Amber Bedard is a member of Piikani First Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Alberta and Montana. Amber has a diverse background in Indigenous research and consultation, primarily working within program evaluation in the public and private sectors. She is passionate about ensuring research and evaluation is done in a culturally responsive and safe manner, while also advocating for deep learning and creating space for Indigenous knowledge. Amber believes that this work must center, appreciate, and uplift the strengths of Indigenous communities and histories, and work to create mutually beneficial pathways that honour Indigenous ways of knowing and doing. Amber now resides on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, and mi ce:p kʷətxʷiləm Nations.

Nina Lee Aquino, a Filipino Canadian, is a renowned director, dramaturge, and artistic leader. Her journey began as the inaugural Artistic Director of fu-GEN Asian Canadian theatre company, where she organized the first Asian Canadian theatre conference and edited a seminal anthology of Asian Canadian plays, alongside co-editing an award-winning book on the subject. She became Artistic Director at Cahoots Theatre Company and Factory Theatre, leading to her current role as Artistic Director of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre.

Aquino's directorial work has garnered prestigious awards, including the Ken McDougall Award, John Hirsch Prize, Toronto Theatre Critics Award for Best Director, and three Dora Awards for Outstanding Direction. She co-authored the play Miss Orient(ed) and serves as an Adjunct Professor at York University. Additionally, Aquino was the President of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatre from 2018-2024. In 2019, she was honored with the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Margo Bindhart and Rita Davies Cultural Leadership Award.

Photo by Cesar Ghisilieri
 

Anna is a theatre practitioner and educator specializing in movement, choreography, intimacy and ensemble development. Her breadth of work ranges from live theatre to international mega-events.  In 2014, Anna Co-Created and Co-Directed Circle Game: Reimagining the Music of Joni Mitchell which toured to 13 cities in western Canada from 2017-2019, garnering 11 award nominations and winning 4 including an Ovation Award for Best Production and an SAT Award for Best Choreography.

Internationally, Anna has worked on the Mass Movement Team of mega-events. Most recently, she spent 2 years living and working in Dubai, UAE for Expo 2020 as a choreographer, movement director, and dance captain for on the nightly entertainment in Expo’s marquee venue – Al Wasl Plaza. These productions integrated actors, dance, and puppetry which interacted with sophisticated projection technology.

Anna holds an MFA in Movement Direction and Teaching from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and trained as an Intimacy Director with Intimacy Directors International and Theatrical Intimacy Education. She  is currently a full-time Faculty Member at MacEwan University in Edmonton. 
 

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), won a Northern Writers' Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. His third collection, Avidya, is due from Bloodaxe in 2025. Vidyan Ravinthiran is co-editor with Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he now teaches at Harvard. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; a collection of essays, Worlds Woven Together (Columbia University Press, 2022; a critical study, Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2020); and Asian/Other, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir forthcoming from Icon in the UK and Norton in the US.

Stephen Motika is the director and publisher of Nightboat Books, a leading publisher of innovative poetry and prose in North America. He has also worked at Simon & Schuster, The CUNY Graduate Center, Northwestern University, PEN America, and Poets House, where he served as Artistic Director. He is the author of the book of poems, Western Practice, and several chapbooks, including Private Archive and Arrival and At Mono. He is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman and co-editor of Dear Kathleen: On the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser’s 80th Birthday. His articles and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, At Length, BOMB, the Brooklyn Review, the Constant Critic, Eleven Eleven, Maggy, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Poets & Writers, Poets.org, and Vanitas, among other publications. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. With the poet John Murilla, she edited Dear Yusef: Essays. Letters and Poems, for and about One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honours include the Arts and the Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Centre Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment from the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Joshua Rothes is a writer, publisher, and book designer. He is the founder and publisher of Sublunary Editions, an independent press that specializes in brief forms of literature; the co-publisher of Hanuman Editions, a publishing project aimed at bringing the global avant-garde into conversation; and the founder of Asterism Books, a distributor specializing in small publishers. He is the author of An Unspecific Dog (punctum books, 2017), Six Novellas (Sublunary Editions, 2021), The Art of the Great Dictators (A Contrived Press, 2018), and other miscellany. He is the editor of The Collected Works of Emanuel Carnevali, the co-editor of The Collected Works of Kathleen Tankersley Young, and the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

Divya Victor is a Tamil American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. It was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award (Poetry). Divya is also the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States) and for Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada), and Book*hug Press (Canada). Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Polish, and Czech. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

Poet and writer Dr. Holly Pester is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. She has worked in forms of experimental, critical and sound-based writing for nearly 20 years, working with BBC Radio, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection. Pester's most recent publications include the poetry collection Comic Timing (2021) and a novel The Lodgers (2024). Both out with Granta in the UK, and Assembly Press in Canada.