Karen Connelly is the author of seven books of best-selling nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, the most recent being The Lizard Cage. She has read from and lectured on her work in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. She is also a working photographer. Her best-selling book, Touch The Dragon, A Thai Journal, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction in 1993, and was a New York Times Notable Travel Book of the Year in 2002. Her latest book The Lizard Cage won Britain's 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for New Writers, as well as being shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize 2006 and longlisted for the Dublin Impac Award, 2006. The novel illuminates the tragic story of modern Burma by focusing on the lives of two people: a Burmese political prisoner and the child-labourer he befriends. A deeply layered work about the transforming power of language and of love, it has also been hailed as a suspenseful, page-turning thriller.

Her other books include Grace and Poison, One Room in a Castle, This Brighter Prison, The Disorder of Love, and The Small Words in My Body.

www.karenconnelly.ca

Jeanette Lynes' fourth collection of poems, It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems, is forthcoming from Freehand Books in September, 2008. Her fifth collection of poems, The New Blue Distance, is forthcoming from Wolsak and Wynn in spring, 2009. Her first novel is forthcoming from Coteau Books in spring, 2009. Her third poetry collection, Left Fields, was short-listed for the Pat Lowther Award. She has also received the Bliss Carman Poetry Award. Jeanette was most recently a Visiting Artist/Scholar in Residence with the Department of Women's Studies at Queen's University in Kingston.

Carmine Starnino is a poet, essayist, critic and editor of Signal Editions (an imprint of Véhicule Press). His first poetry collection, The New World, was nominated for the 1997 QSPELL A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His second collection, Credo, won the 2001 Canadian Authors' Association Prize for Poetry and the 2001 David McKeen Award for Poetry. His recent publications include With English Subtitles (won the 2004 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry), Lover's Quarrel on criticism of Canadian poetry, and an anthology called The New Canon. He lives in Montreal.

www.gaspereau.com/189403189x.shtml

JC Sutcliffe works as a writer and translator and has lived in England, France and Canada. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in national newspapers and magazines in two countries, and she is currently completing a novel.