Caterina Edwards's most recent book is a collection of short stories, The Island of the Nightingales. She won the 2000 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Short Fiction. Her novel The Lion's Mouth has received much critical and academic attention and was published in French last year. She has also published a book of novellas, Whiter Shade of Pale/Becoming Emma and many short stories and essays in various magazines and anthologies. Her play Terra Straniera was produced professionally in Edmonton and published by Guernica Editions under the title Homeground. Caterina has also co-edited two books of life writing by women: Eating Apples: Knowing Women's Lives and Wrestling with the Angel: Women Reclaiming their Lives, and is currently working on a work of creative non-fiction, At Home: An Istrian Story as well as a novel, The Sicilian Wife. A collection of essays by critics from Canada, the U.S., and Italy, Caterina Edwards: Essays on Her Work, was the first book published by Guernica in its series on Canadian writers. 
Claude Lalumière edited three anthologies released in 2003: Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction, Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic, and (in collaboration with Marty Halpern) Witpunk. He founded — and ran for 10 years — Nebula, a Montreal bookshop devoted to "the fantastic, the imaginative, and the weird." He publishes the webzine Lost Pages. He's a columnist for Locus Online, The Montreal Gazette, and Black Gate. His criticism and his short fiction appear regularly in various magazines, websites, and anthologies. 
Yves Meynard was born in 1964 in Québec City and has lived most of his life in Longueuil. He has been active in Québec SF circles since 1986. He was literary editor for the magazine Solaris from 1994 to 2001. Since 1986, he has published nearly 50 short stories in French and English, winning many awards for his short fiction, including several Boréal and Aurora awards, along with the Grand Prix de la Science-Fiction et du Fantastique Québécois, Québec's highest award in the field, in 1994. His work has appeared in, among others, Solaris, Imagine..., Yellow Submarine, Tomorrow, Edge Detector, Prairie Fire, and in various anthologies, including Northern Stars and Tesseracts. His story "Tobacco Words" was reprinted in Year's Best SF 2. He started publishing books in 1995, and has 11 under his belt to date: La Rose du désert, a short-story collection (winner of the 1995 Boréal Award for best book); Chanson pour une sirène, a novella in collaboration with Élisabeth Vonarburg; Le Mage des fourmis, a YA fantasy novel; a YA fantasy diptych, Le vaisseau des tempêtes and Le Prince des Glaces; the beginning of a YA fantasy series, Le fils du Margrave (the next two installments are due out shortly); two books in a YA series with Jean-Louis Trudel, Le messager des orages and Sur le chemin des tornades; and the novella Un Oeuf d'acier. In 1998 Tor Books published his first novel in English, a fantasy titled The Book of Knights, which was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. It came out in 1999 in French under the title Le Livre des chevaliers.
Yves was co-editor, with Claude J. Pelletier, of Sous des soleils étrangers and of three books by Québec author Daniel Sernine: Boulevard des Étoiles, À la recherche de M. Goodtheim and Sur la scène des siècles. With Robert Runté, he was co-anthologist of Tesseracts 5. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université de Montréal and earns a living as a software analyst. 
Lyle Weis lives in Edmonton. He is the author of four novels for young adults (No Problem, We'll Fix It, Bush Party, Burn It and Let's Wrestle), a collection of poetry (The Mill Under His Skin), and dozens of short stories and articles. He has been a juror for the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. A former Executive Director of the Writers Guild of Alberta, he now writes full-time when he is not travelling to offer writing workshops to students of all ages. 
Michelle Sagara was born in the borough of East York, grew up on the boundary between North York and Scarborough, and now lives in Toronto with her husband and their two children. She started working at Bakka Books in 1986 as a part-timer, and eventually wound up managing the store until the birth of her oldest son. As she's always loved bookstores, she continues to work there part-time. Her first short story and her first novel, Into the Dark Lands, were published under the name Michelle Sagara in 1991, and the novel The Riven Shield under the name Michelle West (her married name) in 2003; between these, she wrote and published nine other novels and dozens of shorter works, some as Michelle Sagara, some as Michelle West, and some as Michelle Sagara West. She has written reviews for Quill & Quire, Barnes & Noble, Now Magazine and for the Globe & Mail online, and has a continuing review column in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She has also served on The World Fantasy Award jury. Her sixth novel in the Sun Sword series was published in 2004, as was Speaking with Angels. She is currently hard at work on The Sundered series. 2004 SHORTLIST CHOSEN BY THIS JURY
