Alexander Binning

Alexander Binning was born in Toronto in 1944 and has lived in many places in Canada, including the Lake Superior country. He has worked as a teacher, librarian, park planner, historian and as a heritage planning consultant. He currently lives in Calgary where he writes full time. Two books of short stories are in preparation: Bureaucratic Tales and Bush Tales.

George Mackay Brown

George Mackay Brown was born in Stromness in the Orkney Islands in 1921. He studied at Newbattle Abbey under Edwin Muir and for a degree in English at Edinburgh University. His first book appeared in 1954. Since then he has published many books including plays, novels and collections of short stories of which the most recent is The Masked Fisherman. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has set to music several of George Mackay Brown's poems and other works. The Bard of Orkney died in 1996.

G. K. Chesterton

"I believe that Chesterton is one of the foremost writers of our time, not only because of his happy inventiveness, visual imagination and childlike or godlike cheer so evident in all his writing, but also because of his rhetorical skill and the sheer brilliance of his craft? . . . Chesterton is well-rounded: Chesterton doesn't repeat a formula with the fear of making mistakes; Chesterton feels utterly comfortable, which is why he hardly ever makes use of dialectical methods. He is one of the very few Christians who not only believe in Heaven but are also interested in it, and who provide it with an abundance of conjectures and imaginations."
—Jorge Luis Borges

Robert Dallas

Robert Dallas, from an old Scottish family, was educated at Sherborne School. He went to the South of France in 1966. Since then, he has specialized in the field of domestic architecture and developed his own distinctive and highly successful style. He lives with his wife and children in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.

Jackie Flanagan

Jackie Flanagan is the publisher and editor of Alberta Views magazine. Born in Calgary in 1947 the daughter of John Flanagan (b. Medicine Hat, Alberta, 1916, of Irish immigrants) and Viola Skjei (b. Holonquist, Saskatchewan, 1919 of Norwegian immigrants), she grew up in Bowness, Alberta and has lived in Vancouver, Montreal and Edmonton. Educated at Ste. Ann's Academy in Kamloops, UBC (BA, 1967) and U of C (BEd, 1969, MA, 1975) she taught English at Mount Royal College for 15 years. She lives in Calgary with her two children, Natasha and Zakary Pashak, and her husband, Allan Markin with whom she sits on the Steering Committee of the Writer-in-Residence program at the University of Calgary.

Cecelia Frey

Cecelia Frey is an Albertan who lives in Calgary. She has worked as an editor, teacher, freelance writer, and has long been involved in the writing community. Previous publications iclude a novel, Breakaway, a collection of poetry, the least you can do is sing, and three collections of short fiction: The Nefertiti Look, The Love Song of Romeo Paquette and Salamander Moon. Twice a recipient of the Writers Guild of Alberta Short Fiction Award, she has also won awards for playwriting. Her play The Dinosaur Connection has been performed on CBC's Vanishing Point series.

Udayan Gupta

Udayan Gupta is a former Senior Special Writer for the Wall Street Journal and author of Done Deals. He works with small and entrepreneurial businesses and business groups and organizations to help them understand their financial information needs and develop financial and investor profiles. A graduate of Harvard College, Udayan is a Walter Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University, New York. He lives in New York City.

Marie-France Leroyer

Marie-France Le Royer is a freelance photographer who took up painting in 1999 and has already had a successful exhibition of her paintings in 2002 in Montreal Le Pétrole et le Sexe. Her fascination with images from the oil patch go back to well over 30 years.

Alice Major

Alice Major was born in the ship-building, whiskey-brewing town of Dumbarton, Scotland. She grew up in Toronto, then came to Western Canada to work as a newspaper reporter in Williams Lake, B.C. She now lives in Edmonton, Alberta with her husband and two cats, and makes her living as a freelance writer.

Her work has appeared widely in Canadian literary magazines. Her first collection of poetry, Time Travels Light, was published by Rowan Books (Edmonton) in 1992. Since then, she has published two chapbooks Complete within herself,? issued by the Hawthorne Society (Victoria, B.C.) and ?Scenes from the Sugar Bowl Cafe,? which won the 1998 Shaunt Basmajian award sponsored by the Canadian Poetry Association.

She is a past president of the Writers Guild of Alberta and currently vice-president of the League of Canadian Poets.

Alberto Manguel

Alberto Manguel is the author of A History of Reading and co-author of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. He has edited several collections, among them Black Water; The Anthology of Fantastic Literature and The Gates of Paradise: The Anthology of Erotic Short Fiction.

Ken McGoogan

Born and raised in Quebec, Ken McGoogan worked as a bicycle messenger in San Francisco a greenchain man in Nelson, B.C., and a fire lookout in the Canadian Rockies.

McGoogan earned degrees in Toront and Vancouver and worked for The Toronto Star and The Montreal Star. He travelled around Europe and Africa, sojourning in Greece and Tanzania; later he visited India and Sri Lanka, and recently he spent four months in Cambridge, England.

