Kris Bertin works as a bartender and bouncer at Bearly’s House of Blues and Ribs in Halifax. He has had stories published in The Malahat Review, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Riddle Fence, Pilot, and others. Kris recently put all of his favourite short stories into a pile and named it Bad Things Happen. He is currently working on a novel. He is from Lower Lincoln, New Brunswick.
Shashi Bhat is the author of the novel The Family Took Shape (Cormorant Books, 2012). Her short fiction has appeared in several journals, including PRISM international, Event, The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, and Nimrod International. She was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2009, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University. She currently lives in Halifax, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Dalhousie University.
Astrid Blodgett’s short stories have been read on CBC Radio’s Alberta Anthology and appeared in Meltwater: 25 Years of Writing from Banff Centre, Alberta Views, Prairie Fire, and The Antigonish Review. Her first collection of stories, which includes “Ice Break” and is tentatively titled Let’s Go Straight to the Lake, will be published by The University of Alberta Press sometime in the near future. Astrid lives in Edmonton.
Trevor Corkum’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Malahat Review, Grain, Event, The Antigonish Review, and Prairie Fire. “You Were Loved” is part of a manuscript of short fiction completed under the tutelage of story magician Zsuzsi Gartner through the University of British Columbia’s Optional-Residency MFA Program. He currently lives in Halifax.
Nancy Jo Cullen is the fourth recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Grant for an Emerging Gay Writer. She is the author of three collections of poetry with Calgary’s Frontenac House Press and has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award, and the W.O. Mitchell Calgary Book Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph-Humber. Her fiction has appeared in The Puritan, Grain, and filling Station. Her short story collection, Canary, is forthcoming from Biblioasis in the spring of 2013. She is at work on a novel.
Kevin Hardcastle is a fiction writer from Simcoe County, Ontario. His short stories have been published in Word Riot, subTerrain Magazine, and The Malahat Review. An excerpt from a novel-in-progress was recently published in Noir Nation: International Journal of Crime Fiction. He has studied writing at the University of Toronto and at Cardiff University.
Andrew Hood is the author of the short story collections Pardon Our Monsters (Véhicule Press, 2007) and, most recently, The Cloaca (Invisible Publishing, 2012). He has lived in Guelph, Montreal, and Halifax, and may currently be living in any one of these places.
Grace O’Connell is the author of Magnified World (Random House Canada, 2012). She is the Contributing Editor for Open Book: Toronto and the books columnist for This Magazine, and her work has appeared in various publications, including The Walrus, Quill & Quire, and EYE Weekly. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing. “The Many Faces of Montgomery Clift” has also been nominated for a National Magazine Award. Grace lives in Toronto.
Jasmina Odor is a fiction writer and an instructor of English and Creative Writing at Concordia University College in Edmonton. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Coming Attractions: 05, and The New Quarterly, which first published “Barcelona.” She has recently completed a collection of short stories and is now working on a set of stories about empathy – empathy in its relationship to justice and in its potential to lessen the suffering of others.
Alex Pugsley is a writer and filmmaker from Nova Scotia. As a screenwriter, he has written for performers such as Scott Thompson, Mark McKinney, Dan Aykroyd, Seán Cullen, and Michael Cera. He is the co-author of the novel Kay Darling, and his fiction has appeared in Brick, Descant, The Dalhousie Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, This Magazine, The Queen Street Quarterly, and other periodicals. “Crisis on Earth-X” is the fifth published story in a narrative series about the McKee and Mair families, set in twentieth-century Halifax.
Eliza Robertson studied creative writing and political science at the University of Victoria. She is now pursuing her Masters in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, England, where she received the 2011–12 Man Booker Scholarship. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including The Journey Prize Stories 22 and the Willesden Herald Prize’s New Short Stories 6. She is writing a novel and gathering stories for her first collection.
Martin West’s work has published in magazines across Canada. “My Daughter of the Dead Reeds” is part of a larger collection-in-process about the Red Deer River Badlands in Alberta, some of which has appeared in PRISM international, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and Front & Centre. Another story from that collection, “Cretacea,” was shortlisted for the Journey Prize in 2006.