Clem Martini

Co-Chair

Clem Martini is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the recent co-author of Bitter Medicine, A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness, author of Feather and Bone, The Crow Chronicles trilogy, is a Past President of the Playwrights Guild of Canada and a winner of numerous playwriting awards and prizes including the Writers Guild of Alberta Playwriting Competition and the National Playwriting Competition. His texts The Blunt Playwright and The Greek Playwright are employed by universities and colleges across Canada. He is presently the Head of the Department of Drama at the University of Calgary.

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Lynne Van Luven

Co-Chair

Lynne Van Luven has a PhD in Canadian literature and has taught journalism and creative non-fiction classes at the University of Victoria for the past 14 years. She is the co-editor of several anthologies, including Nobody’s Mother: Life without Kids, as well as Nobody’s Father and Somebody’s Child (forthcoming Fall 2011), both co-edited with Bruce Gillespie.

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Sue Reynolds

Vice-Chair (Portfolio – Communications, Web Presence)

Susan Lynn Reynolds is a writer, an accredited writing instructor in the Amherst Writers and Artists method, and a former president of the Writers’ Community of Durham Region (WCDR). Her novel Strandia (HarperCollins, Farrar Strauss) won the Canadian Library Association’s national Young Adult Novel of the Year award, and she is also a multiple winner of the Timothy Findley Creative Writing Prize for her short stories and poetry. Her area of specialty is the therapeutic use of journaling and memoir, and her thesis on that topic received the Canadian Psychological Association’s Award of Academic Excellence in 2006. She has been leading writing workshops for female inmates at Central East Correctional Centre for six years and received the June Callwood Award for Outstanding Volunteerism for that program.

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Robyn Read

Co-Secretary/Treasurer

Robyn Read is the Acquiring Editor of Freehand Books, the literary imprint of Broadview Press located in Calgary, Alberta. She recently completed her PhD in Canadian Literature at the University of Calgary where she taught Introductory Creative Writing. Her research focuses on contemporary Canadian fiction, and collectors, collections, and acts of collecting represented in Canadian fictions.
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Christine Weisenthal

Co-Secretary/Treasurer

Christine Wiesenthal is a poet, nonfiction writer and editor, who teaches creative writing
at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Her books include Instruments of Surrender (2001, short-listed for the Gerald Lampert and Stephan G. Stephannson poetry awards), a biography, The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther (2005, finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction and winner of the Clio Prize in History), and The Collected Works of Pat Lowther (2010). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in numerous U.S. and Canadian magazines and anthologies. “Horses of the Ghost,” her most recent work, was originally commissioned by the Banff Center for the Arts for the 2009 Literary Journalism Program, and appears in LAKE: A Journal of Arts and the Environment (Spring 2010).

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Antanas Sileika

Director (Portfolio: 2012 CCWWP Conference)

Antanas Sileika is a Canadian writer of novels and stories as well as magazine nonfiction. He has been director of the Humber School for Writers since 2002.

His Buying on Time, Porcupine’s Quill, 1997, was nominated for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Toronto book award. His Woman in Bronze, Random House Canada 2004, was listed as a Globe Best Book that year. Underground, a novel set in postwar Europe, will be published by Thomas Allen in Spring of 2011. He is the winner of a National Magazine Award. In his teaching career, he has won innovation and other faculty awards.
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Sally Ito

Director (Portfolio: Membership)

Sally Ito is a poet and fiction writer. She was born in Taber, Alberta, and currently lives in Winnipeg. She has published two books of poetry, Frogs in the Rain Barrel and A Season of Mercy, and a collection of short stories called Floating Shore.

Ito has also studied in Japan, and has done translations of contemporary Japanese poetry. She has taught creative writing over a decade and currently teaches it at the University of Winnipeg and Canadian Mennonite University. She also is a blog contributor to the multicultural children’s literature blog and website, PaperTigers, based in San Francisco.

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Dr. Rob Budde

Director (Portfolio: Membership)

Budde teaches Creative Writing, Northern BC Literature, and Contemporary Critical Theory at UNBC in Prince George. He has previously published seven books (four poetry collections —Catch as Catch, traffick, Finding Ft. George, and, most recently, declining america ), two novels—Misshapen and The Dying Poem, and a book of short short fiction – Flicker). In 2002, Rob facilitated a collection of interviews–In Muddy Water: Conversations with 11 Poets and in 2006 he edited a collection of Al Purdy’s poetry—The More Easily Kept Illusions.

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Jo-Anne Elder

Director of Translation

Jo-Anne Elder completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Canadian Literature at Université de Sherbrooke, where she became so interested in ellipse, a magazine of poetry in translation, that she now publishes it. She has translated twenty works of poetry, theatre, film, fiction, and non-fiction, including three which were shortlisted for a Governor General’s award. Among her recent translations are Beatitudes, originally by Herménégilde Chiasson, and One, by Serge Patrice Thibodeau. Her own writing has been published in magazines and chapbooks, and her collection of flash fiction, Postcards from Ex-Lovers (Broken Jaw Press), won the WFNB’s David Adams Richards Prize. She organizes a festival of literary translation and often gives workshops and readings. She lives with her partner, Aboriginal artist Carlos Gomes, and their large family in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

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Ray Hsu

Director

Poet-schmoet. Ray Hsu is a rockstar who happens to write books. He is also the neighbourhood kid who gets everyone to build a snowfort. His catchphrases include, What can I do to help? and You know, what would be cool is if… Ray is author of Anthropy (winner of the Gerald Lampert Award) and Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon. He has published over 125 poems in over 40 journals internationally and has more degrees than he knows what to do with. He taught writing for over two years in a U.S. prison and now teaches at the University of British Columbia, where he collaborates across disciplines, districts, and dinner tables. When he isn’t winning poetry or teaching awards, he kicks back with a can of Chef Boyardee and a snifter of Hennessey. Catch him at thewayofray.com.

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Sharanpal Ruprai

Director (Portfolio: Student Relations)

From Winnipeg to Calgary, and now in Ontario, Sharanpal Ruprai has been an active member in literary communities. Currently, she is in the PhD program in the Department of Humanities at York University. Her dissertation focuses on texts that highlight the relationship between religion and culture within the Sikh Diaspora. She graduated from the University of Winnipeg with a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Education. She was a public school teacher in Winnipeg, Manitoba and taught grades seven and eight. Very early on in her life, she realized that pedagogy is one of her greatest passions. She is a published poet; her work has been published in two anthologies, Exposed, and Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets. Recently, she has expanded her creative work into film: she produced Narrow Field of Vision: Experimental Film Narrative, which was showcased at the Spinning Wheel Film Festival, held at the Royal Ontario Museum.

In the position of Student Relations, she vows to create the foundation for a student caucus, by which creative writing students’ needs may be addressed. If you are a student and would like to get involved please email her at rupraisp@gmail.com.