SALLY COOPER

Sally is the author of two acclaimed novels: Love Object (Dundurn, 2002) and Tell Everything (Dundurn, 2008) and the linked story collection Smells Like Heaven (ARP, 2017). Her writing has appeared in CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries; Electric Literature; Event; The Feathertale Review; The Globe and Mail; Grain; The Millions and TNQ: The New Quarterly. In 2017, her writing was longlisted for the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, the Short Works Prize and the Vancouver Women in Film and Television From Our Dark Side Contest. Sally is a Senior Editor of Hamilton Review of Books. Her third novel, With My Back to the World, is forthcoming in 2019 with Wolsak & Wynn. Visit Sally at her website: www.sallycooper.ca. Her next work is an original series, co-written with Krista Foss called ELLESMERE, a sci-fi environmental thriller set in a remote research station in the high Arctic, that tells the story of LU, an isolated young scientist, whose transformation into an Arctic wolf after discovering the fabled Crocker Land forces her to face how both she and the north are changing.

Sally is represented by Samantha Haywood, samantha@transatlanticagency.com. 

GIA DE CADENET

Gia de Cadenet is a business school professor, former translator and editor for UNESCO. A native Floridian, she took her first French class at age seven and fell in love with the language. After achieving her dream job in politics, her desire to live in France became too great to ignore. She put her professional life on hold for two years to get a master's degree in international relations in Paris. But a few short weeks after arrival, she bumped into a red-headed Frenchman and her fate was sealed. A decade later, Gia got serious about another big dream: becoming a published author. Her first manuscript, a contemporary romance titled NOT THE PLAN, was showcased in the 2017 PitchWars mentorship program. She's enthusiastic about her upcoming projects which focus on the impact of mental health and race on the expectations we have of ourselves and on the way we love.

Gia is represented by Samantha Haywood and Leonicka Valcius, samantha@transatlanticagency.com and leonicka@transatlanticagency.com.

NORMA DUNNING

Norma Dunning is a southern born and raised Inuit writer. She is a fifth-year doctoral candidate registered at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Her doctoral work examines the intricacies of policy towards Inuit who are residing outside of their land claims areas. Dunning writes in both prose and poetry. Her debut collection of short stories, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories received the Danuta Gleed Award 2018 and the Howard O'Hagan Award 2018 for best short story collection, as well as a bronze standing with Foreword Reviews and is being translated into French through a Montreal-based publisher. Dunning is working on a book that critically examines the impact of the Eskimo Identification Canada system. She also working on a second collection of short stories. 

Norma is represented by Stephanie Sinclair, stephanie@transatlanticagency.com.

LULU KEATING

Lulu Keating has been writing for over 35 years. As a filmmaker, she has written eight feature length screenplays (two have been produced) and numerous short fiction scripts. For several years, Keating had a regular column for What's Up Yukon, featuring profiles of colourful characters and visitors to her home town, Dawson City Yukon. She has also had work published in The Globe and Mail, the Journal of Canadian Studies, Geist Magazine and Yukon: North of Ordinary. The middle child of eleven, Keating was born and raised in Antigonish Nova Scotia. Her family was the focus of her award-winning animated film, The Moody Brood, co-produced with CBC Television. As a university student, Keating volunteered in the Congo Zaire. This pivotal experience inspired the movie she wrote and directed, The Midday Sun. While she continues to make at least one film a year, Keating is currently adapting KLONDIKE KALAHARI, her screenplay, into a novel with the same name. From the Kalahari to the Klondike, Acacia is about to have her world turned upside down as she rebels against her father's wishes and sets off in an impromptu road trip across the Yukon in search of freedom and independence.

Lulu is represented by Samantha Haywood, samantha@transatlanticagency.com. 

ADNAN KHAN

Adnan Khan has written for VICE, The Globe and Mail, and Hazlitt, for which he was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2016, he was awarded the RBC Charles Taylor Prize for emerging writers. He is working on a novel, THERE HAS TO BE A KNIFE, a story about race, class, and masculinity. 

