Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s short fiction and poetry have been published in many of Canada’s best literary magazines, including The New Quarterly, The FIddlehead, This Magazine, PRISM International, Prairie Fire, Descant, and CV2. She won the Lina Chartrand Award for Poetry in 2007 and her chapbook, Letter on St Valentine's Day, was published by The Emergency Response Unit in 2010. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and her work is taught as part of the short story curriculum at the University of Waterloo. She lives in Toronto, where she is currently at work on a novel.
Anthony De Sa was born in 1966 and grew up in Toronto’s fledgling Portuguese community. His short fiction has been published in several international literary magazines. Barnacle Love is Anthony's first book and has garnered critical acclaim across Canada and the U.S.A. Barnacle Love was a finalist for Canada’s most prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize and a finalist for The Toronto Book Award. His novel in progress, Carnival of Desire, will be set in 1977, the year a twelve-year-old shoeshine boy named Emanuel Jaques was brutally raped and murdered in Toronto. Anthony lives in Toronto with his wife and three boys.
Maria Meindl’s essays and fiction have appeared in journals including The Literary Review of Canada, Descant and Musicworks. She has made two series for CBC Radio’s Ideas: Parent Care, and Remembering Polio. She has two publications coming up soon: Outside the Box: the Life and Legacy of Writer Mona Gould, the Grandmother I Thought I Knew from McGill Queens University Press, and a story “The Last Judgment” from Found Press. http://www.bodylanguagejournal.wordpress.com/
Sheila Murray’s short fiction has been published in Descant, The Dalhousie Review, Exile, and is forthcoming in the Diaspora Dialogues anthology, TOK: Writing the New City. She has completed a collection of short stories, Upside Down, and a novel, Edward, supported by the Toronto Arts Council. Based in Toronto, Sheila writes about immigration and is a documentary filmmaker and sound editor.
Elana Wolff has taught English as a Second Language at York University and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently divides her time between writing, editing, and facilitating therapeutic community art. Elana's poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Her third collection, You Speak to Me in Trees (Guernica, 2006), was awarded the 2008 F.G. Bressani Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Implicate Me (Guernica, 2010), is a collection of short essays on individual poems by Toronto-area poets; a new book of poems, Startled Night, is forthcoming this fall.
And as emcee...
Michelle Alfano is a co-organizer of the (Not So) Nice Italian Girls & Friends Reading Series and a Co-Editor with Descant. Her novella Made Up of Arias (Blaurock Press) won the 2010 Bressani Prize for Short Fiction. Her short story “Opera”, on which her novella Made Up Of Arias is based, was a finalist for a Journey Prize anthology. Her fiction and non-fiction work has been widely published in major literary publications. She will be featured in a forthcoming documentary on the passengers, and the children of the passengers, of the Saturnia which will be featured on OMNI-TV. She is currently at work at a new novel entitled Vita’s Prospects.
