Geneviève Cimon is a respected leader, producer, collaborator, and mentor in the creative sector, bringing over 25 years of executive experience to her role as Director of Cultural Leadership at the Banff Centre. She has worked with Canada’s largest performing arts centres, public and private funders, and visionary community leaders—both in her long-standing role as Senior Director of Learning and Community Engagement at the National Arts Centre and more recently as a consultant working with small, medium-sized and large arts and culture organizations.

Her experience spans artistic programming and production, national and international touring, artist training programs, catalytic partnerships in rural and remote communities, strategic planning, executive coaching, human resources, capital project development, needs assessments, feasibility studies, and grant-making—all aimed at increasing positive social impact. 

Geneviève holds an MBA in Executive Leadership from McGill/HEC, where she focused her research on innovation through cross-sectoral partnerships. She is an avid volunteer and advocate for greater access to health care and arts engagement. She recently served as Chair of Ottawa’s Centretown Community Health Centre and currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Global Leaders Institute’s Arts Innovation MBA, mentoring emerging leaders worldwide. She is also an External Research Fellow at Carleton University’s Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society. 

Outside of work, Geneviève enjoys playing tennis (even if not very well), classical Spanish piano repertoire, cross-country skiing, gardening, and proudly cheering on one son who is passionate about firefighting and another who shines on the basketball court. She and her partner, a biologist, love spending time outdoors with their dog, Buckwheat.

Alison Callahan began her publishing career as a reader for the fiction editors at The New Yorker and The Atlantic. After attending the Radcliffe Publishing Course, she worked at International Creative Management, HarperCollins, and Knopf Doubleday. In 2014, she joined Simon & Schuster, where she is currently Vice President and Executive Editor. In 2015, she helped launch the literary imprint Scout Press with Ruth Ware’s debut, In a Dark, Dark Wood. Along the way, the authors Alison has edited include Amy Schumer, Stanley Tucci, Erin Morgenstern, Ann Patchett, Liane Moriarty, America Ferrera, Iain Reid, Armistead Maupin, Daniel Alarcon, and Peter Straub, among many others. Alison’s interests include literary fiction with ambitious, cutting edge, and inventive plotlines and characters. She also enjoys stylistic and visionary stories that are just left of center, domestic dramas, fish out of water stories, and books that take readers outside of their comfort zones and perhaps cause them to view the world in a different way. Alison likes to keep her feet on the ground and her head in the clouds.

January Rogers is a Mohawk/Tuscarora writer and media producer. She lives on her home territory of Six Nations of the Grand River where she operates Ojistoh Publishing and Productions. January combines her literary talents with her passion for media making to produce audio and video poetry. Her video poem Ego of a Nation won Best Music Video at the American Indian International Film Festival 2020 and her audio work The Battle Within won Best Experimental Audio with imagineNative International Film and Media Festival 2021. She is a literary mentor with Audible, the Indigenous Writers Circle Program since 2022. January wrote a 10-episode comedy series NDNs on the Airwaves (found on the Ojistoh youtube channel) and her play Blood Sport, a comedy about the pretendian crisis in Indian Country has received numerous stage readings and was published by Turtle’s Back Publishing in 2023.

Dan Wells, bookseller and publisher, is the founder at Biblioasis. Started in 1998 as a used and rare bookstore in Windsor, Ontario, it's since gone through various manifestations, turning into a new bookstore and, in 2004, a literary press.  Since that time, Biblioasis has published over 450 titles across a wide range of genres and disciplines: poetry, fiction, literary and cultural criticism, belle lettres, history, memoir, biography, and philosophy, many of which have been nominated or won some of the leading prizes in Canada and around the world, including the Booker and International Booker, the Folio, the Giller, Governor's General, and various Writer's Trust Prizes. Quill and Quire, on their tenth anniversary, called them "the leading publisher of the unpublishable." In addition to books, Biblioasis also publishes CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries.  Dan lives in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife and children.

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and combined. Recent books include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020) and the pamphlet, Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). Translations include The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library, 2020), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence on Thanksgiving Day of 2017 on the occasion of her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects. She teaches poetry, translation, and interdisciplinary art in the Literary Arts department at Brown University.

Described by the Toronto Star as “one of Toronto’s most exciting playwrights,” Michael Ross Albert is a Dora Award-nominated writer whose work has been staged across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Production credits include The Bidding War (Crow's Theatre), Beautiful Renegades (Peggy Baker Dance Projects), When I’m Gone (Mountain Movers Theatre Company), Two Minutes to Midnight (The Assembly Theatre), Miss (Unit 102), and Tough Jews (Dora Award nomination, Outstanding New Play). Michael's work has been presented in multiple Fringe festivals, including Edinburgh, Brighton, and FringeNYC. Five of his plays were staged in the Toronto Fringe Festival, including: The Huns, Anywhere (both: Patron’s Pick and Best of Fringe), and most recently, Good Old Days. He is currently working on new plays commissioned by the Stratford Festival, the Blyth Festival, and Vertigo Theatre, as well as new works supported by Soulpepper Theatre and the Vault Creation Lab. 

Photo by Shaun Benson

Jamie Ross is a newspaper journalist with the Globe and Mail, where he has served as sports editor since 2021. He joined the Globe as an assistant editor in 2015. Earlier in his career, Jamie worked as a reporter for small and mid sized dailies in New Brunswick before relocating to Toronto to cover the Blue Jays for MLB.com in 2014. As a reporter, he was a finalist for the National Newspaper Award for short feature writing in 2018, and in 2024, he was part of the team that won the NNA for breaking news for its coverage of the Canada Soccer drone scandal at the Paris Olympics. As an editor, he’s directed coverage of some of the biggest events in sports, from the Olympics to the World Cup to the Stanley Cup finals.