Adnan is represented by Stephanie Sinclair, stephanie@transatlanticagency.com.

PAMELA KORGEMAGI

After graduating from York University's creative writing program Pamela Korgemagi moved to Toronto where she has worked at various jobs throughout the city including being a game tester at a video game studio, receptionist at an industrial engine repair site, and human money counter in a vault. Calling to mind The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and The Bear by William Faulkner and for readers of Life of Pie by Yann Martel, THE HUNTER AND THE OLD WOMAN is Pamela Korgemagi's first novel, which follows a female cougar as she attempts the most remarkable of feats: survival in the forest.

Pamela is represented by Samantha Haywood, samantha@transatlanticagency.com.

SARAH KURCHAK

Sarah Kurchak is a writer, autist, and retired professional pillow fighter from Toronto. Her work as an autistic self advocate and essayist has appeared in Hazlitt, Catapult, The Guardian, CBC, Vox, and Electric Literature. She's also written autistically about pop culture and MMA for various outlets. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Sarah is currently working on I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder, a collection of essays about how she learned to hide her autism, make friends, and influence people... and how she's currently trying to recover from that ostensible success story. 

Sarah is represented by Stephanie Sinclair, stephanie@transatlanticagency.com.

KAREN MCBRIDE

Karen McBride is an Algonquin Anishnaabe writer from the Timiskaming First Nation in the territory that is now Quebec. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music and English, as well as a Bachelor of Education from the University of Ottawa. Most recently, Karen graduated with a Master of Arts in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Karen is currently writing a novel that follows the story of Hazel, a young Algonquin woman who returns home to her reservation to reconcile the death of her father and the legacy left in his wake. With the aid of the trickster, Nanabush, Hazel begins to unravel a web of deceit that, if left untouched, could destroy her family and her home on both sides of the Medicine Wheel. Presently, Karen is working as an elementary school teacher on her home reservation. 

Karen is represented by Stephanie Sinclair, stephanie@transatlanticagency.com.

TARA MCGUIRE

Tara McGuire's short stories have been broadcast on The Sunday Edition and The Vinyl Cafe on CBC Radio and published in local and international publications, such as Impact Magazine, Australian Yoga Life, The Vancouver Province, and WestCoast Families. Her personal essay "Hook an Anger" was shortlisted for the 2018 Writer's Union of Canada Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers. The new anthology, Always With Me: Parents Talk About the Death of a Child includes Tara's prose essays "Mourning Sickness" and "Hole Family" and her poems, "Go Away" and "On Sunday." During Tara's twenty-nine-year career as a radio broadcaster, she interviewed many extraordinary people, including: Isabel Allende, Sarah Ferguson, Robert Redford, Roberta Bondar, Queen Noor, Goldie Hawn, Madeleine Albright, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Sally Field, Isabella Rosselini, Lily Tomlin, Irish Prime Minister Mary Robinson, and Billy Jean King. Tara holds an Honours Diploma in Radio Journalism from the British Columbia Institute of Technology, is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University, and is currently working on her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She is writing her first volume-length work: a personal exploration of the opioid crisis, by examining events surrounding the overdose death of her son, Holden. Tara McGuire lives in Vancouver.

Tara is represented by Marilyn Biderman, marilyn@transatlanticagency.com. 

AMBER MCMILLAN

SUSAN OLDING

Susan Olding is the author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays, selected by 49th Shelf as one of the top 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her work has been honoured multiple times by the National Magazine Awards Foundation and has appeared in The Bellingham Review, The L.A. Review of Books, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, and the Utne Reader, and in many anthologies including Best Canadian Essays, 2016 and In Fine Form, 2nd Edition. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of British Columbia, she lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario, where she holds a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship in Cultural Studies. Olding is at work on a new essay collection and a debut novel. To learn more, visit her website:  www.susanolding.com.

