Date: February 10, 2025
Features:
Leslie Roach is a poet and lawyer, based in Ottawa. Her debut collection of poetry, Finish this Sentence, was published by Mawenzi House in Toronto – it deals with healing from the negative mental health effects of racism.
Leslie has lived and worked in Italy, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya and Senegal, as an International Civil Servant with the United Nations, where she specialized in employment law and human resources management. Since returning to Canada, she has worked for the Parliament of Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada, and most recently, the National Gallery of Canada. She is a Canada Council for the Arts grantee and has forthcoming collections of poetry.
She writes about: challenging the status quo; personal power; society; the world of work; bureaucracies; the power of the written word; and mysticism. Leslie was born and raised in Montreal to parents who immigrated to Canada from Barbados - they taught her the value of hard work; education; belief in oneself; and human decency.
Linzey Corridon is a writer, Vanier Canada Scholar, and PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His doctoral dissertation examines evidence of sexual fluidity in select Anglophone, multi-island Caribbean nation-states, in an attempt to further transform ongoing conversations about the nature of individual desires and collective freedoms across the region. Linzey’s critical and creative research can be found in, among other venues, Canada and Beyond, Wasafiri, sx salon, Journal of West Indian Literature, and more. Born and raised in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, he now resides in Canada. West of West Indian is his debut book-length project.
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Date: February 3, 2025
Features:
Matthew Welsh is a poet from the Maritimes whose first book, These are not the potatoes of my youth, was shortlisted for the Trillium poetry award and the Gerald Lampert award. Their second book, Terrarium, released this year with Icehouse/Goose Lane. You can find new poems from them in Bad Dog Magazine’s September 2024 issue.
Keith Garebian of Mississauga, Ontario has received plaudits for his poetry collections such as Frida: Paint Me as a Volcano, Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems, Children of Ararat, Poetry is Blood, Against Forgetting, Finger to Finger, In the Bowl of My Eye, and Three-Way Renegade. One of his Jarman poems was set to music for choir and instruments by celebrated American composer Gregory Spears, in the company of a poem each by Thomas Merton and Denise Levertov. Spears’s work entitled The Tower and the Garden is available on CD from Navona Records. Garebian has served on juries for the Gerald Lampert and Raymond Souster Awards, and has won many awards and grants, including a writing grant from the Canada Council, over three dozen from the OAC, and two micro-grants from the Mississauga Arts Council, one of which funded his CD of poems from Poetry is Blood.
Stay is his twelfth poetry collection.
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Date: January 27, 2025
Features:
Paula Eisenstein is the author of the novel Flip Turn from Mansfield Press based on her coming of age years in competitive swimming and family trauma and of the Pinhole Poetry chapbook Flight Problems: Amelia Earhart Poems. Paula has been writing Amelia poems since 2015 with publications in The Rusty Toque, The Puritan, Pinhole Poetry and Big Smoke Poetry. She relocated from Toronto with her husband visual artist Larry Eisenstein to The Village of Gagetown in rural New Brunswick in 2020 just as the Covid pandemic hit. The Wolastoq/St. John River is in her back yard. www.paulaeisenstein.com
Myna Wallin, a Toronto-born poet and prose writer, was published in Antigonish Review, Vallum Magazine, Quarantine Review, Sledgehammer, Miramichi Reader, League of Canadian Poets’ chapbook On the Storm/In the Struggle, Event Magazine, and The Literary Review of Canada, among many others. Myna has a master’s degree in English from the University of Toronto. Wallin was longlisted for the 2022 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. Her short fiction received an honourable mention in Esoterica Magazine’s Inaugural Fiction Contest, 2023. Anatomy of An Injury, her third book, was published by Inanna Publications (2018). Her fourth book, The Suicide Tourist, was published by Ekstasis Editions, June 2024.
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Date: January 20th
Features:
Mary Dean Lee: Mary Dean Lee’s poetry has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2021, Hamilton Stone Review, The Fiddlehead, Salvation South, Ploughshares, Burningword, as well as other journals. Her debut poetry collection, Tidal, was published by Pine Row Press in March 2024. She grew up in Milledgeville, Georgia, studied theatre and literature at Duke University and Eckerd College. After completing her PhD in organizational behavior at Yale, she moved to Montreal to teach at McGill University.
Renée M. Sgroi: Renée published her first poetry collection, life print, in points (erbacce-press) in 2020, and her second collection, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding was recently published by Guernica Editions to much fanfare. Her poems have been published in such journals as Funicular Magazine, Parentheses Journal, Literary Review of Canada,Pinhole Poetry, the /tƐmz/ review, The Prairie Journal, The Windsor Review, with work forthcoming in Augur Magazine. A member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, and the Canadian Authors’ Association, Renée is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.
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Date: January 13th
Features:
Peter Taylor: Peter Taylor’s latest book “Cities Within Us” has been nominated for several awards. His poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Descant, The Ekphrastic Review, Grain, Into the Void and The Toronto Quarterly, and his writing has been published in Australia, the Caribbean, India, Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. His first collection, Trainer, a mosaic of poems capturing his father’s experience as a pilot during the Second World War, included an introductory poem by Raymond Souster. His experimental verse play, Antietam, won honourable mention in the international War Poetry Contest in Northampton, Massachusetts. Born in Edmonton, he lives in Aurora, Ontario.
Liz Worth: Liz Worth is a poet, novelist and nonfiction writer. She is a two-time nominee for the ReLit Award for Poetry for her books The Truth is Told Better This Way and No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol. Her first book, Treat Me Like Dirt, was the first of its kind to provide an in-depth history of southern Ontario’s first wave punk movement. Her new poetry book, Inside Every Dream, a Raging Sea, is published through Book*hug Press.
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Date: January 6th
Features:
Raymond Helkio: Raymond is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design, whose work has been shown at international film, theatre, and design festivals including Inside Out Film Festival, Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, Design Exchange, Videofag, Art Gallery of Ontario, Glad Day Bookshop, Artscape and Nuit Rose. They are also a member of the League Of Canadian Poets and host of Poetry Open Mic at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre.
Armand Garnett Ruffo: Armand was born and raised in remote northern Ontario and is a band member of the Chapleau Fox Lake Cree First Nation with familial roots to the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation. He is recognized as a major contributor to both contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. Among his many publications, he co-edited Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism, and Oxford’s An Anthology of Indigenous Literature in English: Voices from Canada. His own publications include Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird, and Treaty #, both finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. His latest book is The Dialogues: the Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, winner of the 2024 VMI Betsy Warland “Between Genres” Award. He currently lives in Kingston and teaches at Queen’s University.
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