2010 Authors, Moderators, and Special Guests
Gary Barwin
Gary Barwin is a poet, fiction writer, composer, and performer. Barwin’s latest book, the poetry collection, The Porcupinity of the Stars has just been released by Coach House Books. His many diverse publications include poetry: Outside the Hat and Raising Eyebrows (Coach House), Servants of Dust (No Press), anus porcupine eyebrow (Supernova Tadpole/Paper Kite), and frogments from the frag pool (with derek beaulieu) (The Mercury Press); and fiction: Doctor Weep and other Strange Teeth, Big Red Baby, and The Mud Game (a novel with Stuart Ross) (The Mercury Press). Forthcoming books include The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts; BookThug) and Kafka Franzlations: A Guide to the Imaginary Parables (with Hugh Thomas and Craig Conley; New Star). He was the co-winner of the 2010 bpNichol chapbook award for Inverting the Deer (serif of nottingham) and was a recipient of the KM Hunter Foundation Artist award. He is the author of several books for kids, including Seeing Stars which was nominated for a CLA YA Book of the Year and an Arthur Ellis Award. Barwin received a PhD in Music Composition from SUNY at Buffalo. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario with his wife and three children.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Stan Bevington
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Cathy Marie Buchanan
Cathy Marie Buchanan's debut novel, The Day the Falls Stood Still, is a Barnes & Noble Recommends Selection, a Barnes & Noble Best of 2009 book, a New York Times bestseller, an American Booksellers Association IndieNext pick and a Canada Also Reads finalist. Her stories have appeared in many of Canada's most respected literary journals. She holds a BSc (Honours Biochemistry) and an MBA from the University of Western Ontario and is a founding member of conservation organization Friends of Niagara Falls. Born and raised in Niagara Falls, Ontario, she now resides in Toronto.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Louis Cabri
Louis Cabri is a poet, critic, editor, and poetry organizer. He teaches modern and contemporary US and Canadian poetry, literary theory, and creative writing at the University of Windsor. Recent poetry appears in jacketmagazine.com, Rampike and (together with an interview by Roger Farr) The Capilano Review, in the anthologies Less Is More: The Poetics of Erasure (Simon Fraser University Gallery) and Open Text: Canadian Poetry in the 21st Century (CUE), and in the chapbooks What is Venice? (Wrinkle Press, Windsor) and —that can’t (Nomados Literary Publishers, Vancouver). Poetry is forthcoming in The Windsor Review. Through the University of Windsor, he is organizing a spring symposium (25-26 March 2011) on Ron Silliman’s booklength poem, The Alphabet.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Heather Cadsby
Heather Cadsby was born in Belleville, Ontario and moved to Toronto at a
young age. She obtained a BA degree from McMaster University and taught
elementary school for a number of years. In the 1980s she helped organize
poetry readings at the Axle-Tree Coffee House in Toronto. A co-founder of
the poetry press Wolsak and Wynn, she has recently served as a director of
the Art Bar Poetry Series. Could be is her fourth book of poetry.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Frank Davey
Frank Davey was born in Vancouver on April 19, 1940. More recently, he served as the Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario; and was the first to hold this chair. He has also taught at York University in Toronto. Davey attended the University of British Columbia and was a founding editor of TISH, the avant-garde poetry and poetics magazine of the 1960s. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind them, and the struggles between different groups in society -- racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, and economic. Davey has also been the editor of Talonbooks’s New Canadian Criticism Series. Frank Davey retired as professor at the University of Western Ontario in 2005. A conference—“Poetics and Public Culture in Canada”—was held in his honour from March 3 to 7 in that year with several scholarly and literary publications doing special issues in his honour including Open Letter and Rampike.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Adam Dickinson
Adam Dickinson’s poems have appeared in literary journals in Canada, China, the UK, and the USA. His work has also been anthologized in Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets, Post Prairie, The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Poetry from Canada and Ireland, The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science, and in Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems. His first book of poetry Cartography and Walking (Brick Books, 2002) was short listed for an Alberta Book Award. His second collection Kingdom, Phylum (Brick Books, 2006) was a finalist for the 2007 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Adam is currently Assistant Professor of poetics at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he teaches poetry, creative writing, and literary theory, and also serves as co-editor of the literary journal PRECIPICe.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
David Finch
David Finch began his comic book career at the age of 22 at Top Cow Productions, part of Image Comics. There he created Ascension and Aphrodite IX, both of which were top sellers in the business, with Aphrodite IX debuting as the number one comic book in the industry.
