photo credit: Javier Sotres
Carolyn Nakagawa is a Vancouver-based poet and playwright whose work has appeared in publications such as The Malahat Review, the new quarterly, and Poetry is Dead. Her current theatrical project is The New Canadians, a musical about young Japanese Canadians who ran a community newspaper in the 1940s before and after the forced uprooting of their community from Vancouver.
Dara-Lyn Shrager is an editor and poet in Princeton, NJ. Her poems have appeared in many journals and her first full-length poetry collection, "Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee", was published by Barrow Street Books in 2018. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Radar Poetry, an online poetry and art journal. She has taught poetry workshops in many settings and is currently the Poet-in-Residence at the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, NJ.
J.J. Lokshtanov (né Locke) is coordinator of the Frank Scott Poetry Day (August 1). Previously, he was coordinator of the 2008 Montreal International Public Poetry Festival, organizer of the O Canada rewrite contest, and director of the 2009 Leonard Cohen 75th birthday events . In addition, J.J. was VIA Rail's 2011 Destination's Magazine in-house poet. He has read his work in Canada, the US, and France. His latest work, The Snow In Nepal, was published in the anthology, Eternal Snow, Nirala Publications. In 2004, his first book of poetry, Freedom's Narrow Window, was published.
Christine Leviczky Riek is a poet and photographer from Surrey, BC. Her poetry has been published in The Capilano Review, and Pulp Literature. Her photographs have been shown in galleries throughout the Lower Mainland.
Athena Kildegaard is the author of five books of poetry. She holds an M.A.T./English from the University of Chicago and teaches in the English and Environmental Studies programs at the University of Minnesota Morris, where she also directs the Honors Program. Kildegaard's poems have appeared widely in such journals as Malahat Review, Ecotone, RHINO, Rattle, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been set as art song and for chorus by several Minnesota composers, including Libby Larsen. She is now collaborating with a Minnesota composer to create a longer choral and instrumental work on the theme of immigration.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Both her collections of poetry, Hump and Stowaways, won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She recently co-edited GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House, 2018) with Rosanna Deerchild and Tanis MacDonald. In 2019, she will publish two books: Treed, a book of urban-forest essays with Wolsak & Wynn in spring and and TreeTalk: Winnipeg, a chapbook/trade poetry collection with At Bay Press in fall.
I am a poet who's been writing for many years. I've self published a book of poetry back in 2006. I am still working on my craft. I have Asperger Syndrome.
Le Roy Wan is a queer performer, artist and storyteller hailing from their home of East Vancouver. They want to thank all the folks who make Art Song Lab possible, including Rachel Iwassa and Rodney Sherman. Wan is currently a reporter for the queer community news program, OutLook TV. They are also a part of the performance art collective, "Leroy + The Lovebots".
Barbara Black recently won first prize in the 2017 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition and was a fiction finalist in The Malahat Review 2017 Open Season Awards. Other publications include Freefall, The New Quarterly, and Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal. A recipient of the $1000 first prize in the 2017 Don’t Talk To Me About Love Poetry Contest, her poems have also appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, FreeFall, Forage Poetry, The Dying Dahlia Review, and Poems from Planet Earth. She lives in Victoria, BC, where she’s currently busy riding the twisties on her new motorcycle.
I am a Mohawk poet from Six Nations living on Coast Salish territory (Victoria) since 1994. I have 5 published poetry titles with a 6th due out in Fall 2018. I served as Victoria Poet Laureate 2012-2015. I am a sound artist and enjoyed hosting the Native Waves Radio show on CFUVfm for 10 years and Tribal Clefs Music Column on CBC one for 8 years. I am a spoken word poet, performance poet and produce video poems and audio poems. Self-produced samples of my poetry with music can be found on my soundcloud sites.
