Guest Workshop Leaders

Jennifer Cowan has been writing professionally for the past two decades. Her young adult novel earthgirl was New York Times Editors' Choice. Her television credits include: writer and Executive Story Editor of Producing Parker, Show Me Yours, Traders and Big Sound; multiple scripts for the CBC/FoxKids teen soap, Edgemont, (2004 Leo Award Winner for a Leo Award for Best Screenwriting in a Youth or Children's Series/2004 Gemini Award Nominee) The Saddle Club, The Zack Files, Quads, and Ready or Not. She has also produced arts, pop culture and entertainment magazine programs and documentaries for CBC, CBC Newsworld, CTV, TVOntario and CityTV.

Bernice Eisenstein was born in 1949 in Toronto, shortly after her parents immigrated to Canada. Her critically acclaimed graphic novel, "I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors" was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and her illustrations have appeared in a variety of Canadian magazines and periodicals, including the Globe and Mail. Her work will be featured in the upcoming "Comic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women," presented by the Koffler Gallery at the Gladstone Hotel, Feb 17 - April 17 2011.

Helen Guri

Helen Guri graduated from the University of Toronto's Master of Arts in Creative Writing program in 2008 and continues to live in Toronto, where she works as a web writer and editor. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as Descant, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Canadian literature, and Arc. Her first book, as yet untitled, is forthcoming with Coach House Books.

Marina Hess

Marina Hess is a writer and teacher. She has a M.A. in English and creative writing from Concordia University and a B.Ed. from OISE. She has taught writing skills in a variety of classrooms including Ryerson University and in Japan. Recently, she co-facilitated the Annex chapter of Neighbourhood Diaries, a creative writing and art workshop series for children. She is currently working on a children's novel set in Parkdale, where she grew up.

Ibi Kaslik

Ibi Kaslik is an internationally published novelist, freelance writer and teacher. Her most recent novel, The Angel Riots, is a rock n' roll comic-tragedy and was nominated for Ontario's Trillium award in 2009. Her first novel, Skinny, was a New York Times Bestseller and has been published in numerous countries. Ibi teaches creative writing at The University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies.

Brooke Lockyer

Brooke Lockyer was born in the countryside outside of London, Ontario and stole away to New York City at the age of eighteen. While pursuing her BA at Columbia University and MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing at U of T, she won the Hart House Review Literary Contest, the Peter S. Prescott Prize, and the Lenore Marshall Barnard Prize for fiction and wrote for publications including Toronto Life, Toro, Spacing, DesignLines, Paper, and Canadian House & Home.

Lindsay Zier-Vogel

Lindsay Zier-Vogel is a writer, bookmaker and arts educator. She studied contemporary dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre and received an M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. Since 2001, Lindsay has worked with hundreds of students in the Toronto and Vancouver school boards. The creator behind The Love Lettering Project, a one-of-a-kind guerilla love letter art project now in its sixth year, Lindsay currently works as the dance writer/web journalist for So You Think You Can Dance Canada.

Aine McGlynn

Aine McGlynn holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto where she has taught writing and critical thinking. She also teaches composition and rhetoric at Sheridan College. At Sister Writes, Aine has conducted a workshop on thinking critically about advertising, media and what it means to be a conscious consumer. Aine is currently at work on a graphic novel about space, loss and grief.

Grace O'Connell

Grace O'Connell holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in EYE Weekly, Lichen Arts & Letters, and various anthologies. In 2007, she won THIS Magazine's Great Canadian Literary Hunt (fiction category). She has been shortlisted for several awards including the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and recently finished her first novel. Grace lives in Toronto.

Catherine Graham

Catherine Graham is the author of four poetry collections: Winterkill, The Watch, Pupa, and The Red Element. Vice President of Project Bookmark Canada and Marketing Coordinator for the Rowers Pub Reading Series, she teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto.

Her work has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Web del Sol, Poetry Ireland Review, anthologized in The White Page / An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets and showcased in Poetry is Public is Poetry.

Award-winning author Emily Pohl-Weary's books include young adult mystery Strange Times at Western High; ghost love story A Girl Like Sugar; and memoirs of science fiction writer Judith Merril, Better to Have Loved. Pohl-Weary is a former co-editor of Broken Pencil and publisher of Kiss Machine magazine.  In 2008, she founded the Parkdale Street Writers for youth 16-25 in the neigbourhood where she grew up.

Katherine Leyton is a poet and journalist based in Toronto. Her work has been published in the Malahat Review, the Feathertale Review, the Globe and Mail, the South China Morning Post, Precedent magazine, and online at OpenFile.ca. She is also the founder of HowPedestrian.ca, a video blog that seeks to make poetry more accessible to the general public.