Elaine McCluskey's debut collection, "Watermelon Social," contains ten comical and aggressively human slices of suburban life. From grocery aisles to strip-mall parking lots to school hallways and waiting rooms, these stories pulse with the bizarre and sometimes annoying trappings of in-between places and the people we encounter there.

Elaine McCluskey's stories have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Gaspereau Review and Pottersfield Portfolio. The title story in this collection was shortlisted for the 2004 Journey Prize and is included in the 2004 Journey Prize Anthology. A former Bureau Chief for the Canadian Press news agency, McCluskey lives with her family in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

Katerina Fretwell's fourth poetry collection, Shaking Hands With The Night, was published by Pendas Productions, 2004. She's on the Lowther Jury of the League of Canadian Poets and sings tenor in Haydn's Creation with her art as backdrop, first at Stockey Centre, second in Huntsville at Algonquin Theatre. Individual poems are in the latest Descant and Cranberry Tree Press's musical anthology, Toccata.

P.J. Thomas was an editor and arts administrator until she became seriously mentally ill at age 30. She spent the next 10 years in and out of psychiatric institutions. Her first published novel, Almost Up and Down, was written in the last five years of these experiences. Copies of Almost Up and Down will be available at the reading.

P.J. will be reading from her new work; Gert's Book of Knowledge.

Daniel Kolos came out of the poetic closet in 1997 and began a series of public poetry readings that has not yet stopped. In 2003 Pendas Productions of London published his first poetry collection, "Slipped Out".

Before his poetry career, Daniel produced radio documentaries on ancient Egypt and the Biblical world for CBC Ideas, and translated the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Tutankhamun Exhibit treasures into English. The resulting best-seller book, "The Name of the Dead" is still available on www.amazon.ca

He is currently working on a series of inspirational poems based on the 13th century Sufi mystic poet, Rumi, and will read a selection from this new work on June 5th.

Daniel's poetry page is available at www.bmts.com/~damilos/poetry.html His books, several anthologies in which he has paticipated and his CD will be available at the Cooked and Eaten performance.

The words: passion, intensity, and focus, have been used to describe the work of Margot Van Sluytman, poet, publisher, and instructor, who was born in Guyana, South America, and moved with her family to Canada in the late 1960s. Margot is a Canadian Pioneer in the field of mentoring and teaching poetry and writing as both art and healing.

Margot has been published in magazines and eZines across Canada, the US, and South America. Her books include, Feeding Dreams, Bleeding Pupils and Beauty, Alba the Spanish Woman, Studying Love, and Of Dark Night. Her sixth book of poetry, morning tasting whispers, will be published in the Fall of 2006. This work was inspired by an ongoing collaboration with, Robert Winslow, Artistic Director of Canada’s renowned 4th Line Theatre.