 |
 |
 |
 |
Susan Aglukark Singer/songwriter Susan Aglukark is one of Canada’s most unique artists and a leading voice in Canadian music. She blends the Inuktitut and English languages with contemporary pop music arrangements to tell the stories of her people, the Inuit of Arctic Canada. The emotional depth and honesty of her lyrics; her pure, clear voice and themes of hope, spirit and encouragement have captivated and inspired listeners from all walks of life. Aglukark has performed for such dignitaries as HRH Queen Elizabeth (twice), former President of France, Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, and former Governor General of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson. Equally important to Susan are the many, many villages across Canada and the Arctic. Her albums Arctic Rose, Christmas, This Child, Unsung Heroes and Big Feeling have sold over 400,000 copies in Canada to date. |
 |
Todd Babiak Todd Babiak is an award-winning author, journalist and screenwriter. He is the author The Book of Stanley, The Garneau Block and Choke Hold. He is on the board of PEN Canada. He is culture columnist for the Edmonton Journal. |
 |
Ellen Bielawski Ellen Bielawski was born and raised in Alaska and has spent all of her adult life working with Inuit and Dene in Nunavut, Northwest Territories and Alaska. She is the author of Rogue Diamonds: The Rush for Northern Riches on Dene Land and In Search of Ancient Alaska as well as technical papers, reviews and essays in Canada. She is Dean, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of English and Film Studies. Ellen earned a Ph.D. in Arctic Archaeology in 1981 from the University of Calgary. |
 |
Ted Bishop Ted Bishop’s best-selling Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books a Governor General’s Award Finalist, won the City of Edmonton Book Award and the MAX Award (Motorcycle Awards of Excellence) and was named a Best Book by the Globe and Mail, CBC’s Talking Books, and Playboy magazine. His literary nonfiction has appeared in Cycle Canada, Enroute, Prairie Fire, Rider, Word Carving: The Craft of Literary Journalism, and What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men. Twice nominated for National Magazine Awards, in 2003 he received a CBC Literary Award for travel writing. A professor in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, he has published books and articles on Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and modernist publishing. He is working on a history of ink. |
 |
Anthony Dalton Anthony Dalton, FRGS, is an author, freelance writer, photographer - and public speaker. He has written six books and his illustrated non-fiction articles have been published in magazines and newspapers in twenty countries and nine languages. A British-born Canadian adventurer and author he is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Fellow of the Explorers Club. His expeditions have taken him across the Sahara many times, through the deserts of the Middle East, into the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, on dangerous Arctic waters, and canoeing wilderness rivers in northern Canada. Magazine assignments have taken him to the Australian Outback, the Falkland Islands, Namibia, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Bahrain, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, among others. Dalton’s recent books are: Alone Against the Arctic; BAYCHIMO, Arctic Ghost Ship; and WAYWARD SAILOR, in search of the real Tristan. |
 |
Joyce Dene Joyce Dene was born in Fort Chipewyan and grew up in Fort McMurray, along the Athabasca and Embarras Portage Rivers. She is a member of the Mikisew Cree First Nation. She received a B.A. with a major in Native Studies and a minor in English at the University of Alberta in 2004. Her literary journey and accomplishments include a MacTaggart Award for her Creative Non-fiction essay Portals in 2002. This essay, along with Waniska Nosim in the anthology Intersections: readings in the sciences and humanities 2005, and The Mountain accepted for publication in a land use study for Mikisew Cree, are part of her collection for a memoir that she is currently working on. She currently resides in Fort McMurray, AB. |
 |
Marian Botsford Fraser Marian Botsford Fraser is a Canadian writer, broadcaster and critic who grew up in northern Ontario. She is the author of three nonfiction books and numerous pieces for newspapers and magazines, including The Globe and Mail, The Walrus and The Literary Review of Canada. She has hosted CBC Radio programs and done numerous documentaries for the CBC Radio series IDEAS. In the early 90s she was the coordinator for the Arctic Council project in Ottawa and also did work for the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference. She is currently the Books Editor for the Canadian magazine MORE. Her piece about the Arctic, Bone Litter, appeared in GRANTA 83, This Overheating World. Her most recent book, Requiem for My Brother is a meditation on growing up on northern Ontario and the role that landscape plays in shaping lives, sibling relationships and memories. She lives in Toronto. |
 |
Diana Gibson Diana Gibson is the Research Director for the Parkland Institute, a public policy research institute based at the University of Alberta. She has an extensive background in social policy research and has engaged nationally and internationally on topics ranging from health care and energy, to the environment and international trade agreements. Prior to joining the Parkland, Diana was on faculty at Capilano College and worked as a consultant to various community, trade union and government agencies. |
 |
Curtis Gillespie Curtis Gillespie’s fourth book, Crown Shyness, a novel, was recently published. His magazine writing on politics, science, travel and the arts has earned him three National Magazine Awards, one Western Magazine Award, and one Florida Magazine Award. Gillespie has acted as the Writer in Residence at both the University of Alberta and Macewan College, and he is on faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He lives in Edmonton with his wife and two daughters. |
