Stephanie Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General's Award and the Gerald Lampert Award in 1998 and recently appeared in French. She has published two other collections, most recently Pavilion, and edited The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, as well as the inaugural Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 anthology. Stephanie recently completed a collection of zoo-inspired poems and is co-editor of Penned: Animals in Zoos in Poems, forthcoming from Signal/Vehicule in Fall 2009. She teaches creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal.

Susan Gillis is the author of two books of poetry, including Volta, which won the A.M. Klein Prize in 2003. Originally from Halifax, Susan lived on Vancouver Island for many years before moving to Montreal, where she teaches literature and creative writing at John Abbott College. Her work appears regularly in literary journals and has recently been anthologized in The Echoing Years and The New Canon. She has spent a fair bit of time traveling in Greece and goes back whenever she can.

Jeffrey Mackie is a Montreal poet who has been writing, publishing and doing readings for a number of years. His work has been published in Canada, the US and in Europe, and he’s had work translated into Croatian. His poem 'What did Adorno Say' was included in the international collection '100 Poets Against the War' and was also included in a peace poem installation at the Vancouver Public Library in February 2007. His last publication is entitled 'Truth Among the Obsessions'. Jeffrey hosts a literary feature on CKUT’s Friday Morning After.

Julie Mahfood produces and hosts WIRE, a quarterly reading series for Montreal’s West Island writers; a poem of hers was shortlisted in THIS Magazine’s 2008 Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Julie’s work has appeared in: montreal serai, Literary Review of Canada, The Antigonish Review, Room, carte blanche and Bibliosofia, among others. She has recently been accepted to do graduate studies in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University.

Emily Skahan is a Concordia University Theatre Performance student who enjoys singing and song-writing in the little spare time she has. She has performed in such venues as Café Twigs, Zeke's Gallery, Clyde's, Anis et Marjolaine and, of course, Café Aurora. Last summer, she played a lead in The Tempest with Repercussion Theatre's Shakespeare in The Park. Emily enjoys writing her own poetry because it gives her a chance to verbalize what otherwise may have ended up staying inside. "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" - Groucho Marx

Carmine Starnino's poems have won the Canadian Authors Associate Prize, the A.M. Klein Prize and the F.G. Bressani Prize. He is the author of A Lover's Quarrel, a collection of essays on Canadian poetry, and the editor of The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry. He lives in Montreal, where he works as an associate editor for Maisonneuve. His most recent poetry collection is the forthcoming This Way Out (Gaspereau, 2009).