Issue 29 Contributors

Mona Angéline is an unapologetically vulnerable artist, athlete, and scientist. She honors the creatively unconventional, the authentically "other." She shares her emotions because the world tends to hide theirs. She is a new writer. Her work has been accepted for publication in a number of magazines—see more here.

Catherine Austen writes from Gatineau, Quebec. Her books have won the Canadian Library Association’s Young Adult Book Award and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Prize for Children’s Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, The Fiddlehead, and many other journals. Learn more at CatherineAusten.com.

Sharon Berg attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Writing Studio in 1982 and was accepted to Banff’s Leighton Artist Colony in 1987. She is also an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. She did her B.A. in Indigenous Studies at Laurentian U, followed by her B.Ed for Primary Education at U of T. Her M.Ed focused on First Nations Education at York U, and her D.Ed focused on Indigenous Education at UBC. She also received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, which released chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. She's published five full books and three chapbooks, working in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work appears in periodicals across Canada, the USA, Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard (Cyberwit 2020) was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School (Big Pond Rumours Press 2019) won a 2020 IPPY Award for Regional Nonfiction. When she retired from teaching, she opened Oceanview Writers Retreat in Charlottetown (Terra Nova National Park) Newfoundland.

Jonathan Bessette has many hobbies which inform his writing, including astrology, gaming, gardening, and anarchism, and he lives in the unceded and traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Nations, so-called Vancouver. He’s a founding member of Held Magazine and has published poetry in The Capilano Review and CV2, nonfiction in Adbusters and Quill and Quire, and fiction in The Antigonish Review and Carte Blanche.

Noah Cain is a multimodal artist, critic, and school counsellor. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Fire, EVENT, and Yolk Literary. Find him online at noahjcain.com

Louise Carson has published three collections of poetry, the most recent being The Truck Driver Treated for Shock (haiku, Yarrow Press). Her lyric work has been selected for Best Canadian Poetry three times. She also writes mysteries; her ninth, The Cat Crosses a Line, was published in 2024 with Signature Editions. She lives near Montreal in a bungalow surrounded by gardens.

Lindi Dedek is a queer emerging poet, artist and clown-in-becoming from Czechia, based in Berlin. Besides poetry, they work mostly with moving images, analog film and site-specific performance. Their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Stadtsprachen, Aji Magazine, filling Station and Tint Journal. They love black tea and ballet, and believe in free Palestine.

Bhoomika Dongol, pronounced with a “Hh” sound in between the “Bb” and the “oo” phonics in her first name, gets mostly called “B-oo-mika” by native English speakers. Some just call her B; she considers this condensed denominator of her moniker to still hold some pith, but not as deeply as the real meaning of her name, which is essence. Bhoomika is an anthophile and is eluded by the concept of home. She is grateful her writings have found a humble abode in CBC First Person, Spring Magazine, Opening Doors anthologies by the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild, and Paragon Literary Magazine. By chronicling the oral stories told by her mother and grandmother, she keeps her Newari indigeneity alive.

Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, edits, reviews and publishes on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. She is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a long-poem collection provoked by her near-death health crisis. Amanda offers an editing and mentorship service. Visit TinyUrl.com/AmandaEarlEdits for more information, and subscribe to her Substack: Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for whimsy, exploration and a feeling of connection with kindred misfits.

Luc Faris is a writer and composer living on the traditional unceded territory of the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ peoples in Victoria, BC. He has recently graduated with a Bachelor of Music in Composition and Theory from the University of Victoria, with a minor in creative writing. His written work has previously been published in the Spadina Literary Review, and more information about his musical work can be found at lucfaris.com.

Jenny Fried is a trans writer living in North Carolina. Her work has appeared previously in Strange Horizons, Wigleaf, Booth, and other magazines. Find her online at https://jennnnnyyyyyy.github.io/

Eleanor Fuller won The Malahat's 2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. She was a finalist in The Fiddlehead's 2023 fiction contest and the 2024 Cambridge Short Prize. You can find her work in The Moth, The Waxed Lemon, The Manchester Review, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review and The Vassar Review. Fuller completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia, where she continues to volunteer on the Editorial Board at Prism International. She is a 2024 Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence and grateful recipient of SSHRC, Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council grants. She lives in Toronto.

Lindsey Harrington is a Nova Scotian writer with Newfoundland roots. She’s longlisted for CBC’s Nonfiction Prize, shortlisted for Fiddlehead’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, and won the Rita Joe Poetry Prize. Her current projects include a short story collection about breakups and a memoir about being childfree. Learn more about Lindsey at https://www.lindseyharrington.com/

Salma Hussain writes poetry and prose. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Temz Review, Queens Quarterly, CV2, The Antigonish Review, The Hong Kong Review, Ex-Puritan and Pleiades: Literature in Context. Her young adult novel, The Secret Diary of Mona Hasan, about a young girl’s immigration and menstruation journey, was published by Penguin Random House in 2022. It was selected for ALA’s Rise: A Feminist Book Project List and shortlisted for the Geoffrey Wilson Historical Fiction prize.

