Lesley Choyce has a different career for every day of the week: author, poet, publisher, broadcaster, teacher, rock 'n' roll musician, historian and former grand champion of the Men's Open Canadian National Surfing Championships. The founder of Pottersfield Portfolio, publisher of Pottersfield Press, and professor at Dalhousie University, he has helped shape Atlantic Canadian literature for more than two decades. He was born in rural New Jersey in 1951. When he moved to Nova Scotia in 1979, he said, "arriving here as an immigrant, it felt like I was, in fact, returning home for the first time in a long while." In 1980, Fiddlehead Poetry Books published his first book. Since then, he's published 50-odd more in almost any genre you care to name. He teaches part-time at Dalhousie University, runs Pottersfield Press and has a regular nationally-broadcast program on Vision TV called "Off the Page with Lesley Choyce." With his band The Surf Poets, he is reinventing the genre of spoken word poetry.
Hiromi Goto was born in Japan and moved to Canada with her family at the age of three. She stumbled across science fiction in grade four when she started reading through the school library by shelving arrangement. Since A Wrinkle in Time, she's never looked back. Her most recent novel, The Kappa Child, was awarded the 2001 James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. It was also a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize in the Best Book category. Her second book, The Water of Possibility, is a children's fantasy novel filled with Japanese folk creatures. Her first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, was the 1995 winner of the Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best First Book, Canada and Caribbean Region and the 1996 co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Hiromi's short fiction and poetry has been widely published in journals and anthologies. She has also juried for the Canada Council, the Canada-Japan Literary Award, The Writer's Union Emerging Writer's Award and the W.O. Mitchell Book Award. Hiromi is a creative writing instructor, editor and the mother of two children. She is working on a second children's novel involving ghosts and a collection of short stories (with strange happenings) for adults.
Terence M. Green was born in Toronto in 1947. He holds BA and B.Ed degrees from the University of Toronto, as well as an MA in Anglo-Irish Studies from University College, Dublin. A Toronto secondary-school English teacher (now retired) for some 30 years, author of six novels and a collection of short stories, he has given talks and readings widely-from University of Toronto to Ashland (Kentucky) Community College to the University of Oklahoma. Both Interviewer (1996) and Reader (1985) at the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors, he is profiled in such places as The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Contemporary Authors, and Canadian Who's Who. His 1996 novel Shadow of Ashland was a World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Novel, and has been under film option since its publication. Currently, it is required reading (ENG 237) at the University of Toronto, and will be broadcast as a single-voice reading on CBC Radio's Between the Covers, fall, 2002. 1999's A Witness to Life was also a Best Novel finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and of St. Patrick's Bed (2001), The Globe and Mail wrote: "In this modern ghost story, Green's skill as a fantasist shines... It takes a special writer to delineate the complexities of blood kinship while maintaining the reader's sympathy for each character." Married with three sons, he lives in Toronto.
Eileen Kernaghan lives in New Westminster, B.C. Her latest fantasy novel, The Snow Queen, won the Canadian SF and Fantasy Award, the Aurora, for best long-form work in English, and was shortlisted by the Canadian Library Association for Best Children's Book of the Year. Eileen's "Grey Isles" trilogy is set in bronze-age Europe and is based on the origins of Stonehenge. Journey to Aprilioth (Ace, 1980) won a silver medal for original paperback fiction from The West Coast Review of Books. Songs from the Drowned Lands (Ace, 1983) won the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, while the third book in the series, The Sarsen Witch (Ace, 1989), was shortlisted for the same award. Dance of the Snow Dragon, a young adult fantasy novel with a Tibetan Buddhist background, was published in 1995 by Thistledown Press. Her poems and short stories have appeared in many North American publications, both mainstream and speculative. She is one-fifth of the poetry group Quintet, who recently published their first collection, Quintet: Themes & Variations.
Arthur Sladewas raised in the Cypress Hills of southwest Saskatchewan and began writing at an early age. He received an English Honours degree from the University of Saskatchewan, spent several years writing advertising and now writes fiction full-time. He is the author of the "Northern Frights" series of books, John Diefenbaker: An Appointment with Destiny, and Dust, which won the Governor General's award. His next project, Tribes, is coming out this fall from Wendy Lamb Books & HarperCollins Canada. Arthur Slade lives in Saskatoon.
