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Rebecca Blaevoet
Rebecca Blaevoet and her husband live in rural New Brunswick. She says she has two full-time jobs: running Tactile Vision Graphics Inc.—a braille production company specializing in multilingual braille and tactile graphics—and running their farm. Between the gardens and livestock, they grow ninety percent of their food. Rebecca is involved in provincial politics, local government, and has recently begun teaching Welsh in the next village. Cheese-making and bookkeeping are among her favourite things, but in her spare time, she likes to sit and knit with a cup of tea.
Ann Chiappetta
Making meaningful connections with others through writing.
Ann’s poems, creative non-fiction, essays, and fiction regularly appear in journals, online magazines, blogs, and small press reviews. Ann’s poetry has found a place in the pages of Breath and Shadow’s 2016 debut anthology, Dozen: The Best of Breath and Shadow. Four books fill Ann’s authorly shelves and a fifth book is on its way in 2021. One overarching goal for Ann is to offer her books in all eBook, print, and audio file formats. Besides reading and writing, Ann spends time with her two- and four-footed family in New York’s historic and beautiful lower Hudson Valley and continues to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with her assistive technology.
Find her on the web: www.annchiappetta.com and read her blog: www.thought-wheel.com.
Eunice Cooper-Matchett
Eunice Cooper-Matchett is an award-winning author. She has over one hundred fifty short stories and articles published in Magazines, Sunday School take-home papers, anthologies, and online. In 2020 she published two novels, Behind the Purple Sky, a biblical fiction, and Behind Her Name, a story dealing with the effects of childhood abuse and bullying on adults. Presently, she is working on a three-book fiction series dealing with senior widows coping as an individual. She resides in Drayton Valley, Alberta, Canada.
Alice Eakes
Alice Eakes is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than two dozen books, articles, and short stories. Although she has worked in several fields—from social services, to teaching, to office management—writing has always been Eakes’s first love. In fact, she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be a writer. She started writing poetry when she was nine, and the next year, one of her poems was published in a local anthology.
When she isn’t writing from her cat-infested home office or a crowded coffee shop, she likes travel, live theatre, and old movies.
Jameyanne Fuller
Jameyanne Fuller is a space lawyer by day, writer by night. Sometimes she sleeps. A graduate of Kenyon College and Harvard Law School, her work has appeared in the Voyage YA Journal, Cast of Wonders, and several other magazines and anthologies. Jameyanne enjoys cooking, playing the clarinet, and plotting world domination with her Seeing Eye dog, Neutron Star. She blogs at www.jameyannefuller.com and tweets @JameyanneFuller.
Ben Fulton
Ben Fulton lives and practices law in Mississauga. He graduated from Osgoode in 2018 and was called to the Ontario bar in 2019. As a human rights lawyer, his advocacy focuses on championing the rights of people with disabilities, and arranging diversion for minor criminal offences.
He uses legal advocacy and storytelling to shift perceptions. His work has been published by the Ontario Bar Association and the Parliament of Canada. You can follow links to his work from his website: www.benlaw.ca.
When not busy writing and making court appearances, he enjoys jogging through the park with his guide dog, Abbie Road. She graduated from the Canadian Guide Dogs for the Blind in 2017, and while off-duty can be found lounging in the warmest sunbeam she can find.
M. Leona Godin
M. Leona Godin is a writer, performer, and educator. Her first book is There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (Pantheon, 2021). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, O Magazine, Poets & Writers, Catapult (where she writes the column “A Blind Writer’s Notebook”) and other print and online publications. Godin received her PhD from New York University in literature and was recently honored as a Logan Nonfiction Fellow. She produced two plays: The Star of Happiness, about Helen Keller’s time on vaudeville, and The Spectator and the Blind Man, about the invention of braille. Her online magazine exploring the arts and sciences of smell and taste, Aromatica Poetica, publishes writing and art from around the world.
Lawrence Gunther
Lawrence Gunther is a blind conservationist, outdoor writer, podcaster, blogger, filmmaker, and TV personality. His nine years of post-secondary education included living among Inuit in Canada’s western Arctic, lecturing at Umea University in northern Sweden, and earning a master’s in environmental studies from York University.