In 2001 he made the move to Marvel comics. His 15 issue run on Ultimate X-Men was an overnight success and helped make this book a top 3 title for the course of David's run. With the move to Avengers, David's presence once again had an instant impact, doubling sales with the first issue. This book went on to be relaunched as The New Avengers and its sales doubled the next best selling book in the industry. It remained the number one book during the course of his entire run.
Feeling the need for a change, David took on the monumental task of bringing a perennially low selling, cancelled title into the mainstream. His run on Moon Knight skyrocketed this title into the main Marvel universe and landed him a top 5 book which sold more than 5 times the titles' previous release.
Currently David is working with Lost, Heros, and Smallville executive producer, Jeph Loeb, on Marvel's smash hit Ultimatum.
In addition to his comic career, David has also worked in video games, music and film. He has worked with Zack Snyder, Giarmo Del Toro, Clive Barker, and Michael J. Strazynski, among others. His artwork can currently be seen in stores nationwide on the CD cover for the band Disturbed.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Lisa Gabriele
Lisa Gabriele was born in Windsor, Ontario and raised on french fries and gravy and orange pop at Kresge's. After years of ballet and tap lessons at Zimmerman Bondy Studios on Riverside Drive, Gabriele settled for a career writing novels (Tempting Faith DiNapoli and The Almost Archer Sisters, both national bestsellers), and is the Senior Producer of CBC TV's Dragons' Den.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Tony Gray
Tony Gray is the writer and illustrator of the daily comic strips 'Mick & Me' and 'Saturday Afternoon'. He is currently developing 'The Captivating Conduit', a daily comic strip featuring Windsor's very own superhero for publication in The Windsor Star.
Tony has provided comic book illustrations for Comico's Northstar comics line and Mic Mac Comics. He is regularly employed to contribute editorial illustrations to CanWest publications such as the Ottawa Citizen and the Windsor Star.
In 2008, Tony teamed up with Daniele Palanca, of Windsor, Ontario to form 'Legacy Comics'. Tony is currently writing and illustrating the continuing series, 'white plastic', for the Legacy Comics line.
In the rapidly becoming distant-past, Tony was the drummer for The Doomsday Dogs and Hip Knubbin. Working with Andrew Barlow (the former guitarist for Faded Films and the Doomsday Dogs) film scores and commercial soundtracks were composed and recorded. Among their clients were GM Canada, Top Drawer Productions, and Marsh Foods Inc. Tony still occasionally pull out the drumsticks for special projects or studio work.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
David Homel
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Karl Jirgens
Karl Jirgens is the author of four books including two works of fiction published by Coach House Press and Mercury Press and two scholarly studies published by ECW Press. His scholarly articles on postmodern/ postcolonial literature are published in journals around the world. His fiction and poetry appears in Canadian journals such as The Tamarack Review, Only Paper Today, Impulse, Descant, The Journal of Canadian Fiction, Inter, Filling Station, and internationally in The Ontario Review (USA), Tyuonyi (USA), UNIverse (Germany), Essex (USA), the International Symposia of Concrete & Visual Poetry (Australia), and Offerte Speciale (Italy), among others. His fictional works have been anthologized by Coach House Press, Black Moss Press, and Mercury Press. Jirgens is a grand-master of the martial art of Tae Kwon Do. Since 1979, Jirgens has edited Rampike, the international literary journal of contemporary art and writing. From 2004 to 2009 he served as the Head of the English Dept. at the University of Windsor, where he continues to serve as an Associate Professor. He is currently writing a novel as well as a scholarly study on contemporary literature and digital technology.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Jim Johnstone
Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based writer and physiologist. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008). Poems from Patternicity received Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2009 Readers’ Choice Award, a 2008 CBC Literary Award and the EJ Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and “Disgraceland” is forthcoming in Tightrope Books 2010 Best Canadian Poetry in English anthology. See: http://jimjohnstone.wordpress.com.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Susan Juby
Susan Juby is the best-selling author of the internationally popular Alice MacLeod books, recently made into a television series, and the critically acclaimed novels Getting the Girl and Another Kind of Cowboy. Her work has won the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize, been selected as a Children’s Book Sense 76 Pick, A Kirkus Editors’ Choice and an ALA Best Book, and been shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Jean Lemieux
JEAN LEMIEUX est né à Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu en 1954. Après des études en médecine à l'Université de Montréal, il pratique aux Iles-de-la-Madeleine de 1980 à 1994. Parallèlement à sa carrière médicale, il s'adonne à sa passion pour l'écriture. La Lune rouge paraît en 1991 et est traduit en anglais. Il publie ensuite, pour jeunes adultes, La Cousine des États (1993) et Le trésor de Brion (1995), ce dernier roman étant récompensé par les Prix Brive-Montréal 1995 et Christie 1996. En 2000 paraît La marche du Fou, puis de 2001 à 2007, six romans pour premiers lecteurs, la série FX Bellavance.
