Darcie Friesen Hossack, Managing Editor
Darcie Friesen Hossack is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Her short story collection, Mennonites Don’t Dance (Thistledown Press), was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Award, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading Evergreen Award for Adult Fiction. Citing irreverence, the book was banned by the LA Crete Public Library in Northern Alberta. Having mentored with Giller finalists Sandra Birdsell (The Russlander) and Gail Anderson Dargatz (Spawning Grounds, The Cure for Death by Lightning), Darcie is represented by Rob Firing at Transatlantic Agency. Her first novel, Stillwater, was published by Tidewater Press in Spring 2023. Darcie is also a seven time judge of the Whistler Independent Book Awards. She lives in Northern Alberta, Canada, with her husband, an international award winning chef.
Sylvia Petter, Contributing Editor of Fiction
Vienna born Australian Sylvia Petter trained as a translator in Vienna and Brussels. Founding member of the Geneva Writers´ Group, she is a Humber College Toronto creative writing alumnus, holds a PhD in Creative Writing from UNSW (2009) and is a member of the Australian Society of Authors, Sydney, and GAV and IG_AutorInnen, Vienna.
Her stories have appeared online and in print since 1995, notably in The European (UK), Thema (US), The Richmond Review, Eclectica, Reading for Real series (Canada), the anthology, Valentine´s Day, Stories of Revenge (Duckworth, UK), on BBC World Service, as well as in several charity anthologies, and flash-fiction publications.
Her latest book of short fiction, Geflimmer der Vergangenheit (Riva Verlag, Germany, 2014), includes 21 stories drawn from her English-language collections, The Past Present (IUMIX, UK, 2001), Back Burning (IP Australia, Best Fiction Award 2007), and Mercury Blobs (Raging Aardvark, Australia, 2013), and translated into German by Eberhard Hain, Chemnitz.
She has led flash-fiction workshops in Vienna and Gascony, France. Writing as AstridL, several erotic stories appeared in anthologies in the US (Alyson Books) and the UK (Xcite) and subsequently in her collection of 17 erotic tales, Consuming the Muse, (Raging Aardvark, Australia, 2013.)
In 2014, she organized in Vienna the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English.
In March 2020, her debut novel, All the Beautiful Liars was published as a Lightning Bolt eBook by Eye & Lightning Books, UK, and came out in 2021 in paperback and audio.
In July, 2020, she served on the jury for English-language flash fiction for the Vienna Poetry School’s second literary magazine “Gespenster” issued in October. Her antifa novelette in flash, Winds of Change, was published in April 2021 under her imprint FloDoBooks Vienna-Sydney. Sylvia blogs on her website at http://www.sylviapetter.com where there is more on her and her writing.
Clara Burghelea, Managing Editor of Poetry
Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other was published in 2020 with Dos Madres Press. She is the current Poetry Editor of The Blue Nib.
Lori Roadhouse, Curatorial Support and Consulting Editor
Lori D. Roadhouse is a Calgary poet, writer, aphorist and singer. She has been a member and supporter of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society, the Red Mile Revenge poets, Passion Pitch Poetry and the Magpie Haiku Poets. She co-created the 2003 Writing Toward the Light Poetry Contest/Poetry Concert.Since 2007, Lori has been a Board member of the Single Onions Poetry Series. From 2008 – 2010 she was co-artistic director, performer and MC of Lotus Land at South Country Fair.She was the 2009 Poet in Residence for Radiant Lights eMagazine. She is a featured reader at a number of poetry and spoken word events and radio programs. She has been published in a variety of anthologies, magazines, newsletters, websites and CDs. Her recent publications include: Tap Press Read by the Calgary Public Library and Loft 112; POP YYC, the project of Calgary’s recent Poet Laureate, Sheri-D Wilson; The Time of the Poet Republic, curated by Darcie Friesen Hossack and envisioned by Mbizo Chirasha; and (M)othering Anthology, published by Inanna Publications in 2021.
Olga Stein, Contributing Editor of Creative Non-Fiction
Olga Stein holds a PhD in English, and is a university and college instructor. She has taught writing, communications, modern and contemporary Canadian and American literature. Her research focuses on the sociology of literary prizes. A manuscript of her book, The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian is now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Stein is working on her next book, tentatively titled, Wordly Fiction: Literary Transnationalism in Canada. Before embarking on a PhD, Stein served as the chief editor of the literary review magazine, Books in Canada, and from 2001 to 2008 managed the amazon.com-Books in Canada First Novel Award (now administered by Walrus magazine). Stein herself contributed some 150 reviews, 60 editorials, and numerous author interviews to Books in Canada (the online version is available at http://www.booksincanada.com). A literary editor and academic, Stein has relationships with writers and scholars from diverse communities across Canada, as well as in the US. Stein is interested in World Literature, and authors who address the concerns that are now central to this literary category: the plight of migrants, exiles, and the displaced, and the ‘unbelonging’ of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. More specifically, Stein is interested in literary dissidents, and the voices of dissent, those who challenge the current political, social, and economic status quo. Stein is the editor of the memoir, Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile by Hernán E. Humaña.
Sinyuy Geraldine, Contributing Editor of Critical Reviews
Dr Sinyuy Geraldine is a budding creative writer resident in the North West Region of Cameroon. Sinyuy trained as an English Language and Literature in English Teacher in the University of Yaoundé I in Cameroon. She earned her PhD in Commonwealth Literature from the same university in 2018. Dr Sinyuy started writing poems in her teens and most of her poems and folktales were read and discussed on the North West Provincial Station of the Cameroon Radio Television (CRTV) Bamenda where she was often a guest writer for the programme: Literary Workshop: A Programme for Creative Writing and Literary Criticism. She is a critical book review editor at WordCity Literary Journal. She is also does copy editing and proofreading under the cover of the comply she founded in 2022, ‘The Rising Sun Editing Company Ltd’.
Sinyuy Geraldine has had the following awards; Featured Change Maker at World Pulse #She Transforms Tech Featured Change Makers Program; Featured Storyteller on World Pulse Story Awards, May 2017; Prize of Excellence as Best Teacher of the Year in CETIC Bangoulap, Bangangte, 23 October, 2010; Winner of the British Council Essay Writing Competition, Yaoundé, 2007; Winner of Short Story Runner-Up Prize, Literary Workshop: CRTV Bamenda, 1998.
Her publications include: Music in the Wood: and Other Folktales (September 2020), Poetry in Times of Conflict (Eds. Meera Chakravorty and Geraldine Sinyuy, 2020), “Stripped” FemAsia: Asian Women’s Journal; “Invisble Barriers: Food Taboos in V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon.” Tabous: Représentations, Functions et Impacts; “Migration related malnutrition among war-instigated refugee children in the northern part of Cameroon.” South African Journal of Clinical Nutrition; “Cultural Translocation in Three Novels of V. S. Naipaul.” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities. Vol. IV, Issue XII; “Journey without End: A Closer Look at V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction.” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities. Vol. IV, Issue IV; “Which Other Way? Migration and Ways of Seeing in V. S. Naipaul.” Migration, Culture and Transnational Identities: Critical Essays. She is a contributor in an international poetry anthology: Love Letters to Water which is pending release.
Some of her poems are featured in, WordCity Monthly, Time of the Poet Republic; Africa Writers Caravan; For Creative Girls Magazine; and Fired Up Magazine. Dr Sinyuy is an advocate for organic gardening and environmental care. She equally runs an online cookery group via WhatsApp where she teaches women how to cook good and healthy food for their families. She is also a lover of photography and spends her spare time taking photos. She is currently working on a collection of poems and her first novel. Above all, Sinyuy is philanthropist and has been working as a volunteer at the Garden for Education and Healing Orphanage (GEH) Bamenda since the early 2000.
Sue Burge, Contributing Editor of Literary News and Writing Advice
Sue Burge is a poet and freelance creative writing and film studies lecturer based in North Norfolk in the UK. She worked for over twenty years at the University of East Anglia in Norwich teaching English, cultural studies, film and creative writing and was an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing with the Open University. Sue is an experienced workshop leader and has facilitated sessions all over the world, working with a wide range of people – international students, academics, retired professionals from all walks of life, recovering addicts, teenagers and refugees. She has travelled extensively for work and pleasure and spent 2016 blogging as The Peripatetic Poet. She now blogs as Poet by the Sea. In 2016 Sue received an Arts Council (UK) grant which enabled her to write a body of poetry in response to the cinematic and literary legacy of Paris. This became her debut chapbook, Lumière, published in 2018 by Hedgehog Poetry Press. Her first full collection, In the Kingdom of Shadows, was published in the same year by Live Canon. Sue’s poems have appeared in a wide range of publications including The North, Mslexia, Magma, French Literary Review, Under the Radar, Strix, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter’s House, The Ekphrastic Review, Lighthouse and Poetry News. She has featured in themed anthologies with poems on science fiction, modern Gothic, illness, Britishness, endangered birds, WWI and the current pandemic. Her latest chapbook, The Saltwater Diaries, was published this Autumn (2020) by Hedgehog Poetry Press and her second collection Confetti Dancers came out in April 2021 with Live Canon. More information at www.sueburge.uk
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