Sharon Berg
Sharon Berg lives on the eastern coast of Newfoundland. She writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that focuses on First Nations history and education. She founded Big Pond Rumours International Literary E-Zine (for poetry, fiction and book reviews) and its associated Chapbook Press in January 2006 and closed it with the Summer issue in August 2019. She also taught elementary school for many years, as well as conducting education seminars at the university level. She can adapt her observations and comments about writing to a variety of grade levels. She connects with students of all abilities and knows that students learn best when a) they are having fun, and b) they are using multiple skills. Sharon believes that poetry is not a staid old art but a relevant and exciting opportunity for self-expression. She enjoys asking students to create 3D poetry, wherein art, geometry, and poetry are combined on one geometric shape, such as an illustrated haiku on a tetrahedron (or triangle-based pyramid).
Bathélemy Bolivar
Born in Haiti, Bathélemy Bolivar emigrated to the United States in 2000 to study computer sciences while teaching physics. In 2002, he settled in Winnipeg, where he continued to teach. In 2011, his master’s studies in Education and Online Business gave him the opportunity, with the help of friends from Haiti and elsewhere, to launch the École haïtienne sans Frontières (Haitian School Without Borders), the mission of which is to provide free, high-quality education to Haitian students.
Bathélemy Bolivar has published many poetry books, including Manguiers têtus (which won the Rue-Deschambault Prize in 2006), Re-bondir, mots de terre/voices of the earth, which is bilingual, and Tempo.
Véronique Grenier
Véronique Grenier has been teaching philosophy at the college level since 2009. She is the author, with Éditions de Ta Mère, of the poetry collections Carnet de parc (2019) and Chenous (2017), and wrote the story Hiroshimoi (2016), which was also published in Switzerland by Paulette éditrice in November 2017. She has also published a poetry collection for young people at La courte échelle, Colle-moi (2020). She has collaborated with several collectives (Sous la ceinture : unis pour vaincre la culture du viol, Québec Amérique ; Libérer la colère, Remue-Ménage ; Avec pas une cenne, Québec Amérique). She has also worked with the magazines Art Le Sabord, Les Écrits, XYZ. La revue de la nouvelle, Jet d'encre and Exit, and on the stageplay Strindberg (spring 2019, directed by Luce Pelletier). She has been contributing to the "Ideas" section of the newspaper Le Devoir since the fall of 2020. She is a columnist - notably as a "philosopher of circumstance" on the program Et si on se faisait du bien, ICI Radio-Canada, summer 2018 -, a blogger (Les p'tits pis moé), and a speaker. She was a spokesperson for the provincial campaign "Sans oui, c'est non!" to counter sexual violence (2015-2018). She was the winner of the Grand Prix du livre de la ville de Sherbrooke in 2020 (creative component), received the Estrie Merit Award in January 2018, was the recipient of the 2017 Jean-Claude-Simard Award from the Quebec Philosophical Society and was the recipient of the "Coup de cœur" Award from the Conseil de la culture de l'Estrie in 2015. She loves kitsch and quotes and hates requests made to the Universe.
Paul Savoie
Born in Manitoba, francophone poet Paul Savoie (b. 1946) has published works in various genres, including short stories, and translations of poetry into both English and French; he has also composed music. A bilingual writer and proponent of linguistic diversity, he established his talent with his first collection of poetry. His work is personal, and his gaze is straightforward, persistent, and vigilant. His poems foreground the search for love and the place of the individual and the imaginary. Advocating the importance of the individual, this poet of solitude proclaims the universailty of poetry. Savoie received the Trillium Book Award in 2007.
Jacob Scheier
Jacob is a Governor General’s Award-winning poet from Toronto. His third full length collection Is This Scary? — which engages mental and chronic, physical illness — was published in spring 2021 with ECW Press. The book was called "witty and affecting" by the Toronto Star. He has facilitated poetry workshops for over a decade, including being the former poet in residence at Madonna Catholic Secondary School, in Toronto, through Descant’s Writers in the Schools program. He has also facilitated writing workshops with Indigenous communities in Western Ontario and the Yukon. He is most interested in writing out of personal experience, and particularly about being a psychiatric consumer-survivor, in the tradition of the confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. He is, additionally, interested in writing from a Disability Studies or ‘Crip’ perspective, and often incorporates humour in his poems — inspired by the wit of Leonard Cohen, Al Purdy and the New York School poets, such as Frank O’Hara.
Titilope Sonuga
Titilope Sonuga is a Nigerian-Canadian writer, poet, playwright and performer whose work grasps for moments of tenderness and persistent joy at the intersection of blackness and womanhood. She is the author of three award-winning collections of poetry, Down to Earth (2011), Abscess (2014), and This Is How We Disappear (2019) and has composed and released two spoken word albums, Mother Tongue (2011) and Swim (2019). Titilope has written three plays, The Six; an intergenerational exploration of womanhood, Naked; a one-woman play and Ada The Country, a musical. She has scripted global advertising campaigns for brands including; The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Intel Corporation, Guaranty Trust Bank and The MacArthur Foundation. She was an actor on the hit television series Gidi Up, which aired across Africa. Her writing has been translated into Italian, German and Slovak. She is the 9th Poet Laureate of the City of Edmonton.