 |
Linda Goyette Linda Goyette is a passionate collector of Alberta’s stories. She is the editor of an anthology of immigrants’ writing called The Story That Brought Me Here and Standing Together. Goyette is also the award-winning author of Edmonton in Our Own Words, Second Opinion, Kidmonton: True Stories of River City Kids and Rocky Mountain Kids. She was awarded the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy in 2000 to investigate relationships between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians across Canada for a series of articles in the Toronto Star. Goyette wrote for the Edmonton Journal for twenty years as a reporter, editorial writer and editorial page columnist and won two National Newspaper Awards for her writing. She contributes a regular column to AlbertaViews, as well as feature articles to regional and national magazines. |
 |
Edith Iglauer Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She married Philip Hamburger and raised two sons in New York. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1961, Iglauer became one of her generation’s most adventurous and astute observers of the Canadian way of life. Before joining The New Yorker, Iglauer was one of the few female correspondents to cover World War II. In 1974 Iglauer moved to British Columbia where she married John Heywood Daly, a commercial salmon fisherman and moved to Garden Bay on the BC coast. Their relationship and her introduction to the rigors of commercial fishing became the basis of her acclaimed memoir Fishing with John, a runaway bestseller and nominee for the 1989 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. Her journalistic curiosity also led her into the Canadian North which she wrote about in Denison’s Ice Road and Inuit Journey: The Co-operative Adventure in Canada’s North. |
 |
Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak Rhoda Katsak was born in an Inuit hunting camp outside of Igloolik. At the age of eight, and speaking only Inuktitut, she was brought in off the land to attend Igloolik Federal Day School. In the early 1990s, she collaborated with her mother, Apphia Agalakti Awa, her daughter, Sandra Pikujak Katsak, and anthropologist, Nancy Wachowich, on a three-generation life history project which eventually became a book entitled Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women. Katsak currently lives in a house on the beach in Pond Inlet with her husband and her younger children. In her spare time, she sews caribou skin clothing and goes camping on the land. |
 |
Barbara Kingscote Barbara Kingscote and her black Canadian-bred mare, Zazy, began a westward ride from Mascouche, Quebec, to Litton, BC on May 1949 when she was nineteen. A budding scientist, Kingscote kept meticulous journals where she described the beauty of the countryside, the changing cloud patterns, the purity of Canadian Shield rock and the dangers of the road. In 2005, she published the story of that epic journey in Ride the Rising Wind: One Woman’s Journey Across Canada. Over the course of her life, Kingscote has been a veterinarian, wife, traveler, mother, horse breeder, researcher, and bestselling author. She is currently writing a book on the Canadian Arctic reindeer herd. Kingscote actively travels across Canada—nowadays by truck—giving readings and visiting her daughters and grandchildren. |
 |
Elizabeth Kolbert |
 |
Myrna Kostash Myrna Kostash is the award-winning author of All of Baba’s Children, No Kidding: Inside the world of Teenage Girls, Bloodlines, The Doomed Bridegroom, All of Baba’s Great Grandchildren: Ethnic Identity in the Next Canada, The Next Canada, Reading the River: A Traveler’s Companion to the North Saskatchewan River and her work-in-progress My St Demetrius: Memoirs of Byzantium. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Brick, Border Crossings, Prairie Fire and Geist, dandeLion and in anthologies such as The Thinking Heart: Best Canadian Essays; Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape and Edmonton on Location: River City Chronicles. |
 |
Debbie Marshall Debbie Marshall has worked as a freelance writer and editor for over twenty years, contributing to local and national magazines and on-line publications, including Legacy, Alberta Views, The Beaver, Canadian Heritage, The Canadian Encyclopedia, The United Church Observer and anthologies such as Dropped Threads II and Push It!. She was editor of Exchange Magazine for Adult Learners. She co-authored Candles to Kilowatts: 100 Years of Edmonton’s Power Company and has edited collections, including Spiritual Quest: Stories from Life and Big Enough Dreams. Marshall’s passion for history was revealed in Your Other Vote to the Sister: A Woman’s Journey into the Great War, a biography of one of the first two women elected to a legislature anywhere in the British Empire, Roberta MacAdams. |
 |
Melanie McGrath Melanie McGrath is an award-winning author and journalist. Her book Motel Nirvana, won the John Llewelyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday award for Best New British and Commonwealth Writer under 35. Her books include Silvertown and her latest book, The Long Exile, which took her to the High Arctic to live among Inuit, is currently being made into a feature documentary by Zak Kunuk, director of Camera D’Or winner, Atanarjuat. In past lives, Melanie has been both a television producer and presenter. She continues to write for, among others, The Guardian, The Observer, The London Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times. Melanie has lived in Las Vegas, Nevada and in Leon, Nicaragua and now spends most of her time in London. The Times once listed her as one of the 10 most interesting people to know in the capital. |
 |
