Stephanie Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award in 1998 and appeared in French with Les Éditions du Noroît in 2007. She has also published two other poetry collections, Two Bowls of Milk and Pavilion in , 1999 and 2002, respectively. Her new book, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, is forthcoming in 2011.
Bolster is also the editor of The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, and Stephanie is co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems. Raised in Burnaby, B.C., she now teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal.
Adam Dickinson’s first book of poetry Cartography and Walking (Brick Books, 2002) was shortlisted for an Alberta Book Award. His second book, Kingdom, Phylum, was a finalist for the 2007 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals across Canada and internationally. He teaches poetry and poetics at Brock University in St. Catharine’s, Ontario.
A native of Gimli, Manitoba, Simone Gillies has built her career around the love of radio and storytelling. Initially interested in becoming a sports broadcaster, after graduating as a journalism major from Red River College in Winnipeg, she realized that her passion was to tell the story of the people behind the scores and the stats, and she changed her career focus. Simone then began to build her experience in the radio industry, first as an account manager for two Winnipeg commercial radio stations and then as a morning radio show host. In 2009, she was selected to be one of the first two recipients of the Corus Entertainment New Radio Program scholarship at The Banff Centre, which allowed her to interview and train with world-class artists and recording engineers while producing several audio pieces.
After completing the scholarship term, she was asked to stay on in a new Podcast Producer position for The Banff Centre’s library department, where she continues to work. More of her audio pieces can be heard on the The Banff Centre’s iTunes U podcast channel.
Sue Goyette lives in Halifax and has published two books of poems and a novel. She has been nominated for several awards including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and she has won a 2008 CBC Literary Prize (poetry). Her third collection of poems is forthcoming from Brick Books. Her poetry has appeared on the Toronto subway system, in wedding vows, and has been spray-painted on a sidewalk somewhere in St. John, New Brunswick. Sue teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.
Photo Credit: Pete Munro
Enrique Servín Herrera is a linguist, poet, and translator from Chihuahua, Mexico. He has done research on language conflict phenomena and the Mexican Indigenous oral tradition. He has translated into Spanish poems from Catalan, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and other languages. He has published El Agua y la Sombra (Water and Shadows, poetry), Imágenes para un Reencuentro (Images for an Encounter, anthology of world poetry), Ralámuli Ra’ichábo (a method for learning the Uto-Aztecan Tarahumara language) as well as several other books, as a co-author. He has received the Fuentes Mares National Award for Poetry and is currently working as a cultural promoter.
Philip Holmes is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. at Princeton University, where he has directed the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He has held visiting positions at: The University of California Berkeley, Université de Montreal, California Institute of Technology, and at Paul Erdôs Mathematical Center, Budapest, Hungary. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994.
He has published over 200 papers and has co-authored several books in his areas of expertise, and he is a poet. He has contributed to the mathematical foundations and applications of dynamical systems or ‘chaos theory,’ His current interests focus on the neuromechanics of legged locomotion and swimming (or why it’s hard to catch cockroaches and lampreys).
David (Jhave) Johnston is a multimedia-poet currently living in Montreal. He is a web-curator and independent media-arts practitioner, involved in numerous collaborative and solo digital and in-situ art practises. His focus is language-based online digital art, combinatorial poetics and multimedia poetry. Currently, he is developing works that feature typographic experiments built through a synthesis of Flash, Mudbox, Vegas, Ableton Suite, After Effects and Mr. Softie. As well, he is working and exhibiting with, among others, FILE, Champ Libre, Bioteknica,Turbulence.org, Ollivier Dyens, OBX, TML, Symbiosis, Zoi…).
His work has been exhibited at 3 new media Biennales: Montreal 2003 & 2009, and Toronto 2004.
His current home site is www.glia.ca
He co-curates www.year01.com
Bio Photo Credit: Thanh Pham
Elena E. Johnson is a poet who has a degree in environmental studies and an MFA in creative writing. As a field ecologist, she has banded wood thrushes in southern Ontario, documented vegetative communities in the boreal forest, and designed and implemented the restoration of a small wetland. In 2008 she was writer-in-residence at a remote research station in the Yukon. She’s currently finishing her first collection of poems, many of which have something to do with ecology. Her work can be found in the anthology Rocksalt: Contemporary Poets of British Columbia.
Joseph Mazur is Professor of Mathematics at Marlboro College where he has taught a wide range of classes in all areas of mathematics, its history and philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from M.I.T., is a Guggenheim Fellow and has authored many educational software programs, including Explorations in Calculus, the first interactive, multimedia CD package of simulations for calculus. He is the author of Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Mathematics chosen as one of Choice’s 2005 Outstanding Academic Titles of the Year). His latest book is The Motion Paradox: The 2,500-Year Old Puzzle Behind All the Mysteries of Time and Space. A new book on the history, mathematics and psychology of gambling, What’s Luck Got To Do With It? will be published by Princeton University Press in June 2010.
