Anne Fleming
Anne Fleming is the author of Gay Dwarves of America, a finalist for this year’s Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her novel Anomaly, and Pool-Hopping and Other Stories shortlisted for a BC Book Prize and the Governor-General’s award.

Her writing has been described as stellar, harrowing, savagely funny, inventive, heartbreaking, deceptively beautiful, audacious and real.

She teaches creative writing at UBC’s Okanagan Campus.

George Littlechild
George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within is a stunning retrospective of a career that has spanned nearly four decades. Featuring more than 150 of the Plains Cree artist’s mixed-media works, this sumptuous collection showcases the bold swaths of colour and subtle textures of Littlechild’s work.

Littlechild has never shied away from political or social themes. His paintings blaze with strong emotions ranging from anger to compassion, humour to spiritualism. Fully embracing his Plains Cree heritage, he combines traditional Cree elements like horses and transformative or iconic creatures with his own family and personal symbols in a unique approach.

George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within shows the evolution of an artist from his earliest works to the present day, including hints of future directions and themes. An insightful foreword by artist and curator Ryan Rice, a Mohawk from the Kahnawake First Nation in Quebec, and Littlechild’s reflections on each piece build a broad understanding of Littlechild’s work, his life and his views on the role of art within all cultures.

Andrew Nikiforuk
For more than two decades Andrew Nikiforuk has written about energy, economics and the West for a variety of Canadian publications including the Walrus, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, Chatelaine, Georgia Straight, Equinox and Harrowsmith.

In the late 1990s, he investigated the social and ecological impacts of intensive livestock industries and the legacy of northern uranium mining for the Calgary Herald. His public policy position papers on water diversion in the Great Lakes (2004) and water, energy and North American integration (2007) for the Program on Water Issues at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre sparked both discussion and reform.

Nikiforuk’s journalism has won seven National Magazine Awards since 1989 and top honours for investigative writing from the Association of Canadian Journalists. His dramatic Alberta based-book, Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 2002. Pandemonium, which exposes the impact of global trade on disease exchanges, received widespread national acclaim.

Tom Wayman
2013 marked 40 years since the publication of Tom Wayman’s first collection of poems, Waiting for Wayman (McClelland and Stewart, 1973), and since then he has had more than a dozen other books of poems published, as well as three books of fiction and three collections of essays. He has also edited six anthologies of poetry, many by people writing about their own daily employment.

To celebrate his first 40 years as an author, in 2014 Wilfrid Laurier University Press will issue a selected poems, The Order in Which We Do Things, edited by Owen Percy, and Lynx House Press in Spokane will publish a U.S. selected poems, Built to Take It. Wayman’s two most recent books of poems are Dirty Snow (Harbour, 2012), which won the 2013 national Acorn-Plantos Award, and Winter’s Skin (Oolichan, 2013).

Born in the Ottawa valley, Wayman grew up in Prince Rupert and Vancouver, and now lives far inland in B.C.’s southern Selkirk Mountains.

Shaena Lambert
Shaena Lambert is a novelist, short story writer and teacher. Her latest book of stories, Oh, My Darling was chosen as a Globe and Mail Top Book of the Year, and was published to critical acclaim across the country. Her first book of stories, The Falling Woman, published in Canada, the UK and Germany, was also a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award. Her novel, Radiance, about a Hiroshima survivor who comes to New York in 1952, and the complex relationship she has with her hosts, was a finalist for the Writers Trust Fiction Award, the Ethel Wilson Prize, and the Ontario Evergreen Award.

Shaena has taught fiction with The Humber School for Writers, The Writers’ Studio of Simon Fraser University and through the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She is currently working on a new novel, and divides her time between Vancouver and Cortes Island.

Anny Scoones
Anny Scoones has written three books (Home, Home and Away, and True Home) detailing the rural life and philosophies on historic Glamorgan Farm in North Saanich, Vancouver Island, where she lived for many years.

Anny's new book is Hometown, Out and About in Victoria's Neighbourhoods (Touchwood Editions), a collection of observations, interesting local facts and information, interviews, and musings of Victoria's diverse and often unexplored areas; described as a "a calming, gentle amble through our city”, the book is also illustrated by artist Robert Amos.

Anny teaches English in Victoria and lives in the quirky neighbourhood of James Bay where she spends hours walking her dog Archie on the beautiful city beaches.

2 Dopes Boys
in a Cadillac
2 DOPE BOYS IN A CADILLAC are fakelorists, poets and gonzo playwrights. Under the guises of Johnny MacRae and shayne avec i grec they have spent the last four years traveling extensively across the continent performing their theatrical brand of spoken word poetry. As fakelorists they have spent much of this time chronicling the histories and prophecies of BC's fabled Cadillac Mountains – explored extensively in their psychedelic talk opera The Anthropocalypse – which premiered to a sold out Victoria, BC audience in September 2013. They followed their first foray into play in November with a short play, The Book of Gamp, as part of Intrepid Theatre's 'Theatre Under the Gun'.

Their poems have spread themselves on pages throughout North America through a pair of self-published chapbooks (2012's sold-out Anthropocalypse Now and 2013's The Anthropocalypse Rises). Their first book, The Anthropocrypha, is set to be published by Patchwork Poetry in the autumn of 2014.

Heather Pringle
Heather Pringle's curiosity about the ancient world is part of her DNA. Her first short story, written at age eleven, explored the lives of ancient Egyptians during the Old Kingdom: her earliest published prose-in a junior high school newspaper-fictionalized the building of the royal Inca estate at Machu Picchu.

After graduating from the University of Alberta, Heather worked as a research assistant in the history and anthropology department at the Royal Alberta Museum. There she witnessed firsthand the reclaiming and spiriting away of an ancient medicine bundle by First Nations activists and elders--an incident that sparked her lifelong interest in Native cultures, both ancient and contemporary.

Over the past three decades, she has written features on archaeology and history for National Geographic, Discover, SCIENCE, Scientific American, New Scientist, Geo and Archaeology magazine. Her work has taken her into the back seat of an F-18 fighter jet flying upside 200 feet above the treeline, alongside archaeologists searching for the remains of Neanderthal children in a remote rockshelter in France, and inside the tomb of 1200-year-old Wari queens, who once wove with golden tools on Peru's north coast.

Heather has written four books, including The Mummy Congress, an exploration of the quirky, off-kilter world of mummy research, and The Master Plan, a detailed examination of the sinister work of a World War II German archaeological institute.

Today she lives with her husband Geoff and their Labrador retriever in Victoria, British Columbia.
www.heatherpringle.com