Adam Sol is, most recently, the author of Jeremiah, Ohio, a novel in poems published by House of Anansi Press. His previous books are Jonah’s Promise, which won MidList Press’s First Series Book Award for Poetry; and Crowd of Sounds, which won Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry in 2004. He is also the author of numerous essays and reviews for publications as various as The Globe and Mail, The Forward, Critique and CNQ. He holds an MFA from Indiana University, as well as a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Laurentian University, Georgian College. He lives in Toronto with his wife and their three sons.

Andrew Pyper is the author of four internationally bestselling novels as well as Kiss Me, a collection of stories. His latest publication, The Killing Circle, was selected by the New York Times as a Notable Crime Novel of the Year. Previous novels include Lost Girls (a New York Times Notable Book), The Trade Mission (a Toronto Star Ten Best Books of the Year), and The Wildfire Season (a Globe and Mail Notable Book). Three of Andrew's novels are currently being developed for feature films. He lives in Toronto.

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is the author of two novels, and several books of poetry. He is also an avid translator of foreign literature. He works with performance and sound-poetry, and regularly appears at poetry and music festivals, as well as dabbling in the dark arts of the concrete. His books in Icelandic have been critically acclaimed, and critics have found reason to compare him to such dissimilar poets as Snorri Sturluson and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the recent years he has explored the possibilities inherent in the European and North-American avant-garde traditions, and focused on disassembling language into its visual, social and linguistic units. Eiríkur is a founding member of the Nýhil poet cooperative.

Norðdahl’s poetry has been published in the following non-icelandic magazines: filling Station (can), NoD (can), dANDelion (can), Lichtungen (austria), OUTsidermagasin (Faroe Islands), Nypoesi (Norway), Das Wörterbuch der Strasse (Austria), Tuli ja Savu (Finland), KirjaIn (Finland), El dedo critico (Peru), RealPoetik (US) and Muse-Aprentice-Guild (US).

Photo by Aino Huovio

Jeramy Dodds lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick. His first collection, Crabwise to the Hounds, was published by Coach House Books in 2008, and was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Lisa Foad’s debut story collection, The Night Is A Mouth (Exile Editions), has been praised by The Globe and Mail as “a brand-new thing” – says The Globe, Foad writes “with courage and surprising panache.” And EYE Weekly, in its five-star review, declares, “her DeLillo-sized sentences create a linguistic tension that could cause the pages to flip autonomously.” Her creative work has appeared in Matrix, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, and Red Light: Superheroes, Sluts and Saints, and she contributes cultural commentary to a variety of publications, including The Globe And Mail, NOW Magazine and Xtra. Lisa Foad lives in Toronto and is at work on her first novel.

Margaret Christakos is a writerly loaf of bread and a plate of cheese. She covers the basic food groups, and sometimes gets awarded things and called innovative. Her most recent, of seven, poetry collections is What Stirs, from the nutritious Coach House Books, warm in fall 2008, nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She teaches creative writing and facilitates "Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon" at U of T School of Continuing Studies.

Oana Avasilichioaei is a poet and translator who’s most recent book is feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008, watch a sample at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ11gBLPCWw). She has translated Nichita St?nescu from Romanian, published as Occupational Sickness (BuschekBooks, 2006) and Louise Cotnoir and Geneviève Desrosiers from French. She has performed her work in Canada, most recently at WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival and Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, USA, Mexico and Europe. She was the founder and curator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series from 2004 to 2009. A collaborative work with Erín Moure, involving authorial and translational impossibilities, will appear as Expeditions of a Chimæra fall 2009 (BookThug).

Paul Dutton is a poet, novelist, essayist, and oral sound artist who is internationally renowned for both his literary and musical performances. Throughout the last four decades he has published, recorded, and performed his work in various contexts, solo and collaborative, in print and film, on TV, radio, and the Web. He has taken his art to festivals, clubs, concert halls, schools, and other venues throughout Canada and across the United States, Europe, and South America. Dutton’s artistic focus continues to be the exploration of consciousness and perception through the creation of multisensory works, employing written poetry and prose, visual poetry, and the sonic dimensions of language and oral expression.
He was a member of the legendary Four Horsemen poetry-performance group (1970–1988), along with Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Steve McCaffery, and the late bpNichol. He joins his soundsinging oralities to John Oswald’s alto sax and Michael Snow’s piano and synthesizer in the free-improvisation band CCMC (1989 to the present). He recently formed Quintet à Bras in company with two French poets and two French instrumentalists. The most recent of his six books is a novel, Several Women Dancing (Mercury Press, 2002), the latest of his five solo recordings is the CD Oralizations (DAME Records, 2005).

Photo by Max Middle

Peter Culley lives in South Wellington on Vancouver Island. His books include "The Climax Forest" (Leech 1995) Hammertown (2003 New Star), The Age of Briggs & Stratton: Hammertown Book Two (2008 New Star) & To the Dogs (Arsenal Pulp 2009). His extensive writings on such visual artists such as Roy Arden, Kelly Wood, Stan Douglas, Geoffrey Farmer & Evan Lee will be collected in the forthcoming Let's Go Away For a While: Art in Vancouver 1986-2008.

Ryan Kamstra is a song-writer and poet based in Toronto. As well as fronting and songwriting for critically lauded indie-pop glam band Tomboyfriend, he has released two collections of poetry: iNTO tHE dROWNED wORLD (2008) and lATE cAPITAIST sUBLIME (2002).

Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and grew up in Trinidad. She has lived in Canada since the early 1980s. Her acclaimed first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, was published in fourteen countries, and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, He Drown She in the Sea, was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Mootoo is also an accomplished visual and video artist. She has lived in Vancouver and Edmonton, and now lives in Toronto.

Susan Holbrook is the author of misled (Red Deer Press, 1999) and Good Egg Bad Seed (Nomados, 2004). Her poetry collection Joy is So Exhausting is forthcoming from Coach House, Fall 2009. She teaches North American literatures and creative writing at the University of Windsor. She has just co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (forthcoming from Oxford U P, 2009).