Ivan Coyote was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon and is the son of a welder and the daughter of a government worker. Ivan is the author of three collections of short stories, Close to Spider Man, One Man’s Trash,and Loose End;and a novel, Bow Grip.Ivan's first and truest love is live storytelling, and over the last ten years she has become an audience favourite at music, poetry, spoken word and writer's festivals from Anchorage to New York City. The Globe and Mail called Ivan "a natural-born storyteller" and Ottawa X Press said "Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture." Ivan’s work has also appeared in the National Post, the Georgia Strait, and magazines like Geist, Shared Vision, Nerve, and Curve.

Mariko Tamaki is a Toronto writer and performer with an avid interest in freaks, weirdos, and other fabulous forms of human behaviour. Mariko has appeared on stage with a variety of performance troupes, including fat activists Pretty, Porky and Pissed Off, The Corporate Wet Nurse Association, and theatre misfits TOA. Mariko has also published collections of creative non-fiction: True Lies: The Book of Bad Advice, and Fake ID, and one novella, Cover Me. Her most recent work is a graphic novel, Skim, illustrated by her cousin Jillian Tamaki. Another graphic novel, Emiko Superstar, illustrated by Steve Rolston, which will be released this summer as part of DC Comics’ MINX series. In her spare time, Mariko is a columnist for Kiss Machine and Herizons, and a graduate student in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto where she studies language, performance, and gender.

Joey Comeau was born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1980. When he was younger, his father had custody and so his mother kidnapped him. He is the author of a novel, Lockpick Pornography, and a collection of short stories, It’s Too Late To Say I’m Sorry. His short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Pine, Broken Pencil, Terminus1525, The Coast, Eyeshot, and Uber. Joey also writes the webcomic A Softer World, illustrated by Emily Horne, which appears weekly in The Guardian in the UK. Joey’s new novel is forthcoming from ECW Press in 2009.

RM Vaughan is a Toronto-based writer and video artist originally from New Brunswick. His books include the poetry collections A Selection of Dazzling Scarves, Invisible to Predators and Ruined Stars, the novels A Quilted Heart and Spells, and the plays Camera, Woman and The Monster Trilogy. Vaughan’s poems, essays, plays and fiction appear in over forty national and international anthologies. Vaughan’s short video and film works are exhibited in festivals and galleries across Canada and around the world. Vaughan comments on art and culture for numerous publications, most notably a weekly celebrity-pestering column in The Globe and Mail, and is a two-time National Magazine Award nominee. His latest book is Troubled, a poetic memoir of a patient/psychiatrist relationship gone horribly wrong. 

Anand Mahadevan is a writer and teacher based in Toronto; he was born in India and educated there as well as the US, Canada and Germany. He travels extensively and his writing explores how individuals are marginalized in social structures with a particular focus on kinship and family ties. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Strike, which documents the uncertain coming-of-age of its queer child protagonist in 1980s India. Currently, Anand is completing a book about the lives and loves of a young Muslim student in North America before and after 9-11.

Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and grew up in Trinidad. She has lived in Canada since the early 1980s. Her acclaimed first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, was published in fourteen countries, was a finalist for the Giller Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her most recent novel, He Drown She in the Sea, was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Award. She is also an accomplished visual and video artist. Shani Mootoo has lived in Vancouver and Edmonton, and now lives in Toronto.

Emma Donoghue is an award-winning Irish writer who lives in Canada. At 37, she has published six novels, three books of short stories, two works of literary history, two anthologies, and two plays. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with her lover and their son and daughter. Landing is her first contemporary novel in a decade, and her latest book, The Sealed Letter, is her long-awaited first Canadian publication.

Neil Smith is the author of Bang Crunch, which The Globe and Mail chose as a best book of 2007. This book of stories also earned rave reviews from The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Nylon, The Advocate, and more. Bang Crunch won the McAuslan First Book Prize and was nominated for the Hugh MacLennan Prize and the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book. Neil lives in Montreal, where he’s working on a novel about heaven. His website is www.bangcrunch.com

Nalo Hopkinson, born in Jamaica, has lived in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana and for the past 30 years in Canada. She is the author of four novels and a short story collection (Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, Skin Folk). She is the editor of fiction anthologies Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, Mojo: Conjure Stories. She is the co-editor of fiction anthologies So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction (with Uppinder Mehan) and Tesseracts Nine (with Geoff Ryman). Hopkinson's work has received Honourable Mention in Cuba's "Casa de las Americas" literary prize. She is a recipient of the Warner Aspect First Novel Prize, the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for emerging writers, the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, the World Fantasy Award, and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award.