Irina Rakina is a multimedia artist and writer. She creates interdisciplinary pieces, as well as digital art and poetry. Irina has exhibited her short film ‘/(mind/body)\’ for the duration of a week in Alexander Studio of S.F.U. That project optically explored Cartesian mind | body separation. She has taken part in a group exhibition in Audain gallery. Irina wrote and performed a poem about her experiences with mind-altering states. Irina participated in the Vancouver Outsider Art Festival providing her photography with phenomenological writing. She’s an art and film reviewer for the SAD magazine. Irina intends to find the precarious balance between visual and textual forms of expression one day.
Leanne Boschman is a prairie transplant to the West coast where she works as a writer of poetry, fiction, and as post-secondary educator. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including Poems from Planet Earth, Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia, and Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry. She has also published in journals including Prism International, Room, Geist Magazine, and Dandelion Magazine. In 2009, she published a collection of poetry Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal with Leaf Press.
A poet and educator who lives in Vancouver, JCortens has long taught Burning Karma, a seminar exploring writing from memory and life experience for novice writers.
His poems have appeared in the journal The Maynard. He participated in a collaborative writing project Poetic Pairings hosted by Pandora’s Collective in Spring 2017. He presented at Light within the Shadows: Celebrating Pnina Granirer in December 2017.
His first collection of poems exploring the search for love in a fractured world, is searching for a home. He is collecting fragments entitled Every Scar is a Story exploring collective experiences of the gaymale communities.
I have been writing poetry since I was eight years old, when I won an award for a poem on water safety. As an adult I extended my work into personal essays and memoir. My work has appeared in a variety of small publications and I led creative writing workshops for more than twenty years. In 2007 I started learning operatic singing, and since then I have written two opera libretti, one at the request of my artsonglab 2015 collaborator, Kaley Lane Eaton. Another artsonglab 2015 composer, Katya Pine, is well into composing my other libretto.
mia susan amir works at the intersection of creative and community practice as an educator, cultural organizer, writer, and theatre artist creating immersive, interdisciplinary, and site-specific works. mia’s writing has appeared on SpiderWebShow, Lemon Hound, Digging Through the Fat, and in Sustenance: An Anthology of Writers from B.C. and Beyond on the Subject of Food, Anvil Press. mia is the Creative Director of The Story We Be, the Associate Dramaturg at PTC, and a Dramaturg with the Virago Play Series. She lives and works on the unceded and occupied territories of the x?m?θkw?y??m (Musqueam), Skwxwu?7mesh (Squamish), and S?l?i?lw?ta?/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Kagan Goh is an award-winning filmmaker, published author, spoken word poet, and mental health advocate and activist. Kagan has been published in numerous anthologies, periodicals and magazines. Select Books in Singapore published his first book, Who Let in the Sky? Goh is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker with a number of releases, including the award-winning Mind Fuck (1996) and Stolen Memories (2012). His films have been broadcast on national television and gained entry into respected film festivals across Canada. His personal mission is to educate people about mental health issues and fight the stigma against the mentally ill.
Cory is a writer, performer, director and producer and has worked as a theatre artist for more than 30 years. Cory’s writing credits include Peaches & Scream (co-written with Mercedes Baines), the award winning Marking Time, Faith, Bob, Contrary, Sorry, Scarlet, Late, Slippage, and Fever Cabaret. As a performer, favourite acting credits include Mud & Men Inside (Ruby Slippers Productions), Bad Dollies (Women in View Festival) Her Big Break (These 4 Walls Productions), By Choice (Twelve Minutes Max), Faith and Bob (La Luna Productions) and Slippage (Wild Filly Productions).
Cory is the Theatre and Events Services Coordinator at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby where she is the Artistic Director for the Shadbolt’s theatre season, directs the Artist-in-Residency program and manages Special events and concerts in Deer Lake Park. Cory was one of the founding members and co-artistic director of La Luna Productions (1998-2007).
Cory is a graduate of the Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and she has just completed her MA in Graduate Liberal Studies program at SFU. Her thesis project was her play, Hoarding Paradise, about a woman with Compulsive Hoarding Disorder.
