Short Story Contest
Heather Birrell (BEd 2006) is the author of two story collections, Mad Hope (2012) and I know you are but what am I? (2004). Winner of the Writers Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for short fiction and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, she lives with her husband and two daughters in Toronto.
Kelli Deeth’s first story collection, The Girl Without Anyone (2001) was chosen as one of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books. Her second collection, The Other Side of Youth (2013), was shortlisted for a ReLit Award. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.
Spencer Gordon (MA 2010) is the author of Cosmo (2012), a collection of fiction that Quill & Quire called “Canada’s Most Underrated Book.” He is also a co-founding editor of The Puritan. He lives in Toronto.
Alissa York’s internationally acclaimed novels include Mercy (2003), Effigy (2007), which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Fauna (2010). She is also the author of the short fiction collection Any Given Power (1999), stories from which have won the Writers Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. York has lived all over Canada and now makes her home in Toronto. Her new novel, The Naturalist, is due out in 2016.
Flash Fiction Contest
Flash fiction entries had to include the words “fall,” blue” and “bright.”
Cary Fagan (BA 1980 UC, MA 1991) is the award-winning author of six novels and three short story collections as well as many books for children. He teaches creative writing at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies.
Helen Walsh (BA 1990 UC) is the president of the Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization and the founder of Spur, a festival of ideas that takes place in five Canadian cities.
Poetry Contest
George Elliott Clarke is the E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at U of T. He is a past winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry (2001) and the National Magazine Foundation Gold Medal for Poetry (2002), and was a Trudeau Foundation Fellow (2005–
08). He is an officer of the Order of Canada and Toronto’s Poet Laureate.
Robert McGill is a professor in U of T’s English department, where he teaches Creative Writing and Canadian Literature. He is the author of two novels, The Mysteries (2004) and Once We Had a Country (2013) and of a non-fiction book, The Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics, and Autobiographical Fiction (2013).
Lindsay Zier-Vogel (BA 2005 Victoria, MA 2007) is a Toronto-based writer and arts educator whose work has been published in Taddle Creek, Grain and Descant. She is also the creator of The Love Lettering Project, a community-based art project that has been bringing love poems to strangers since 2004. She is currently working on a novel.