Dr. Cheryl Thompson is an Academic, Public Speaker, and Director, Research and Creative Strategy of Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA), an Ontario Early Researcher Award, and Social Science Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project. She is also Director of Black Creative Lab, an incubator for the curation of public exhibits, speaker events, and YouTube content. Dr. Thompson has written three books: Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019), Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021), and Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (2025). She has held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Black Expressive Culture and Creativity, and in 2021, was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists for her contributions to Black Canadian studies.

Manjula Martin is author of the national bestseller The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, winner of the American Horticultural Society Book Award, and she edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Martin is senior editor of the literary magazine ZYZZYVA and was previously managing editor of the National Magazine Award–winning fiction and art quarterly Zoetrope: All-Story. She has written for The New Yorker, Orion, Los Angeles Times, and other publications, and she is a volunteer mentor with the Periplus Collective. She lives in California.

Lauren White is a genre-defying bassist and vocalist based in Sydney, known for her grounding bass, soulful melodies and down-to-earth style. Bridging contemporary jazz, Brazilian music, blues and funk, she brings a unique and versatile voice to the Australian jazz scene.

She tours internationally as the bassist for David Campbell and Matthew Ifield, and performs regularly with celebrated artists including Justine Clarke, Marlene Cummins, Ashli and Ali Pahlavan. Her own projects have appeared at major festivals and venues such as the Melbourne Jazz Festival, Sydney Women’s Jazz Festival and at the Sydney Opera House. She has also recorded for Netflix and Marvel Studios productions, Sydney Theatre Company and video game soundtracks.

Lauren studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the esteemed Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA in Los Angeles, and has studied with renowned mentors such as Tamir Hendelman, Donny Benet, Nicki Parrot and Stu Hamm. In 2023, she attended the Siena Summer Jazz Workshop in Italy, where she studied with Linda May Han Oh and Matt Penman.

In 2024, Lauren was awarded the Ken Weatherley Jazz Scholarship which supported the writing and recording of her debut album. Her compositions draw from poetry, impressionist, landscape and still-life painting, and the wide spectrum of music she plays, resulting in a sound that showcases the eclectic and versatile musician that she is.

Lauren White was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, is author of the novel Winter Counts (Ecco/HarperCollins), winner of numerous literary awards and named by Time magazine as one of the best mystery novels of all time. His short fiction appears in the anthologies The Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories, Never Whistle at Night, Denver Noir, Midnight Hour, This Time for Sure, and others. His scholarship and nonfiction appear in the New York Times, Shenandoah, The Cambridge Companion to American Prison Writing and Mass Incarceration (Cambridge University Press), and other books and journals. He’s the editor of the anthology Native Noir (Akashic Books), and is the series editor of Native Edge, a new imprint of the University of New Mexico Press. He was Indigenous Artist in Residence at Brown University and has received fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Ucross, Ragdale, Sewanee, and Tin House. He’s Professor of English and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Stony Brook University in New York.

Wayne Arthurson is a writer and literary agent of Cree, Quebecois and Scottish descent from Edmonton, Alberta. He is the author of eight novels, including three from his Leo Desroches crime series and two from his Sergeant Neumann Mystery series. His novel Fall from Grace won the 2012 Alberta Readers' Choice Award, and his book The Red Chesterfield won the 2020 Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for best novella. He was the 2023/24 Writer in Residence for the University of Alberta and the 2016 Writer in Residence for the Edmonton Public Library. As a literary agent he represents a number of crime writers including Candas Jane Dorsey, Deryn Collier and Eric Beetner.

Nita Prose is the #1 New York Times and Canadian bestselling author of The Maid series, which has sold more than two million copies worldwide. A Good Morning America Book Club pick, The Maid won the Ned Kelly Award for International Crime Fiction, the Fingerprint Award for Debut Novel of the Year, the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and the Barry Award for Best First Mystery. The Maid was also an Edgar Award finalist for Best Novel.

Dr. Jules Arita Koostachin (Attawapiskat First Nation) is an award-winning Cree filmmaker, writer, performance artist, and academic committed to telling stories that centre Indigenous voices, truths, and experiences. Born in Moose Factory and raised in Moosonee by her Cree-speaking grandparents and in Ottawa by her mother, a residential school warrior/survivor, Jules grounds her work in lived experience, cultural knowledge, and ancestral responsibility.

She is the founder of VisJuelles Productions Inc., a company dedicated to creating film and media projects that amplify Indigenous narratives with beauty, courage, and complexity. Her films include the acclaimed feature Broken Angel, winner of Best Film at the American Indian Film Festival; the feature drama Angela’s Shadow (2024), and the NFB-produced documentary WaaPaKe (Tomorrow), which explores intergenerational healing. She is also known for her CBC short films NiiSoTeWak, OshKiKiShiKaw, and KaYaMenTa.

Jules holds a BA in Theatre from Concordia University, an MA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), and a PhD from UBC’s Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, where her dissertation focused on Indigenous documentary practices and community protocol.
A passionate advocate for Indigenous sovereignty, language, and storytelling, Jules’ creative work spans genres—poetry, drama, documentary—and has screened and published internationally. She was named one of Variety’s Top 10 to Watch in 2022. A mother of four sons, including actor Asivak Koostachin, she currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC, where she continues to blend artistry, research, and community engagement in all she does.

Photo credit Karolina Turek 
 

Lisa Pearson is a publisher, editor, designer as well as the founder of Siglio Press, an independent publishing house driven by its feminist ethos and committed to publishing uncommon books that live in the rich and varied space between of art and literature. In the seventeen years since Pearson started Siglio in a garage in Los Angeles, Siglio titles have won two AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers awards and garnered high praise from the New York Times, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, among dozens of other media. Siglio is now located in the Southern Berkshires in Massachusetts.

Dodie Bellamy is a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, personal essayist, and art journalist. She has published a dozen books, including (with Semiotexte) Bee Reaved, When the Sick Rule the World, and The Letters of Mina Harker. She’s written for numerous art catalogues and journals, including Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Apartamento, Gagosian Quarterly, diaphenes, The Village Voice, and Los Angeles Review of Books. With Kevin Killian, she edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (2017). Bellamy was the 2018-19 subject of California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute’s “On Our Mind” program—a series of public events, commissioned essays, workshops, and reading group exploring her writing—culminating with the 2020 monograph Dodie Bellamy is on Our Mind. In 2023 she received a Guggenheim fellowship in Nonfiction.