Thank you to all of our wonderful Variety Show contributors:
Jon Aylward earned a BA in German Studies in 2005, in addition to diplomas in Creative Writing, Professional Writing, and Performance & Communications Media. He is also a playwright and regular contributor to the St. John’s Shorts, with his most recent dramatic piece produced September 2019.
Jacqueline Baker is the author of A Hard Witching & Other Stories, The Horseman’s Graves, and most recently The Broken Hours, a ghost story about the final days of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.
Sheri Benning‘s fourth collection of poetry, Field Requiem, will be published by Carcanet Press in Spring 2021. Her previous collections include The Season’s Vagrant Light: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet Press), Thin Moon Psalm (Brick Books), and Earth After Rain (Thistledown Press).
Born and raised in Munich, Germany, Simon Boehm is an emerging writer, podcaster, and blogger. He moved to Saskatoon for the MFA in Writing program in 2016. After graduating in 2018, he moved to Toronto and hopes to soon be a Canadian permanent resident.
Sandy Marie Bonny is a published writer and artist with an academic background in the earth sciences—she embraces interdisciplinary literacies of all shapes and sizes. When not writing, painting, or carving and filming rocks, Sandy leads Indigenous Student Achievement Pathways (ISAP) for the College of Arts & Science. She has also been a mentor for the MFA in Writing program at the University of Saskatchewan.
Rita Bouvier’s poetry has appeared in literary anthologies, musicals, and television productions, and has been translated into Spanish, German, and the Cree-Michif of her home community of sakitawak – Île-à-la-Crosse, situated on the historic trading and meeting grounds of Cree and Dene people. Rita is working hard to complete a fourth book of poetry.
Beverley Brenna is a faculty member in the College of Education, teaching courses in English Language Arts and Canadian Children’s Literature. She has published over a dozen books for young people including her award-winning “Wild Orchid” series (2013 Governor General’s shortlist; Printz Honor). New work includes a picture book about an iconic Saskatoon sculpture—The Girl with the Cat (illustrated by Brooke Kerrigan)—and a middle-grade novel Because of That Crow. Bev looks for crocuses every spring.
Dave Carpenter is a Saskatoon writer and a former mentor for the MFA program. Every Sunday at 7:00 pm he emerges from his front door on Temperance Street, banjo at the ready, and with his wife and neighbours—including the very talented Lisa Vargo—sings banjo tunes.
Amanda Dawson grew up in rural Alberta, Canada, where she spent her time reading books, stargazing, and searching for a door to the Faerie realm in the forest near her house. She is currently pursuing a MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.
Marina Endicott has returned to Saskatoon after being too long away. She teaches writing in several places except during pandemics, when she writes instead. The Difference, her latest novel, will come out next month in the US as The Voyage of the Morning Light.
Sarah Ens is a writer and editor living in Treaty 6 territory. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Poetry Is Dead, Room Magazine, and SAD Mag. Her debut collection of poetry, The World Is Mostly Sky (Turnstone Press), was released this spring. Sarah’s cat writes haiku on Instagram @balto_thesleddog.
Brandon Fick was born and raised in Lanigan, Saskatchewan. He writes realistic fiction (along with some poetry), and has been published in Polar Expressions, in medias res, and The Society. Brandon is currently in the MFA in Writing program, working on a short-story collection examining shades of masculinity and small-town life.
Connie Gault has written for theatre, radio, and film, and now concentrates on fiction. Her most recent book is the novel A Beauty. She lives in Regina where she dreams of writing until the day she dies. With luck she will rattle away on the keyboard on that day too.
Tea Gerbeza is a disabled poet and paper quilling artist. She has two dogs who keep her feet warm while she writes. You can find Tea’s work in the Society, Spring, and Poetry Is Dead, among other literary magazines. Her poems have won an Honourable Mention in the 2019 Short Grain Contest. Her paper art can be found @teaandpaperdesigns.
Laurie D. Graham is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her first two books, Rove and Settler Education, were nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Trillium Award for Poetry respectively. A third book, a long poem tentatively titled The Larger Forgetting, will be published in 2022.
Carolyn Gray is a playwright, short story, and non-fiction writer. She won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the Manitoba Day Award for her play The Elmwood Visitation. She received her MFA in Writing in 2019 and is editor at Prairie Fire magazine.
Nicole Haldoupis is a writer, editor, designer, and cat person from Toronto. She’s a co-creator of untethered, editor of Grain, and co-founder of Applebeard Editions. Her flash fiction and poetry can be found in BAD DOG, The Feathertale Review, Bad Nudes, (parenthetical), antilang, and other places. Her debut book, Tiny Ruins, is forthcoming with Radiant Press in fall 2020. Follow her cat drawings on Instagram @morningkitties.
Lucy Hinnie is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Saskatchewan, having relocated to the prairies in 2019 with her partner and two cats. Lucy is currently working on her postdoctoral project “Digitising the Bannatyne MS.” She is a late medievalist with early modernist leanings. Lucy works as an editor on the Journal of the Northern Renaissance. Outside of academia Lucy is passionate about good food, podcasting, improv, libraries, reading, photography, travel, and theatre-making.
dee Hobsbawn-Smith (MFA ’14) is an award-winning writer, quilter, runner, and chef. She lives west of Saskatoon with her husband, the writer Dave Margoshes, and their pets. Her work has appeared in lit mags and journals, newspapers, anthologies, magazines, and online. She is a past poetry editor of Grain, served as the SPL’s 35th Writer-in-Residence, has published seven books, and is currently earning her MA in Literature at the U of S.
Terry Jordan is an award-winning fiction writer, essayist, musician and dramatist whose stage plays have been produced in Canada, the U.S and Ireland. His book of stories It’s a Hard Cow won a Saskatchewan Book Award and was nominated for the Commonwealth Book Prize. He has published two novels, Beneath That Starry Place and Been in the Storm So Long. His play A Million Words Unspoken was part of Saskatoon’s Short Cuts Festival in 2019.
Mika Lafond is a member of the Muskeg Lake First Nation in Treaty Six Territory. She has authored poems, plays, and short stories for publication and performance. She completed her MFA at the University of Saskatchewan. Currently, Mika teaches at ITEP at the University of Saskatchewan.
Tonia Laird is of Métis and settler descent. Her writing credits include the AAA video games Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. She was also the lead writer on the mobile game Everlove: Rose and is releasing her own interactive novel, Poster Girl, on the FableLabs mobile platform.
Barbara Langhorst has published a collection of experimental poetry (restless white fields) and a novel (Want). To her astonishment, a second novel has been accepted. She teaches at St. Peter’s College, and shares an acreage with her husband, an assortment of mostly elderly pets, and the local wildlife.
Tim Lilburn is the first Canadian to receive the European Medal of Poetry and Art. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Assiniboia, Orphic Politics, Kill-site, and To the River. His work has received the Governor General’s Award and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. Lilburn is also the author of three essay collections. He teaches at the University of Victoria.
Taidgh Lynch is a poet from the South West of Ireland. He graduated from the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA in Writing in 2019 and published a chapbook, First Lift Here, with JackPine Press that same year. He recently finished a mentorship with Neil Aitken which was run by the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild.
Jeanette Lynes is the author of two novels and seven collections of poetry. Her non-fiction recently appeared in The Malahat Review. She directs the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.
Tanis MacDonald is the author of Mobile ( Book *hug 2019) and five other books. She lives in Ontario but is forever from the prairies.
Writer and editor Dave Margoshes writes fiction, short (and sometimes very short) and long, and poetry on a farm west of Saskatoon. He’s been a mentor for USask MFA in Writing students three times.
Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain and is the author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and was adapted to the screen and directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score. Martel is also the author of the novels The High Mountains of Portugal and Beatrice and Virgil. He lives in Saskatoon, SK.
Shannon McConnell is a writer, educator and musician originally from Vancouver, British Columbia. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in untethered, The Fieldstone Review, Louden Singletree, In Medias Res, Rat’s Ass Review, The Anti-Languorous Project. etc. She holds degrees in English Literature and Education from UFV and SFU, respectively, and is a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA in Writing program. She recently completed a MA in History also from the University of Saskatchewan. In 2018, she won second place for the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award for Poetry. She currently lives in Kingston, Ontario where she is working on her PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University.
Allie McFarland’s debut novel(la), Disappearing in Reverse, is forthcoming fall 2020 with the University of Calgary Press as part of their Brave & Brilliant series. She is a co-founding editor of The Anti-Languorous Project, which publishes antilang. magazine, soundbite, Good Short Reviews, and the On Editing blog series.
Cameron G. Muir resides in Saskatoon with his wife, Carolyn, and their two sons. He is finishing a collection of short stories for his MFA (Writing) thesis and—at last—reacquainting himself with “that novel.” Cameron’s writing appears in Geist Magazine, The Lamp Journal, antilang., and The Society.
David Parkinson studied violin and viola in Calgary and Victoria, latterly with John Thompson and Gerald Stanick. After withdrawing twice from BMus programs, he accepted the inevitable and completed degrees in English. At existentially tricky moments he attempts to reawaken the dream and tests the patience of those nearby.
Geoff Pevlin is a poet, visual artist, editor, and innkeeper from St. John’s, Newfoundland. He’s a co-founder of Applebeard Editions, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Arc, The Fiddlehead, Riddle Fence, Best Canadian Poetry, and others.
Casey Plett is the author of the novel Little Fish, the story collection A Safe Girl to Love, and co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers. Winner of multiple literary awards, much of her work can be found free on her website.
Poet and novelist Elizabeth Philips is the author of five books, edits privately and for publishers, mentors emerging writers, and teaches creative writing now and again. Lately she has been writing poems at a socially acceptable remove from everyone but her true love and two exceptionally literate dogs.
Bruce Rice is the Saskatchewan Poet Laureate, an essayist, and an editor. His sixth poetry collection, The Vivian Poems: Street Photographer Vivian Maier, is new from Radiant Press. His many awards include a Saskatchewan Book of the Year nomination and The Malahat Review’s P.K. Page Award for poem of the year. Bruce writes about individual lives, community, and how we are transformed by landscape even as we leave our footprints on it. He lives in Regina on Treaty 4 Territory and the Métis Homeland.
William Robertson retired in 2019 after many happy years of teaching at ITEP, SUNTEP Prince Albert, St Peter’s College, and various First Nations. His latest collection of poems was Decoys (2017), and he’s busily working away on the third ITEP anthology of creative writing.
Mari-Lou Rowley’s most recent books are Unus Mundus (Anvil Press) and Transforium (JackPine Press) in collaboration with visual artist Tammy Lu. New work is appearing in Golden Handcuffs Review in May 2020 and her tenth collection of poetry, NumenRology, is forthcoming with Anvil Press in spring 2021.
Candace Savage is the author of more than two dozen books including, most recently, Hello, Crow! and Strangers in the House: A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging. She lives in Saskatoon with her partner, Keith Bell, plus 2 budgies, 3 dogs, and a domestic shorthair named Louise Mae Allcat.
Arthur Slade was raised on a ranch in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan. He is the author of twenty five novels for young readers including The Hunchback Assignments, which won the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and Dust, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. His lifetime of work has also received the prestigious Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence.
Theressa Slind is a friend of the MFA in Writing program through her work with Saskatoon Public Library. Her fiction has appeared in Grain, subTerrain, The New Quarterly, and is forthcoming in The Malahat Review.
Glen Sorestad is a longtime Saskatoon poet whose poems have been published in many different countries and translated into eight languages, his latest book of poems being a bilingual English/Italian volume, Dancing Birches, from the Italian publisher Impremix Edizioni.
Jennifer Still is a Winnipeg poet working at the intersection of language and material forms. Her latest book, COMMA (Book*hug), won the 2018 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.
Diana Hope Tegenkamp is a Métis poet and filmmaker. Her writing has been published in CV2, Grain, Matrix, Moosehead Anthology, Queen Street Quarterly Review, and Tessera. She recently completed Arterial & Quarry, her first poetry manuscript, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
Leona Theis writes novels, short stories, and memoir. If Sylvie Had Nine Lives, a ‘novel in stories,’ won the John V. Hicks Award and is forthcoming from Freehand in fall 2020. She is a past winner of the CBC Literary Award and the Story Prize from American Short Fiction.
Guy Vanderhaeghe is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for English language fiction. He has also received Britain’s Faber Memorial Prize, the Timothy Findley Award, and the Harbourfront Prize, both given for a body of work. He currently teaches creative writing class at STM college.
Dianne Warren’s 2010 novel Cool Water won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. She is also the author of the novel Liberty Street and three story collections. Her new novel, The Diamond House, will be released by HarperCollins in June 2020. Dianne lives in Regina.
Toronto writer Alissa York is a professor at the Humber School for Writers. Her internationally acclaimed novels include Effigy (short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), Fauna, and The Naturalist. Stories from her short fiction collection, Any Given Power, have won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award.
USask's MFA in Writing Variety Show 