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.

Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet, translator, and a writer of fiction. He has translated the work of Georges Perec, Michèle Métail and Raymond Queneau, and is the author of the novel tapestry, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems, Dante’s Inferno, and Dictator, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish, which refracts his experience of working with migrants in Sicily with Stories in Transit. The Penguin Book of Oulipo, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020, and Carcanet published his edition of Jean-Luc Champerret’s The Lascaux Notebooks, the first ever anthology of Ice Age poetry, in April 2022. His version of Dante’s Purgatorio, relocated to Mersea Island in Essex, was published in October 2024 – “A Dante like no other” (London Review Bookshop). He is currently translating The Essential Baudleaire for Pushkin Press.

Jessica Westhead (she/her) is an author, editor, and creative writing teacher who has been working with fellow writers since 2005. She has taught creative writing at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University, and facilitated at Sage Hill Writing. Jessica’s fiction has been shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards, selected for the Journey Prize anthology, and nominated for a National Magazine Award, and has been published in major literary journals in Canada, the US, and the UK. She is the author of the novels Pulpy & Midge (Coach House Books) and Worry (HarperCollins) and the critically acclaimed short-story collections And Also Sharks and Things Not to Do (Cormorant Books) and Avalanche (Invisible Publishing). And Also Sharks was a Globe & Mail Top 100 Book, one of Kobo’s Best Ebooks of 2011, and a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Worry was included on CBC Books’ Best Canadian Fiction of 2019 and the CBC Canada Reads Longlist. Jessica lives in Toronto with her family.

Jen Yakamovich is a Vancouver-based drummer and improviser who works across disciplines as a performer, composer, researcher, and educator. She sees her relationship with the drum set—a system of interrelating sounds and parts— as an inquiry into relationships with both her own internal system and wider socioecological webs. Her approach to improvisation and spontaneous composition is rooted in the Creative Music Workshop in Halifax, NS, where Yakamovich grew up. From 2024-2025 Yakamovich studied with drummer, composer & field recordist Susie Ibarra (New York/Berlin).

Over the past year Yakamovich has worked with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin / bauhaus Campus Stadt Nature program, Now Society’s 8east, Vancouver Coastal Jazz, Active Passive Performance Society, The Only Animal, and grunt gallery. She has recently contributed to projects with percussionist Adrian Avendaño (Vancouver), artists Roxanne Nesbitt & Ben Brown (Montréal), guitarist Sam Wilson (Halifax), Persian psych artist Niloo (Victoria), art rock group Heaven For Real (Montréal), producer Miguel Maravilla (Vancouver), improvisers Mustafa Rafiq (Edmonton) & Jairus Sharif (Calgary) for Active Passive, and Balkan folk group Fetele Din Balkani (Vancouver). She regularly performs with experimental pop artist Wallgrin (Vancouver), and recently formed the improvisation duo Notice Flower with pianist Bahar Khazei. She has a solo experimental folk project called Troll Dolly.

Yakamovich has a progressive vision impairment called retinitis pigmentosa. She holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies from Dalhousie University.

Jen Yakamovich was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards.