Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris Banks has been reviewing poetry for over 15 years, and was an associate editor with The New Quarterly.
Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician on staff at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. A third collection, What We Know So Far Is, will be published in Fall 2025. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto where he is a funded researcher of pediatric hospital safety, pediatric medication error, and opioid stewardship. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications and he is a frequently invited international lecturer and presenter on pediatric perioperative care and error prevention. He has also published poetry in noted medical journals such as JAMA, and CMAJ. He recently joined forces with the Narrative Based Medicine Lab at U of T to launch Case Repertory (an online platform publishing physician/scientist/healthcare workers’ narrative based case histories where, as Editor in Chief, he hopes to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with the primary authors of future accepted publications).
rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is full-time with the wee girls he shares with writer Christine McNair. His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press), will appear in August 2024. His next poetry collection is the book of sentences with University of Calgary Press, the second in a suite of collections that began with the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). He edits the chapbook press above/ground press and the online journal periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics, among other schemes.
CECILIA MONTEMAYOR is an emerging writer, originally from Mexico but, currently located in southern Ontario. Interested in writing in a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, film, and theatre, Cecilia’s work tends to fit into the speculative fiction category—and explores, among other themes, mental health stigma, conflict between the United States and Mexico, intergenerational trauma, queer love and spirituality. Cecilia is a recent graduate from the MA in English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and holds a Bachelor of Communication and Digital Media from Tec de Monterrey, with a concentration in Film Production.
Shane Neilson is a poet, physician, and critic who published Constructive Negativity, a book of evaluative criticism, with Palimpsest Press in 2019.
The Woodlot 