Gail Bowen – A resident of Regina, Gail Bowen is a playwright as well as the author of the best-selling Joanne Kilbourn mystery series. Kilbourn solves murders all over Saskatchewan and is a professor at the University of Regina, where Bowen herself taught for many years. The series has been adapted for television movies and includes A Colder Kind of Death (1994), for which Bowen won the Arthur Ellis Award, and recently The Brutal Heart (2008). Her plays include adaptations of Beauty and the Beast, Peter Pan, and Dr. Doolittle.



Daria Salamon – Winner of the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book in Manitoba for The Prairie Bridesmaid (2008), Salamon is a writer from Winnipeg whose freelance work has been published in many papers, including the Winnipeg Free Press, which featured her monthly humour column “The Wedding Diaries,” in 2005. Her work has been shortlisted for the Writer’s Union of Canada’s Emerging Writer Short Fiction Award and the Canadian Authors Association’s North of 55 Writing Contest.
 
Wayne Tefs – Teacher, novelist, critic, and anthologist, Winnipeg’s Wayne Tefs is also the co-founder of Turnstone Press. “Red Rock and After,” a short story, was awarded the Canadian Magazine Fiction Prize in 1990,while his novel Moon Lake (2000), won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. His 2007 novel Be Wolf, based on a true story, was the McNally Robinson Book of the Year in Manitoba. In 2009 he released the short story collection Meteor Storm.

Wednesday, May 12 7:00 p.m.
An Evening with Writers for Children &Young Adults:
Martha Brooks, Anita Daher & Colleen Sydor

Martha Brooks – Nominated for a Governor General’s Award four times, Martha Brooks is best known for her young adult fiction, including Mistik Lake. Her debut collection Paradise Café and Other Stories (1991) won the Vicky Metcalf Award and was selected as a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She received the GG Award in 2002 for True Confessions of a Heartless Girl, and Traveling on Into the Light (1996) was a Hungry Mind Review Children’s Book of Distinction. Martha is also a jazz singer.


Anita Daher – Anita Daher says “place” infuses her writing, and is grateful to have lived in communities like Summerside, PEI; Moose Jaw, SK; Churchill, MB; Baker Lake, NU; and Yellowknife, NT. Her short stories have appeared in Prairie Fire, and she is author of seven youth novels, including Spider’s Song, a Manitoba Book Award finalist (2006), and Racing for Diamonds (2006), nominated for the Arthur Ellis and Diamond Willow awards. She has led workshops across the country and is an editor for Great Plains Publications.


Colleen Sydor – Colleen Sydor of Winnipeg has been writing for children since the birth of her first child and has enjoyed critical success, winning the McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award three times for her books Smarty Pants (1999), Camilla Chameleon (2005), and Raising a Little Stink (2006). In 2009 Tundra released her children’s picture book Timmerman Was Here¸ illustrated by Nicolas Debon.  

Friday May 14 7:30 p.m. Keynote Speaker Todd Davis Loving the Flesh”: on the body in poetry

Todd Davis is the author of the poetry collections The Least of These (2010), Some Heaven (2007), and Ripe (2002), as well as the scholarly books Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture (2006) and Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four (2006), both with Kenneth Womack. He is co-editor of Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets (SUNYPress, 2010) and the essay collection Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (2002). He teaches creative writing, American lit, and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State Altoona and is a member of University Mennonite Church in StateCollege, Pennsylvania. Born and raised in Elkhart, Indiana, he taught at Goshen College from 1996 to 2002, where he was chair of the English Department. A winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, Davis has been a nominee for the Pushcart Prize.