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Levi Binnema is an aspiring writer, currently working as a manager at Edmonton's landmark independent bookstore Audreys Books. Levi received a Bachelor of Arts undergraduate degree in English with a focus on Canadian Literature. He also completed his MFA in poetry from UVic in 2018 and is working on a lyric exploration of his hometown, Edmonton. Some of his accomplishments include poetry published in the Glass Buffalo literary magazine and being long listed for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2013. At Audreys, Levi plays a key role in organizing events and helps foster interest and attention for local writers.

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Karen spent 16 years as a full-time publisher with Purich Publishing Ltd. in Saskatoon SK, which specialized in books on Indigenous and social justice issues, law, and Western history for the academic and reference market. She sat on the executive board of SaskBooks for several years during that time. She practiced law for 19 years before working part-time in each of law and publishing. As a publisher, she negotiated contracts with authors, editors, printers, distributors, and sales reps, as well as worked in acquisitions. She also did substantive editing of manuscripts, proofreading, and marketing. The Purich publishing program was sold to UBC Press in November 2015. In 2019, Karen became a Senior Justice of the Peace, whose work involved case management in Small Claims actions. She fully retired in 2022.
Karen was born on Treaty 4 land and currently lives on Treaty 6 territory, also the homeland of the Métis. She has been an avid reader for as long as she can remember.

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Prior to entering library work, Shelagh McDonald spent over 20 years as a bookseller employed by several local businesses before establishing (in partnership) titles bookstore – a quality independent – which earned national recognition for providing a carefully curated selection of literature to the readers of Saskatoon. The store also dedicated substantial exhibition space to the university’s BFA students, as well as emerging and established members of the visual arts community. She has volunteered for several organizations and served two terms as a board member of the AKA – one of the oldest, artist-run centres in Canada. She is the current president of Word on the Street Saskatoon, a non-profit annual festival which champions literacy and provides access, for free, to a wide range of exceptional literary talent. Shelagh holds a BA in political studies from the University of Saskatchewan, and resides in Treaty 6 Territory (Saskatoon.)

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Aritha van Herk has published five novels, seven works of non-fiction, and most recently, Stampede and the Westness of West (Frontenac Press), a volume of prose-poetry. It seeks to unsettle history, erasure, and the idea of westness as a version of mass impulse and unquestioning destination. Her textual accompaniments to the work of photographer George Webber, In This Place: Calgary 2004-2011 and Prairie Gothic develop the idea of geographical and historical temperament as tonal accompaniment to landscape. She is currently writing a creative place-biography of Robert Kroetsch, and an anti-historical anatomy of history. She teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at the University of Calgary in Alberta. She has served on dozens of juries, including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Awards, the Gabrielle Roy Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Photo credit: Trudie Lee Photography.

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Tomas Jonsson is a curator, writer and visual artist whose diverse practice focuses on the socially engaged, collaborative nature of the artmaking process. He received a BFA in 2000 at the University of Calgary, and an MFA at the University of British Columbia Okanogan in 2018. He has curated, presented, and performed work in Canada and internationally, including Artscape Gibraltar Point (Toronto), Suvilahti Cultural Centre (Helsinki, Finland), and MoKS Artist run space (Mooste, Estonia). He currently resides in Treaty 4 Territory (Regina), where he is Curator of Moving Image and Performance at the Dunlop Art Gallery.

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Carol is the past executive director of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and was previously the director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre. She has served on the boards of LitFest, the Edmonton-based nonfiction festival, and the Calgary-based, WordFest. She has been shortlisted for the Rozsa Award for Excellence in Arts Management, awarded a Queen Elizabeth 11 Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012, a Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2022, and recently received a lifetime achievement award from the Book Publishers of Alberta. She is an active member of the literary community and a lifelong reader.