His first book, Canada?s Undeclared War, won a best-non-fiction book award from the Writers? Guild of Alberta. His third novel, Kerouac?s Ghost, was translated into French and hailed as a work ?dont l?esprit ne pouvait venir que de la Belle Province.

McGoogan lives with his family in Calgary, where he works as Books Editor at The Herald, tools around in a 1986 Cadillac Seville and shelters a white cat whose symbolic potential is only now being recognized.

Roger Nash

Roger Nash was born in Maidenhead, England, in 1942. Surviving the blitz, and being bombed out of his pram, he was raised in Egypt and Singapore. He arrived in Canada in 1965, and has lived mainly in Sudbury since, though with a stint at farming in the Tawatinaw valley, northern Alberta. He travels frequently in the Middle East (Egypt, Jordan, Israel) and Asia (Thailand, Hong-Kong, China). He is married to psychologist and educator, Chris Nash. They have two sons, Piers and Caedmon.

Nash received a Ph.D. from the University of Exeter, and is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Laurentian University. He is currently President of the League of Canadian Poets. His poetry has won a number of awards, including the Canadian Jewish Book Awards Prize for Poetry (1997), the Confederation Poets Prize (1997), Fiddlehead's 1st. Prize for Poetry (1994), and Prism International's 1st. Prize for Poetry (1986).

Judd Palmer

Judd Palmer, best-selling author of The Maestro and The Tooth Fairy, both published by Bayeux Arts, was born in Calgary, Alberta, the product of both stoic-Texan and sentimental-Greek lineage. His early years were spent often in the mountains, listening to the stories of grizzled old climbers in snow-bound alpine huts, or on the family ranch, being scared of horses. He attended Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He eventually emerged, blinking into the sunlight, with a degree in philosophy.

In 1999, Judd and his friends founded The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, down on the ranch of his youth. Their first show premiered to a bunkhouse full of cowboys and Hutterites, but now tours across the country. They make large-scale puppet theatre for both adults and children ? and generally try to erase that distinction. Their latest production is a puppet opera based on the ancient poem Beowulf.

The Old Trouts are currently touring a puppet theatre version of Judd?s book The Tooth Fairy. It?s a musical, in collaboration with David Rhymer, much acclaimed by critics: ?one of the best, most surreal works of imagination I?ve seen in ages,? (See Magazine, Edmonton) ?Utterly captivating,? (Ottawa Citizen) ??marvelous? dazzling?? (Fast-Forward, Calgary).

The second book in the series ?Preposterous Fables for Unusual Children,? The Maestro, has also been adapted for performance ? Dandi Productions tours the show to orchestras around the continent, playing to thousands of children. The illustrations for the books, along with various stage designs, will be exhibited in October at the University of Calgary. Judd worked as a puppeteer for Disney and YTV, and most recently on Whoopi?s Littleburg for Nickelodeon. He has traveled the nation with a Punch and Judy show in a suitcase, and also works as a freelance illustrator. He?s the lead singer and slide banjo player for the underground bluegrass group, The Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir.

Mike Robinson and Karim-Aly Kassam

Mike Robinson and Karim-Aly Kassam are professors of planning and community economic development at the Arctic Institute of North America of the University of Calgary. Their combined interest in participatory action research, praxis, and social justice has led to a variety of joint research, teaching, and service endeavors in Alberta, the Canadian Arctic and Russia. At home on the Kola Peninsula tundra, in the boreal forest of Alberta, or in their apartment in the village of Lovozero, Karim-Aly and Mike are strongly supported in this work by their wives, Yasmin and Lynn, and their children, Tahera-Rafia, Sinan-Saleh, Lancelot, and Caitlin.

Both authors were educated in Canada and England. Mr. Robinson's intellectual loyalties lie first and foremost in Oxford, and Mr. Kassam's in Cambridge. In spite of this, they frequently collaborate and work out together at the University of Calgary's super circuit. This is their first co-authored book.

Richard Stevenson

Richard Stevenson was born in Victoria, B.C., in 1952 and has lived in Western Canada and Nigeria. A college English professor by profession, he has taught English, Canadian and African Literature, Creative writing and other courses in high school and colleges. A former Editor-in-Chief of Prism International, his own reviews and poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and journals in Canada, US, and overseas.

Richard is the recipient of the Norma Epstein Award (1983), the Vancouver Literary Storefront Chapbook Award (1983), the Stephen G. Stephansson Award (1994), and the Pyrowords? Literary Rose Award (1997). He lives in Lethbridge, Alberta, and also performs with the jazz and poetry group, Naked Ear, and the rock music/YA verse troupe, Sasquatch.

Maurice Yacowar

Maurice Yacowar was born in Saskatchewan in 1942. He is well known for his film criticism and reviews in the press, radio and TV. An oft-recycled English professor, he taught and/or administrated at Lethbridge Junior College, Brock Uni-versity in St. Catharines, Ontario, The Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, and The Uni-versity of Calgary, where he is Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts. His publications include one poetry chapbook and seven books of film criticism. After illuminating Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and the Andy Warhol horror films, he now unleashes his first novel. The father of two, he lives in Calgary with his partner, broadcaster Anne Petrie.