SOFI PAPAMARKO

Sofi is an award-winning writer and matchmaker (love, not sulphur) who lives in Toronto. She is a former regular columnist for the Toronto Star, Sun Media Newspapers and Metro Canada. She's also written for The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Flare, CBC, Reader's Digest, Salon, Exclaim! and many more. Sofi recently completed her debut short fiction collection, RADIUM GIRLS, for readers of early Lorrie Moore, Barbara Gowdy and ZsuZsi Gartner, the stories in Radium Girls plumb the depths of loneliness and seek to understand how human beings cope, break and triumph in the face of it. "Ark" encapsulates teenage isolation and loneliness as two female best friends grow apart, their friendship marred by complicated emotional and sexual ties. In "Underwater Calisthenics," a young woman debates whether or not to have an abortion while navigating friendships and her unconventional adopted family. Body and confidence issues propel the heroine of "You're a Gem of a Jewel of a Pearl of a Girl" to take up with a much older man who shows almost as great an interest in her as his magic tricks. Her short stories have appeared in Taddle Creek, Maisonneuve, Room and the Toronto Star. Sofi is also at work on a debut novel.

MARK SAMPSON

Mark Sampson is the author of five books: the novels The Slip (Dundurn Press, 2017), Sad Peninsula, (Dundurn Press, 2014), and Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007), the short story collection, The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015), and the poetry collection, Weathervane, (Palimpsest Press, 2016). Mark has published many short stories, poems, essays and book reviews in literary journals and magazines across Canada. He holds a journalism degree from the University of King's College in Halifax and a master's degree in English from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Born and raised on Prince Edward Island, he currently lives and writes in Toronto.

AVERY SWARTZ

Avery Swartz is a Toronto-based tech expert. She is the founder and CEO of Camp Tech, the tech workshop company for non-technical people. Avery is the resident tech expert on CTV's Your Morning, where she talks about tech trends and highlights the latest tech gadgets for a national audience. She writes articles about tech and the modern woman for Chatelaine, writes about tech and small business for The Globe and Mail, and hosts the Camp Tech podcast. Avery acts as a digital advisor to a number of charities (including the Art Canada Institute and Canadian Cancer Society), hosts the Gather North retreat for women who make the web, and is #5 on the Top 50 Women in Marketing list by Search Engine Journal. Avery is at work on THE DIGITAL PLAYBOOK: A frustration-free guide to reach more people, increase sales, and confidently build your brand online, all at once a modern manifesto on how communications technology can (and should) work for small businesses, a field guide to the standards and strategies that can propel fledgling businesses to flourishing ones, and an instruction manual that details absolutely everything one might need to know to market a product, service or brand by leveraging our connected world.

ALISON TAYLOR

Alison is a writer, stand-up comic and video artist whose work has screened internationally. She has an MFA in film from York University and is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. She has previously published in Exile Literary Quarterly and her upcoming novel is about an oxy-addicted mother, her university-dropout daughter and the shared trauma that haunts their past. She is currently working on her next novel, in which two estranged siblings are forced to reunite after their mother suffers a debilitating stroke. Originally from Hamilton, Ontario, Alison currently splits her time between Toronto, where she works as a television editor, and Fredericton, where her partner lives with their two cats.

CHELSEA VOWEL

Chelsea Vowel is Métis from manitow-sâkahikan (Lac Ste. Anne) Alberta, currently residing in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). Mother to six girls, she has a BEd and LLB, and is currently a graduate student in Native Studies. Chelsea is a public intellectual, writer, speaker, and educator whose work intersects language, gender, Métis self-determination, and resurgence. Her essays have been featured in the Nati onal Post, The Globe and Mail, the Guardian, Chatelaine, Today's Parent, Macleans, Briarpatch, Canadian Art, and many other publications. Chelsea is the author of the national bestseller, Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada, which won the Manuela Dias Book Design award, and was shortlisted for the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book as well as the Quebec Writer's Federation Concordia First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction. Chelsea is currently writing a collection of short stories that envision Métis people into the near and far future, exploring the concept of Indigeneity in post-singularity, and post-human contexts.