Virtual Workshop: Finding Time & Space to Write

Speakers for this event

• Melissa Yi

  Melissa Yi

  Author

  Melissa Yi loves to do all the things, from emergency medicine to jointly raising two kids and two rescue dogs to writing the Hope Sze thrillers. She recently won the Derringer Award for the best short mystery story in the English language, placed third in the Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction, and won a scholarship from the International Thriller Writers. She is currently a finalist for the Prix Aurora Award for the best speculative poem in Canada, and writes F&SF and memoir under the name Melissa Yuan-Innes. Her secret weapons include a supportive family, saying no, and learning how to sleep. For more tips, find her at www.myi.ninja.

  URL http://www.melissayuaninnes.com/

  Author

• Nathan Caro Fréchette

  Nathan Caro Fréchette

  Author

  Nathan Caro Fréchette is a disabled, queer, transgender designer, sequential artist, publisher, and author. He has published over a dozen short stories, both graphic and prose, as well as five novels, three graphic novels, one co-authored collection, and two works of nonfiction. He has taught creative writing over a decade, has a degree in Film Studies and another in Sequential Art; he was the founder and director of the French Canadian literary magazine Histoires à Boire Debout, an editor for the French Canadian graphic novel publisher Premières Lignes, and is a co-founder of the Ottawa-based publisher Renaissance. He was finalist for a Prix Aurora Award in 2020 for his design work, was the Publisher Guest of Honour at Can-Con’s 2022 edition, and sits on the LitDistCo board of directors.

  Author

• Sienna Tristen

  Sienna Tristen

  Moderator

  Sienna Tristen (they/them) is an author, poet, and literary organizer living in Treaty 3 territory who explores queer platonic partnership, the nonhuman world, and mythmaking in their work. The first installment of their award-winning fantasy duology The Heretic’s Guide to Homecoming came out from indie arts collective The Shale Project in 2018; the sequel released in October 2022. You can find their poetry in Augur Magazine and Plenitude, and their chapbook hortus animarum: a new herbal for the queer heart is out with Frog Hollow Press.

  URL https://www.siennatristen.com/

  Moderator

• Tonya Liburd

  Tonya Liburd

  Author

  Tonya Liburd has the honour of her work being used in Nisi Shawl’s Writing The Other workshops and in Tananarive Due’s UCLA Horror course (which featured Get Out’s director Jordan Peele as a guest lecturer) as examples of code switching. Her poetry has been nominated for the 2017 & 2018 Rhysling Awards and longlisted in the 2015 Carter V. Cooper (Vanderbilt)/Exile Short Fiction Competition. Her fiction has been praised by Publisher’s Weekly and over at Barnes & Noble’s SFF blog. She is also editor of The Expanse Magazine.

  URL www.Tonya.ca

  Author