2025 Senior National Finals Hosts & Judges

Wayde Compton is the author of six books and the editor of two literary anthologies. His collection of short stories, The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2015 and he won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2011. His work has been a finalist for three other City of Vancouver Book Awards as well as the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2006 Compton co-founded Commodore Books, Western Canada’s first Black Canadian literary press. He has been writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, Green College at the University of British Columbia, and the Vancouver Public Library. Compton currently teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. His latest book is Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics (U of Alberta P, 2024).

Stéphane Despatie is the editor of Entracte Magazine, a bookseller, literary and theatrical columnist for Radio-Canada radio and television, the weekly Voir and the daily La Presse, director of the Filigrane collection at Editions Trait d'union, the general manager of Écrits des Forges, administrative director of the multidisciplinary Phénomena festival and the general manager of Arion Orchestre Baroque. He has also served on the boards of the Maison de la poésie de Montréal, the Union des écrivaines et écrivains du Québec and the Association nationale des éditeurs du livre. He is one of the founders of the Marché de la poésie de Montréal, the current director of the poetry magazine, Exit, and a publisher at Éditions Mains libres.

His poetic work includes several collections, such as : Engoulevents, Ceux-là and Garder le feu. He has also published the story Réservé aux chiens and the novel Fretless. His work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, English, German, Turkish and Russian. He was a finalist for Estuaire magazine's Prix Terrasse Saint-Sulpice in 2001 and winner of the Prix de poésie Gatien-Lapointe - Jaime-Sabines 2022 awarded by the Seminario de Cultura de Mexico and the Festival international de la poésie de Trois-Rivières.

He has taken part in many major literary festivals in France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Italy, Argentina, the United States and Mexico.

Louise Dupré is a poet, novelist and professor from Quebec. She taught creative writing for twenty years at the University of Quebec in Montreal. A member of the Académie des lettres du Québec, Royal Society of Canada and Order of Canada, she has twice received the Grand Prix Québecor of the Festival International de la Poésie and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her poetry reveals an rare impetus and lyricism, witness to a fruitful thought. Dupré shows that, even at the darkest hour, one can find a healing voice. In 2020, her collection Plus haut que les flammes was the subject of a feature film directed by Monique LeBlanc and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Her latest collection, Exercices de joie, was published in 2022 by Éditions du Noroît in Montreal and Éditions Bruno Doucey in Paris. She has just published the non-fiction L'homme au camion with Héliotrope.

Evelyn Lau is the Vancouver author of fourteen books, including nine volumes of poetry. Her first book, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (HarperCollins, 1989) was published when she was 18; it was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh in her first major role. Evelyn's short stories, essays and novel have been translated into a dozen languages. Her poetry has received the Milton Acorn Award, the Pat Lowther Award, the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry, a National Magazine Award and nominations for the BC Book Prize and the Governor-General's Award.  Her poems in journals have been chosen numerous times for inclusion in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series. Evelyn Lau's poetry is recognized for its emotional intensity and search for honesty;  narrative and lyrical, her early work explored her difficult past, while later work has revolved around themes of relationships, urban life, cultural background, mortality and the natural world.  From 2011-2014, she served as Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver. Evelyn's most recent collection is Cactus Gardens (Anvil, 2022), which was included in CBC's Top 20 Poetry Books of 2022, and shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award. Her tenth collection of poetry, Parade of Storms, will be published by Anvil in 2025.

Born in Lebanon in 1961, Nadine Ltaif spent her first thirteen years in her native country before she immigrated to Montreal in 1979. After her first collection of poems, Les métamorphoses d’Ishtar (1987), she became known for writing the experience of migration and exile, drawing on mythologies from the Middle East, and measuring her narrative against the realities of her new country and host city. Inspired as much by Japanese poetry as by the great Lebanese poet Adonis, Nadine Ltaif's work is also rooted in feminism. Her collection Entre les fleuves was shortlisted for the Nelligan Prize, the most important poetry prize for emerging poets in Quebec. Her work has been translated into many languages, and Ltaif has herself worked on literary translations. She studied literature at the University of Montréal and works for a film production company. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the digital magazine Mïtra. Her latest book, Chant des créatures, was published in 2024.

Her blog: https://lescarnetsdishtar.blogspot.com/

Jane Munro is a Vancouver writer and educator. False Creek (Harbour Publishing, 2022), is her newest poetry book. It balances her signature themes - dream life, the visual arts, the mysteries of the natural world - with an urgent, more directly political voice. Her prose memoir, Open Every Window (Douglas & McIntyre, 2021) and Glass Float (Brick Books, 2020), her seventh poetry collection, both came out during the pandemic. Now, she is glad to be doing in-person readings again and in-person events.

Blue Sonoma, Munro's sixth poetry book, was the 2015 Canadian winner of The Griffin Prize For Excellence In Poetry. The judges said: “Blue Sonoma unflinching as its poems are … achieves an engaging liveliness as a result of the poet’s earthy voice, colloquial wit, and acute descriptive powers. In primarily short lines of impressive transparency, Munro’s writing, replete with natural images of Canada’s west coast, celebrates, even as it confronts with blunt honesty, the sensuous passage through the years towards whatever transition must follow … and leads us, with gentleness but no apology, into the realm of riveting and ultimate contemplation.”

Munro is a member (with Mary Di Michele, Susan Gillis, and Jan Conn) of Yoko’s Dogs, a poetry collective composing innovative collaborative linked verse.