Deep Winter Writers 2028

Dr. Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 36 books of poetry, fiction and essays. His novel, Yiddish for Pirates was a national bestseller, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award (in fiction and in French translation) and won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted was chosen for Hamilton Reads, also won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Vine Award. He won the League of Canadian Poets’ Lifetime Membership Award and has twice been shortlisted for their Spoken Word prize. He was a judge for the Writers’ Union of Canada Atwood-Gibson Award and the CBC Poetry Prize. 

A PhD in music, he has taught courses and been writer-in-residence in many universities, colleges and universities, mostly recently 2026-2027 Shaftesbury Creative Writer-in-Residence at Victoria College (U of Toronto). Recent books include a novel, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead (Book*Hug Press, Fall 2026) and poetry, Take Rain (with Elee Kraljii Gardiner, ECW, Spring 2027) He lives in Hamilton.
 

Sandra Ridley is the author of five books of poetry, including Silvija, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and Vixen, winner of the Pat Lowther Award, the City of Ottawa Book Award, and the Archibald Lampman Award. Her poetry explores trauma, resilience, and transformation, drawing on personal experience, medical archives, and the impacts of gendered violence and environmental crises. Her work has received the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Publishing, the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, and the International Festival of Authors’ Battle of the Bards. She has been nominated for the Ontario Arts Council’s KM Hunter Artist Award for Literature and the Ottawa Arts Council’s Mid-Career Artist Award. 

Ridley has taught poetry at Sage Hill Writing and Carleton University, and has mentored writers through Ottawa’s Footprints to Recovery program and the League of Canadian Poets’ P.K. Page Mentorship Program. She has participated in sound poetry groups and collaborative exchanges, and has presented work at the Ottawa Art Gallery, the National Arts Centre’s Fourth Stage, and Quebec’s Centre d’exposition l’Imagier. Her poetry has been anthologized and translated into German and French through the VERSschmuggel/reVERSible poetry project in partnership with Berlin’s Poesiefestival. She lives in Ottawa.

Dr. Susan Holbrook’s poetry books are ink earl (Coach House 2021), Throaty Wipes (Coach House 2016), Joy Is So Exhausting (Coach House 2009), and misled (Red Deer 1999). Her most recent work is a creative non-fiction memoir called Steamy: A Menopause Symptomology (Coach House 2025). Her most recent chapbook is Canon (Zed 2022), which features great works of literature translated through a calculator. She has also written a textbook, How to Read (and Write About) Poetry (Broadview Press 2021), and edited Intertidal: Daphne Marlatt—The Collected Earlier Poems (Talonbooks 2017) and The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (Oxford UP 2010). Her work has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Trillium award for Poetry, and the Pat Lowther Award. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor.  She lives in Leamington, Ontario.

Noelle Allen is the owner and publisher of Wolsak and Wynn, an award-winning literary press based in Hamilton, Ontario. She has served on many boards and committees within the publishing community, including as the Chair of the Literary Press Group, the Co-chair of gritLit: Hamilton’s Readers and Writers Festival and as the Chair of the Literary Advisory Committee for the Hamilton Arts Council. Currently she works with Supercrawl, Hamilton’s largest music and arts festival to organize their literary programming. She recently founded Sharp Words: Hamilton’s Winter Book Fair and in 2024 received the Arts Champion Award from the City of Hamilton.