Kaiya Cade Smith Blackburn

Kaiya Cade Smith Blackburn is a publishing professional, writer, and musician based in Montreal. As a freelance editor for various Canadian presses, she specializes in academic nonfiction, memoir, and fiction. She completed her bachelor's degree at the University of Toronto in English Literature and her graduate studies at McGill University in Musicology, where she was the winner of the 2018 Schulich School of Music Dean's Essay Prize. She is the author of A Long-Awaited Diamond Day: Examining the Reception History of Freak Folk (2019). She has held several research and educational posts at McGill in the field of musicology. She released two studio albums as a folk musician and composes music for film and television.

Ann Charney

Ann Charney is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and journalist. Her work has been published in the US, Italy, France, Germany, as well as in Canada. She is a member of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal and the Honourary Board of the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. She has also been named to the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

Patrick Coleman

Patrick Coleman is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of works on Rousseau and Gabrielle Roy and served as editor of Québec Studies between 2000 and 2005. His most recent books include Anger, Gratitude, and the Enlightenment.

Julian Gollner

Julian Gollner has worked extensively in Management Consulting, Risk Management and Information Technology, with a degree in Economics from Concordia University. He holds multiple certifications within the IT field, and brings experience both from the corporate and not-for-profit sectors, including Blue Metropolis Foundation. He lives in Vancouver, where he is a Manager at Ernst & Young, as part of its Advisory Services Performance Improvement practice.

Edward He

Edward He is a translator and indie songwriter who has many years of experience working in English, French, and Mandarin. He is a graduate of Tsinghua University and University College London. He was the copy editor of Font Magazine, and has worked on several LLP projects, which include No Crystal Stair by Mairuth Sarsfield and Can’t Help Falling by Tarah Schwartz.

Rachel McCrum

Rachel McCrum is a poet, performer and organiser. Originally from Northern Ireland, she lived in Edinburgh, Scotland between 2010 and 2016, where she was the first BBC Scotland Poet in Residence and recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. She now lives between Montreal and Cacouna, Bas St Laurent. Her debut collection The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate was translated by Jonathan Lamy and published in a bilingual edition with Mémoire d’encrier in Fall 2020, and was shortlisted for the Le Prix de traduction de la Fondation Cole from the Quebec Writers’ Federation in 2022. Her latest book, co-written with Amélie Prévost, is La Belle-mère/The Stepmother, is published in a bilingual edition from L'Hexagone and touring Quebec and Canada as a spoken word show. She was curator of the Atwater Poetry Project 2019 - 2021, and Editor-in-Chief of Font magazine 2021 - 2023, has served on the Boards of Espace de la Diversité, Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature and the Quebec Writers' Federation, and is currently the Cultural Coordinator for Heritage Lower Saint Lawrence.

Elise Moser

Elise Moser is a writer and editor. Her nonfiction kids' book, What Milly Did: The Remarkable Pioneer of Plastics Recycling, appeared in 2016. It was preceded by her YA novel, Lily and Taylor (2013) and her novel Because I Have Loved and Hidden It (2009). She was the founding Literary Editor for Montreal online culture magazine The Rover and has reviewed books for Montreal Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Life Sentence, and Kirkus Reviews. She has served on a number of boards including the Quebec Writers’ Federation and PEN Canada. She manages the Atwater Writers Exhibition, is a co-organizer of the Read Quebec Book Fair in Montreal, and is a co-founder and co-coordinator of the National Juries and Awards Working Group.

Jinwoo Park

Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer and literary translator based in Montreal. Born in Seoul, he has lived in various parts of North America and the UK since the age of 11. He obtained his bachelor’s degree from McGill in 2013, followed by a master’s in political economics from LSE in 2014, and a master’s in creative writing at the University of Oxford in 2015. In 2021 he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers’ Award for his first fiction manuscript, Oxford Soju Club, which will be published by Dundurn Press in September 2025.

Deanna Radford

Deanna Radford is a writer, editor, performer, and organizer with an MA in creative writing (Concordia University). Her poetry has appeared in The Capilano Review, Vallum, and more. She writes about music and sound art and contributed toResistant Practices in Communities of Sound (MQUP, 2024). Her poetry-sound group, Cloud Circuit, has toured Western Canada, performed in the US, and served as Ambassadors of the Embassy of Utopia at the Tartu International Literary Festival in Estonia. She was the communications & membership services coordinator at the Quebec Writers’ Federation (2013-17), curator of the Atwater Poetry Project (2015-19), digital media editor of Font magazine, and a contributing copy editor to Tara Schwartz’s Can’t Help Falling. Deanna is currently a curator and social media promotions consultant for Arts in the Margins and a freelance editor.

Cora Siré

Cora Siré is the Montréal-based author of two novels, two collections of poetry and her latest, Fear the Mirror, a hybrid story/memoir collection. Her novel Behold Things Beautiful was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Fiction Prize. Cora’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many anthologies and magazines in Canada, the US, Mexico, and Europe. Her work has been translated into French and Spanish. Cora delivers talks on literature at universities and writing workshops for the QWF. She curates a reading series in her local library and appears at festivals and literary events in Montréal and elsewhere.

Author website: www.quena.ca