He is currently working on new writing projects, including:
Meaning? The Origins of Modern Icons, Signs and Symbols in Mathematics, Poetry and Life.
Don McKay is a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry, for Night Field and Another Gravity. McKay has written twelve books of poetry, including Birding, or Desire and Apparatus. A recent collection, Camber: Selected Poems, was a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year. Slip/Strike won both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2007.
He has worked as an editor and creative writing teacher at University of Western Ontario, University of New Brunswick, Brick Books, Sage Hill Writing Experience, the BC Festival of the Arts, and The Banff Centre. From 1991 to 1996, he was editor of Fiddlehead magazine.
At present, Don makes his home in St John’s, Newfoundland.
RICHARD MILES received a MFA in poetry from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught creative writing at The University of Arizona and The University of Maine at Machias. He co-founded the Aspen Writers’ Conference and Workshop in 1974. Miles published The Evener, a draft horse magazine, for three years before turning to stonework and sculpture full time. His book of poems, Boat of Two Shores, appeared in ’07 from UMM Press and his next book, Refusing Capture, will be out in September ‘10. He has exhibited his sculpture at The Powers Gallery at The University of Maine and his outdoor pieces reside on the grounds of The Oak Point Retreat in down east Maine as well as in private collections.
Lance Olsen is author of twenty books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novel Head in Flames (Chiasmus, 2009). He teaches narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.
His website: www.lanceolsen.com
Photo Credit: Andi Olsen
Evalyn Parry is an award-winning spoken word artist, songwriter, and theatre creator. Her solo and collaborative performances have taken her to music, storytelling, poetry, and theatre festivals from coast to coast in North America, and she has released three critically acclaimed CDs of music and spoken word (most recently Small Theatres, on Borealis Records) as well as a live concert DVD and several video poems. Known for the outspoken, political commentary that runs through her work, evalyn has been commissioned to create work on a wide variety of topical issues for CBC radio and television, as well as for many social justice organizations. She is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award (Ontario Arts Council), The Beth Ferguson Award and nomination for the KM Hunter Award for Music (Ontario Arts Council). Her newest creation is a show entitled SPIN, a music-and-spoken-word-cycle which explores the connections between bicycles, women, and advertising. The show will will premiere this summer at the Sound Symposium in Newfoundland. www.evalynparry.com
Paolo Pietropaolo is a documentary producer, broadcaster, writer, and musician based in Vancouver. Paolo’s productions have been awarded a Peabody Award, the Prix Italia, and several other international awards. Recent documentary work has included a series called “The Nerve: Music and the Human Experience” for CBC Radio’s Inside the Music and The Sound and the Sea, a documentary about the Salish Sea for CBC Radio’s The Current.
Paolo is currently the interim host of Hot Air on CBC Radio One in British Columbia.
Kate Pullinger was born in Cranbrook, British Columbia, and went to high school on Vancouver Island. She dropped out of McGill University, Montreal, after a year and a half of not studying philosophy and literature, then spent a year working in a copper mine in the Yukon, northern Canada, where she crushed rocks and saved money. She spent that money travelling and ended up in London, England, where she has been ever since. Her books include ‘Weird Sister’ and ‘A Little Stranger’ and her most recent novel, ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2009. Her digital fictions include the prize-winning ‘Inanimate Alice’, and ‘Flight Paths’. She is married and has two children.
http://www.katepullinger.com
http://www.inanimatealice.com
http://www.flightpaths.net
Siobhan Roberts is a Canadian author and journalist who is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She began writing her first book, King of Infinite Space, a biography of the geometer Donald Coxeter, here at the Banff Centre in the Maclean Hunter Arts Journalism Program, and that book subsequently won the 2009 Euler ['OILER'] Prize from the Mathematical Association of America. Her reading tonight is an excerpt from her forthcoming biography of the Princeton University mathematician John Horton Conway.
As a freelancer she contributes to numerous publications including the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, Canadian Geographic, the Mathematical Intelligencer, Leonardo, The New York Times “Science Times,” and the Smithsonian.
Photo Credit: Catherine Neily
Elinor Whidden received a BA in Canadian/Environmental Studies from Trent University, a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a MFA from SUNY at Buffalo. She has exhibited throughout North America, recently showing work in Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Buffalo NY. In 2004 she was featured as an emerging artist on CBC’s Zed TV and in 2007 she attended the Walking and Art residency at The Banff Centre. Whidden is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including creation grants from Nova Scotia Culture, Tourism & Heritage, Ontario Arts Council, and most recently from Canada Council for the Arts. Whidden’s exhibition Ford Explorer continues her quest to find a way to survive and adapt in a world increasingly threatened by contemporary car culture.
Photo Credit: Catherine Neily