Kevin Irie is a Japanese Canadian poet from Toronto. He is the winner of the 2024 Short Grain Contest for poetry in Grain Magazine and second runner-up in the 2024 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest in The New Quarterly. He is part of the upcoming anthology The Gates of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Press, 2025). His most recent collection is The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).

Rafiat Lamidi is a poet and photographer. Her works have been published in Lolwe, Isele Magazine, Olney Magazine, Lucent Dreaming, Acropolis, The Blood Beats Series and elsewhere. Her twitter is @rauvsbunny.

Anson Leung is a graduate of the University of Alberta’s Bachelor of Commerce program. He is an Alberta-based writer who loves all forms of writing, including poetry and article writing. In his spare time, he loves playing tennis and board games.

Gray Lévesque is a transfeminine writer, music producer, and game developer with an insatiable thirst for all things strange and surreal. When it is not working on one of its numerous projects, it spends its days in a Detroit apartment with its husband and a small striped cat. Information on its projects can be found on its Tumblr, wolfpaper.tumblr.com.

Kathryn MacDonald’s poetry has been published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S., and other countries. She is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (poetry chapbook), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édourd (novel).

Tanis MacDonald (she/they) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female and six other books. New writing has recently appeared in Consilience, FreeFall, and Canadian Literature, and her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl, is forthcoming with Book*hug Press. A free-range literary animal, Tanis was raised in Treaty One territory and now lives as a grateful guest on Haldimand Treaty land, near the Grand River in southwestern Ontario.

Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), all with above/ground press, as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have much to do with some of this. He sometimes translates poetry for periodicities as well as other text in other places, and is currently working on translations of books by Denise Desautels and by Phyllis Webb. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome

Daniel Mohr (he/him) is a queer poet and fiction writer, based in Germany. His work has appeared in Canthius, CV2, carte blanche, Nonbinary Review, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. He mostly writes when it’s dark or when it’s snowing—preferably both.

Sanni Omodolapo is a Nigerian short story writer. His works have appeared in RIC Journal, the Weganda Review, Agbowo, and elsewhere. He was shortlisted for the Writivism Prize for Short Story (2023).

The poetry and prose of Robert L. Penick have appeared in well over 200 different literary journals, including The Hudson Review, North American Review, Plainsongs, and Oxford Magazine. The Art of Mercy: New and Selected Poems is now available from Hohm Press, and more of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net

Paul Sheppard, originally from Rosseau, Ontario, currently lives with his small family of human and non-human animals in London, Ontario, where he works as a neuroscience researcher. His work is forthcoming or published in Soliloquies Anthology, The Trinity Review, and Paper Cranes Literary Magazine. He recently took up running so is probably on the brink of a midlife crisis.

Josh Steinbauer is an artist and filmmaker in NYC. Selections from his series of author portraits and multi-disciplinary reviews (Portrait of a Book Report) have been published in The Offing, Rain Taxi, Harpy Hybrid, EpicenterNYC, Untenured, and InParenthesis. [email protected]

Photo credit: Michal Vozar

Michal Tallo is a writer and translator from Slovakia. He writes in Slovak and English, and is the author of three books of poetry in Slovak: Antimita (Antimacy, 2016), Δ (Delta, 2018) and Kniha tmy (The Book of Darkness, 2022). Tallo’s poems and short stories have been translated into several languages. His most recent work is a short story collection called Všetko je v poriadku, všade je láska (Everything’s Fine, Love Is Everywhere), published in July 2024 by the Literárna bašta publishing house. He translated Andrew McMillan’s poetry collections Physical and Playtime, and Seán Hewitt’s memoir All Down Darkness Wide into Slovak. Tallo’s English writing has appeared in Giramondo Publishing's HEAT. To learn more, visit www.michaltallo.sk

Shanai Tanwar (she/her) is an Indian journalist and poet living on stolen Musqueam territory. She graduated with a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia. Shanai’s poetry has previously appeared in Existere, Plenitude Magazine, and Train River Publishing, alongside other writing in THIS, Maisonneuve, Broadview, Chatelaine, and others. She loves the mountains and is convinced she has a divine connection with black cats.

Jordan Williamson is a writer and poet from London, Ontario. His work has appeared in Ballast, Tilted House, The /tƐmz/ Review and Funicular Magazine. He was a contributor to Stones Beneath the Surface: A Poetry Anthology from Black Mallard Poetry and Volume Two, Selected from Pinhole. His debut chapbook Love’s Little Dojo is forthcoming from the Pinhole Chapbook Series, spring 2025.