En 2003, Jean Lemieux publie un premier polar, On finit toujours par payer, qui remporte deux prix et fera l'objet d'une adaptation au cinéma en 2010. En 2009, le même univers, centré autour du sergent-enquêteur André Surprenant, revit dans Le mort du chemin des Arsène. Dans une prose fluide et évocatrice, Jean Lemieux crée des personnages complexes et attachants et explore avec pénétration les thèmes de la quête d'identité, des liens familiaux et de la précarité de l'amour.
Les oeuvres de Jean Lemieux ont été traduites en anglais, en espagnol et en allemand. Il vit à Québec depuis 1994. Site Internet: www.jeanlemieux.com.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Yan Li
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Alexander MacLeod
Alexander MacLeod was born in Inverness, Nova Scotia and raised in Windsor, Ontario. His award-winning short fiction has been published in many of the leading Canadian and American literary journals and collected in the 2009 Journey Prize Anthology. He holds a BA from the University of Windsor, an MA from the University of Notre Dame, and a PhD from McGill University. Alexander MacLeod lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and and teaches at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Shawn Micallef
Shawn Micallef is the author of the new book: Stroll: Psychogeographic walking tours of Toronto, published by Coach House Books. He's also a senior editor at Spacing magazine; a co-founder of [murmur], the location-based mobile-phone documentary project; managing editor of Yonge Street and a columnist for Eye Weekly. He writes about cities, culture, buildings, art and politics for a variety of media outlets, and he is also an instructor at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Mary Ann Mulhern
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Shane Neilson
Shane Neilson published Complete Physical with the Porcupine's Quill this year. He published Meniscus with Biblioasis last year. He is the editor of Frog Hollow Press, and won the Arc Poem of the Year Contest for 2010, placed in the Descant Winston Collins competition in 2009, and placed in the Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson competition in 2008. He has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, and has twice won Gold in the Kenneth R. Wilson awards.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Nino Ricci
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Stuart Ross
Stuart Ross is a poet, fictioneer, editor, and writing instructor. He sold 7,000 copies of his poetry and fiction chapbooks in the streets of Toronto during the '80s and co-founded, with Nicholas Power, the Toronto Small Press Book Fair. Stuart has edited the literary magazines Mondo Hunkamooga, Who Torched Rancho Diablo?, Dwarf Puppets on Parade and Peter O'Toole: The Magazine of One-Line Poems. His latest project is Syd & Shirley. Stuart has given hundreds of readings in Canada, the U.S., England, and Nicaragua, and has appeared at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, Banff-Calgary WordFest, Ashkenaz Festival of Yiddish Culture, MayWorks, Words in Whitby, Vancouver Jewish Book Fair, West Coast Poetry Festival, Poetry on the Rocks (Kimberley/Cranbrooke), Lucerne School Writers Festival (New Denver), the Hillside Festival (Guelph), Cleveland Performance Art Festival, the Ottawa Folk Festival, and the Toronto Mini-Festival of Sound Poetry. His work has appeared in scores of journals, including Harper's, Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Geist, Rampike, WHAT!, Industrial Sabotage, dig.Perpetual Motion Machine, Fell Swoop, Taddle Creek, and Bomb Threat Checklist. His column "Hunkamooga" appears in sub-Terrain. Stuart was the 2002 Writer in Residence for the Writers Circle of Durham Region, the 2003 Poet in Residence for the Ottawa International Writers Festival, and the 2005 Electronic Writer in Residence for Toronto Public Library's RAMP website. Stuart is the Fiction & Poetry Editor for This Magazine. In 2000, he was a Finalist for the Trillium Book Award, for Farmer Gloomy's New Hybrid. His acclaimed short-story collection, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books, 2009), recently went into a second printing.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Richard Scarsbrook