Ken McGoogan Last year, Ken McGoogan won the Pierre Berton Award for History and the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography. His bestselling books include Lady Franklin's Revenge, Ancient Mariner and Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, which won four major awards, including one in the U.S., and is now being turned into a docudrama for the BBC and History Channel. Formerly the books editor at the Calgary Herald, McGoogan now writes full-time in Toronto and recently returned from sailing in the Northwest Passage |
 |
George Monbiot George Monbiot is one of the world’s most influential radical thinkers. His Guardian columns, celebrated for both their originality and the depth of their research, are republished all over the world. His web site – www.monbiot.com- is listed by Yahoo as the most popular columnist’s site on Earth, outside the United States. He has been named by the UK’s The Independent on Sunday as one of the forty international prophets of the twenty-first century and in 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He is a visiting professor in the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University. |
 |
Andrew Nikiforuk Andrew Nikiforuk is a well known, award-winning Canadian journalist who has written about education, economics, and the environment for the past two decades. His work has appeared in Saturday Night, Report on Business, Chatelaine, Georgia Straight, Equinox, Harrowsmith and both national newspapers. He is the author of three books, The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Plagues, Scourges and Emerging Viruses, Saboteurs: Weibo Ludwig’s War against Big Oil and Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century. Nikiforuk lives in Calgary, Alberta. |
 |
Sheila Pratt Sheila Pratt started as a rookie reporter during Alberta's first boom in the late 1970s and has been analyzing and commenting on the changing political and social landscape ever since, as a writer and editor. A graduate of Queen's University, Pratt covered the provincial legislature in the Lougheed and Getty years. Her work included national and provincial television and radio commentary. Pratt is also co-author of a book Running On Empty, Alberta After the Boom (that's the first boom). In 2001, Pratt won the Southam Journalism Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She is currently an editorial writer and Sunday columnist at the Edmonton Journal. |
 |
Tom Radford Tom Radford's career spans thirty-five years in the Canadian television and film industries as a writer, director, and producer portraying the distinctive character of the west and north to Canada and the world. Radford and his films have received awards from Banff to San Francisco, Toronto to Florence, leading to the Alberta Award of Excellence. His films include Arctic Dreamer and Alberta Bound. He is the author of three books, including the best selling Alberta, A Celebration. He founded the Northwest Studio of the National Film Board of Canada in Edmonton and was a founder of the National Screen Institute. He is a member of the Advisory Council to the Historical Foundation. |
 |
David Solway David Solway is the award-winning author of many books of poetry including Modern Marriage, Bedrock; Chess Pieces, Saracen Island: The Poetry of Andreas Karavis, The Lover’s Progress: Poems after William Hogarth; The Turtle Hypodermic, Director’s Cut, The Pallikari of Nesmine Rifat and Reaching for Clear and Franklin’s Passage. His non-fiction books include Lost, Random Walks and The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity. Solway is currently an Associate Editor with Books in Canada and is now working on his fourth book in education and culture, entitled Reading, Riting and Rhythmitic and a collection of political essays, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. |
 |
Nancy Wachowich Nancy Wachowich is an author and university professor. For the past 15 years she has been working with Inuit ethno histories and oral traditions in the Eastern High Arctic of Canada. In the 1990s Wachowich was part of a collaborative, three-generation, life history project where she recorded autobiographical tales with three Inuit storytellers from the same family which she transcribed into a book entitled Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women. Wachowich currently writes and lectures in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. |
 |
Rudy Wiebe Rudy Wiebe is one of Canada’s most cherished and acclaimed writers. He is widely published internationally and is the winner of numerous awards, including two Governor General’s Literary Awards for the novels The Temptations of Big Bear and A Discovery of Strangers. His most recent books are Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest and a Landmark Edition of Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic. Rudy Wiebe is an Officer of the Order of Canada and lives in Edmonton. |
 |
Janice Williamson Janice Williamson has published articles on women's writing and cultural studies in periodicals, popular and scholarly, as well as five books including Sounding Differences: Conversations With Seventeen Canadian Women Writers and the image-text creative non-fiction works, Tell Tale Signs: fictions and Crybaby!, a memoir. A poetry chapbook won the national Nichol Chapbook Award. Her life and current writing focuses on international adoption and mothering a daughter born in China. She is a professor in the Department of English, University of Alberta. |
 |
Annette Woudstra A.S. Woudstra's first collection of literary essays, The Green Heart of the Tree, Essays and Notes on a Time in Africa, was published early this year by the University of Alberta Press. It was described by a recent reviewer in the Edmonton Journal as, “the most peculiar and artistically exceptional book I've read in decades.” Her work has also appeared in various literary journals such as Brick and the Queen’s Quarterly. |