Amal El-Mohtar writes fiction, poetry, and criticism. She won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for her short story “Seasons of Glass and Iron” and again for her novella This Is How You Lose the Time War, written with Max Gladstone, which also won the BSFA and Aurora awards, became a New York Times bestseller, and has been translated into over ten languages. She's a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem for her poems "Song for an Ancient City," "Peach-Creamed Honey," and "Turning the Leaves," and in 2012 she received the Richard Jefferies Poetry Prize for "Phase Shifting." Her reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Times, where she has been the science fiction and fantasy columnist since 2018, in The Los Angeles Times, and on NPR Books. The River Has Roots is her solo debut, and Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories is her debut collection. She lives in Ottawa, Canada. 

Ai Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian writer, Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. Her work can be found in F&SF, The Dark, The Masters Review, among others. She is the recipient of Odyssey Workshop's 2022 Fresh Voices Scholarship and the author of Linghun and I AM AI. The first book of her novella duology, A Palace Near the Wind, is forthcoming 2025 with Titan Books.

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of: The Midnight Run (an arts-filled, night-time, urban walking experience.), The Rhythm and Poetry Party (The R.A.P Party) which celebrates poetry & hip hop, and Poetry + Film / Hack (P+F/H) which celebrates Poetry and Film. Identity, Displacement & Destiny are reoccurring themes in his work, where he tries to mix the old with the new: traditional African oral storytelling with contemporary poetics, paint with pixel, texture with vector. His books are published by Flipped Eye, Akashic, Nine Arches, Penned In The Margins, Oberon & Methuen. 

Emma is Artist in Residence at Concordia University, and a Director and Dramaturg. She is the former Artistic and Executive Director of Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal, where for fourteen years, she dramaturgically collaborated on the development of new Canadian work for the stage.

Emma has directed new Canadian plays across the country, including Building Houses and Falling Trees by Megan Gail Coles, Okinum by Emilie Monnet (co-director), Refuge by Mary Vingoe, I Don’t Even Miss You by Elena Belyea, The Baklawa Recipe by Pascale Rafie. She co-founded Talisman Theatre for whom she directed, among others, the award-winning productions That Woman by Daniel Danis, Down Dangerous Passes Road by Michel Marc Bouchard, and The Medea Effect by Suzie Bastien. She co-created Skin, a performance piece with the interdisciplinary company The Bakery.

Emma is a recipient of LMDA’s Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy, and the Conseil Québécois du théâtre Prix Sentinelle. She is a graduate of Concordia University’s Theatre Department, and NTS’ Directing Program. She feeds her inner punk rocker by playing in basement bands The Tibaldos and The Dépanneurds.

Image by Bernardo Fernandez

Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. Currently, she is the 2024 Edmonton Public Library writer-in-residence and an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod. She is the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website. 

Hazel Millar is the co-owner and co-publisher of Book*hug Press, a Canadian independent literary publisher working at the forefront of contemporary book culture. Hazel has been working in the publishing since 2009. In addition to her work with Book*hug Press, she is the Past Chair of the Board of the Literary Press Group of Canada and sits on several publishing-industry boards and advisory committees. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Jay Millar (aka the other half of Book*hug Press), their sons, and a cool, diva calico cat named Tess.

Dr. Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner. Kearney is a Whiting Writers and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and The McKnight Foundation. He is a Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.