poetry to the territory, and is considered a landmark event in its literary scene, and is most certainly a warm and generous ‘wayfinder’ for those agile poets snowshoeing after him.
A Mohawk writer from the Six Nations band in southern Ontario, Janet Marie Rogers was born in Vancouver BC and has resided in Victoria BC since 1994, where she is currently rounding out her three year term as that capital city’s Poet Laureate. A published and award-winning poet, she has many notable works to her name and in a variety of media.
Paul Wilson was born in Lacombe, Alberta and in addition to his five collections of poetry, has contributed to his city of Regina, Saskatchewan and beyond as a key cultural worker, editor, and publisher.
Phoebe Wang was born in Ottawa, Ontario and is a poet, reviewer and teacher. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including ARC, Canadian Literature, CV2, Descant, Grain, The Malahat Review, and Ricepaper Magazine, and also in TOK 6: Writing the New Toronto. Wang is emerging as an important contributor to critical studies of poetry, and her latest piece "Three Passages West" for online Toronto publication The Puritan (in my rather self-serving beau geste, including work by West Coast poets Brian Brett, Evelyn Lau, and however gone South, yours truly) demonstrates her astute and insightful analysis.