Lawrence’s 30-year public service career included serving as a research officer for Canada’s Parliament, a foreign service officer with Canada’s Department of Global Affairs, an international trade expert with Canada’s Department of Finance, a tribunalist for the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the head of Industry Canada’s Web Accessibility Office, and a senior advisor to Canada’s Minister of Agriculture.
Lawrence is also a regular contributor to numerous outdoor magazines and blogs, hosts two popular podcasts, produces short-form TV and YouTube content, and has created four award-winning outdoor documentaries.
Lawrence’s work has been recognized with the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal, and the Governor General’s Meritorious Service Medal. He now serves as the executive director of the charity Blue Fish Canada, and continues to live in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, with his wife, six children, two grandchildren, and his latest guide dog, Lewis.
If you want to take advantage of what he’s learned, visit his website, www.blindfishingboat.com, or listen to his podcast, Outdoors with Lawrence Gunther.
Anita Haas
Anita Haas is a visually impaired, finger-amputated Canadian writer and teacher based in Madrid, Spain. She has published books on film, two novelettes, a short story collection, and articles, poems and fiction in both English and Spanish. She is now putting the final touches on a picture book which she has written, translated, and illustrated, and the sales of which will be donated to local animal shelters.
Some publications her fiction has appeared in include Falling Star Magazine, The Tulane Review, Literary Brushstrokes, The Zodiac Review, River Poets Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review, Terror House Magazine, Wink and Adelaide Magazine. She spends her free time watching films, and enjoying tapas and flamenco with her writer husband and two cats.
Felix Imonti
Felix Imonti was born in Montreal. As a teenager, his family moved to Los Angeles where he finished his education at UCLA and acquired his degree in international relations. After graduation, Felix and his wife established a manufacturing business that was sold after fourteen successful years. They spent the next ten years wandering the world and often without a permanent address. He returned to Canada after living in Japan for ten years and has decided that the wandering days are over. Now, he is focused upon writing and trading the stock market. He has published the history book Violent Justice, and numerous articles in the fields of international politics and economics. Also, he has published a number of short stories and has just completed a novella that he is attempting to place with a publisher.
Heather Meares
In 2017, Heather Meares moved to Walla Walla, Washington, and lost most of her remaining vision. In the process, she found herself.
Heather serves on the board for the Washington Council of the Blind, and is content editor of the Newsline, with technical editor, Reginald George. Together, they received the Hollis K. Liggett Braille Free Press Award from the American Council of the Blind, for excellence in writing and best journalistic practices. She serves on several disability councils, including the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library.
Heather is passionate about gardening, music, writing, and jumping in water fountains when the opportunity arises.
Tessa Soderberg
Tessa Soderberg was born partially blind, but defines herself as a writer who is blind, not a blind writer. She wrote her first novel in braille during high school. Computers and braille notetakers have enabled her to write eleven more, plus novellas and short stories. She has participated in NaNoWriMo annually since 2010. Chapters from her NaNoWriMo novels won first and third prize in the 2016 Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop Contest. She writes fiction, from westerns to time travel to suspense. She writes about people, both sighted and blind, who find themselves in untenable situations.
Niki White
Niki White holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. Blind since birth, she is a TV snob, singer, theatre-goer, traveller, and lately can often be found analyzing lyrics and fictional passages. Niki lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. Find her on Twitter: @Niki_White
Jamieson Wolf
Jamieson has been writing since a young age when he realized he could be writing instead of paying attention in school. Since then, he has created many worlds in which to live his fantasies and live out his dreams.
He is a #1 bestselling author (he likes to tell people that a lot) and writes in many different genres. Jamieson is also an accomplished artist. He works in mixed media, charcoal, and pastels. He is also something of an amateur photographer, a poet, and a graphic designer.
He currently lives in Ottawa, Ontario with his husband, Michael.
Melissa Yuan-Innes
Melissa Yi is an emergency physician and award-winning writer. In her newest crime novel, Scorpion Scheme, Dr. Hope Sze lands in Cairo and discovers a man with a nail through his skull who might hold the key to millions in buried gold. Previous Hope Sze thrillers were recommended by The Globe and Mail, CBC Books, and The Next Chapter as one of the best Canadian suspense novels. Yi was shortlisted for the Derringer Award for the world’s best short mystery fiction. Under the name Melissa Yuan-Innes, she also writes medical humour and has won speculative fiction awards. Find her on the web: http://www.melissayuaninnes.com/.
