Stuart Ross is the 2019 recipient of the prestigious Harbourfront Festival Prize. He is a Cobourg-based fiction writer, poet, editor, translator, and creative-writing instructor. He has been active in the Toronto literary scene since the mid-1970s. In 1987, he co-founded, with Nicholas Power, the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, and was co-coordinator of the fair for its first three years. In 2008, he became a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective, which puts on the annual Indie Literary Market and administers the bpNichol Chapbook Award.Stuart is the author of twelve full poetry collections, most recently 70 Kippers: The Dagmar Poems (w/ Michael Dennis; Proper Tales Press, 2020); Motel of the Opposable Thumbs (ECW Press, 2019); A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak and Wynn, 2016), winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry; A Hamburger in a Gallery (DC Books, 2015); Our Days in Vaudeville (Mansfield Press, 2013), for which he collaborated with 29 other Canadian poets; and You Exist. Details Follow. (Anvil Press, 2012), which won the sole award given to an Anglo writer in 2013 by l'Académie de la vie littéraire au tournant du 21ême siècle.

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. She is the co-creator of Reth aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary project exploring folklore from Pakistan through poetry, sculpture, and community arts. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

Alice Burdick is the author of five books of poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in multiple anthologies, chapbooks, folios, broadsides, cookbooks, and films. She leads workshops for children and adults and is a mentor, freelance editor, proofreader, and manuscript assessor. She lives in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Véronique Sylvain was born and raised in Northern Ontario. She now lives in Ottawa where she works in publishing. She is the author of the collection Premier quart (Trillium Poetry Prize, Ottawa Book Award, Champlain Prize and AAOF Emergence Award) and holds a Master's degree in French literature from the University of Ottawa. Several of her texts have appeared in collective collections, including Poèmes de la résistance, Projet TERRE, as well as in creative writing magazines (e.g