About the Writers

Aaron Chan is a musician, filmmaker, and writer born and raised on unceded Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, BC). He holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and his writing has been published in literary magazines and publications, including Plenitude, filling Station, Polychrome Ink, and Xtra. His piece “A Case of Jeff” won subTerrain‘s Lush Triumphant Literary Award in Creative Non-Fiction, and he has published a poetry chapbook, Romantic Hopeless.

He is the author of This City Is a Minefield (Signal 8 Press), a collection of memoir and personal essays about growing up gay and Asian in Vancouver, and his first children’s picture book, The Broken Heart, is forthcoming in June 2024 with Rocky Pond Books. He is currently a Creative Writing MFA candidate at the University of California Riverside, where he received the L.M. and Marcia McQuern Endowed Graduate Award in Non-fiction Writing. Aaron also likes cats and vegan cheesecake.

Christina Myers is a writer, editor, and former journalist. Her novel The List of Last Chances was longlisted for the 2022 Leacock Medal. Her next book, Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife, is coming May 2024 from House of Anansi. Her writing has also appeared in magazines, online, and in a dozen anthologies, including one she edited.

She’s at work on her next novel and a new anthology, and is the current Federation of BC Writers Ambassador for 2023. She is a member of Da’naxda’xw First Nation, though she grew up all over Canada; she has lived in North Surrey for the last 14 years.

Jennifer Zilm has written a trinity of books: Waiting Room, The Missing Field and, most recently, First Time Listener published by Guernica Editions.

She is presently winterizing herself on 108th Ave by the Expo Line in historic Downtown Surrey, thinking about centos and performing various synesthetic experiments.

Instagram: @jenniferzilm
www.jenniferzilm.com

Candie Tanaka is a multiracial trans writer, artist, and librarian challenging the binaries continually reconstructed between self and other while exploring archive and memory in a socio-political context. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design.

Their first YA book, Baby Drag Queen, was published with Orca Books in April 2023. They’ve also published work in Resonance: Essays on the Craft of Life and Writing with Anvil Press and This Will Only Take A Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction with Guernica Editions.

Cynthia Sharp holds an MFA in creative writing and an Honours BA in literature. She was a Writers’ International Network 2022 Poet Laureate and the City of Richmond’s 2019 Writer in Residence. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have been published and broadcast internationally in journals such as CV2, Prism, Pocket Lint, The Pitkin Review, and untethered and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology.

Her plays have been performed at Delta’s Killer Verse, Washington’s Take Ten Festival, Ottawa’s SAW Gallery, and the Chincoteague Theatre in Virginia. She’s the author of Ordinary Light, a finalist in the Sunshine Coast 2023 Book Awards, Rainforest in Russet, and The Light Bearers in the Sand Dollar Graviton, as well as the editor of Poetic Portions.

Christine Hayvice is a Kiwi who lived in Canada for forty-five years and graduated from The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University in 2012. She currently lives in her homeland of Aotearoa New Zealand, where she has been a visiting writer several times at Auckland’s Michael King Writers’ Centre.

A long-time social justice activist and union leader, her day job for thirty-two years was with an international airline and that inspired many of her poems and writings. She was a vice-president of the BC Federation of Labour, where she chaired the Women’s Rights Committee.

She was a member of a performance group, the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union, a work writers’ group, which published an anthology called More Than Our Jobs. For twelve years she was a member of the feminist writers and artists group Sex, Death, and Madness.

In 2021, she published a sixty-year history of the union at her airline called Arrivals and Departures. She has also spent years researching and writing a history of her father’s Russian Jewish immigrant family and has turned many of the family sagas into short stories.