Chris Banks
Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of eight collections of poems, with Bureau of Useless Splendour forthcoming (Fall 2026, ECW press). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.
Conor Mc Donnell
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
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), the book-length essay A river runs through it: a writing diary, collaborating with Julie Carr (Spuyten Duyvil, 2026), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
Cecilia Montemayor
Cecilia 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
Shane Neilson is a poet, physician, and critic who published Constructive Negativity, a book of evaluative criticism, with Palimpsest Press in 2019.
The Woodlot 