Richard Scarsbrook is the award-winning author of the books Cheeseburger Subversive, Featherless Bipeds, and Destiny’s Telescope. His brand-new novel, The Monkeyface Chronicles, is already receiving fabulous reviews. He teaches creative writing courses at George Brown College, Humber Colleges, and Toronto Writers’ Centre, runs a freelance editing business, plays and sings in several bands, and sometimes sleeps. Find out more about his swashbuckling literary adventures at www.richardscarsbrook.com.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Christopher Shulgan
Christopher Shulgan is an award-winning writer who contributes essays and feature articles to various magazines and newspapers in the United States and Canada. His second book, Superdad: A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood, is the story of Shulgan's struggles with crack cocaine and the responsibilities brought on by the birth of his first child. It was released in October with Key Porter books. His first book, the critically acclaimed political history, The Soviet Ambassador: The Making of the Radical Behind Perestroika, was released in 2008 and shortlisted for the largest prize for non-fiction published in Canada, the National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. A paperback edition of The Soviet Ambassador is due out with McClelland & Stewart in March of 2010. Shulgan completed his undergraduate degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and has a Master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He lives with his wife and two children in Toronto, and he's online at www.shulgan.com.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Michel Thérien
Michel Thérien, poète d´Ottawa, a publié ses premiers poèmes dans des journaux et des revues littéraires lorsqu´il poursuivait ses études à l´Université d´Ottawa. Par la suite, il a fait carrière comme professeur et fonctionnaire ici au Canada et à l´étranger. En 1998, il a renoué avec la poésie et a publié Fleuves de mica (Éditions David, Ottawa, 1998, finaliste, Prix Christine Dumitriu-Van-Saanen 1999), Corps sauvage (Éditions David et Éditions d´art Le Sabord, 2000, finaliste, Prix Trillium 2001 et Prix Christine Dumitriu-Van-Saanen 2001), Eaux d´Ève (Éditions David et Éditions d´art Le Sabord, 2002, finaliste, Prix Trillium 2002) et L´aridité des fleuves (Éditions David, 2004). Bon nombre de ses poèmes ont paru dans des revues littéraires et des anthologies au Canada et ailleurs.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Rhonda Welsh
Rhonda Welsh was Born in metro Detroit and is the youngest of four daughters. Her parents Forrest Murray and Rebie Mae Owens (nee Jordan) are both from Warrenton, Georgia. Although Rhonda is a city girl through and through, she acknowledges the profound impact her parents’ southern roots have had upon her. Her biggest artistic influences are Gil Scott Heron, Nikki Giovanni, Phoebe Snow, and Langston Hughes. Rhonda’s own work fuses poetry and music. Every piece is meant to be read out loud and every piece has a rhythm. Whether it’s life, love, lust, self-realization, loss, or faith, few topics are off-limits. Her work has been performed at museums, libraries, churches, halls, restaurants, parks, bars, festivals, living rooms, kitchens and a number of other venues. Rhonda is also an arts educator and she has taught with the award-winning InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the renowned Wayne State University Math Corps Program (in the Creative Writing program). She graduated from Cass Technical High School’s Performing Arts program and she holds a BA in English and an MA in Public Relations and Communications from Wayne State University. She resides in metro Detroit, Michigan.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor:
Ian Williams
Ian Williams is the author of You Know Who You Are (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010).
His first collection of short stories, Not Anyone's Anything, is forthcoming
from Freehand books in 2011.
He completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is
currently an assistant professor of American literature at Fitchburg State
College in Massachusetts. Williams has held fellowships or residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Cave
Canem, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Palazzo Rinaldi in Italy.
He was also a scholar at the National Humanities Center Summer Institute for
Literary Study. His writing has appeared in Arc, Fiddlehead, Contemporary
Verse 2, Rattle, jubilat, Confrontation, The Antigonish Review, Gargoyle,
Folio, Pebble Lake Review, Callaloo, Descant, and Matrix Magazine. He divides his time between Ontario and Massachusetts.
- Appearances at BookFestWindsor: