Dionne Brand is the Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto. She has written nine volumes of poetry and four works of fiction. For her poetry she has received the Governor General’s Award for poetry, the Pat Lowther Award and the Trillium Prize and for her fiction has received the Toronto Book Award. She is also Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at The University of Guelph.

George Elliott Clarke is an award-winning poet, playwright and screenwriter. He is the author of six books of poetry, including Whylah Falls, a 2002 CBC Canada Reads finalist, and Execution Poems, winner of the 2001 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the black Loyalist community of Three Mile Plains. He now lives in Toronto, where he is currently the E. J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, but also owns land in Nova Scotia. He was recently awarded the Trudeau Fellowship.

Lynn Crosbie is a Ph.D in English literature who is currently teaching at OCA University. She is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Missing Children and Liar. She is also the author of two novels and the editor of two acclaimed anthologies of feminist writing. She lives in Toronto and is a regular contributor to the Globe and Mail and Fashion. She is completing a new book called Blood on the Gizmo.

Poet and playwright Daniel David Moses hails from the Six Nations Grand River. He co-edited Oxford University Press’ An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, now in its third edition. His essays Pursued by a Bear were published in 2005 and his play Kyotopolis in 2008. A new edition of his best-known work Almighty Voice and His Wife was released in 2009 by Playwrights Canada Press. He teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.