BILLY-RAY BELCOURT, from the Driftpile Cree Nation, won the Griffin Poetry Prize for "This Wound is a World." He was twice nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His bestsellers include "A Minor Chorus" and "Coexistence." He is an Associate Professor at UBC.

JUNIE DÉSIL, born to Haitian immigrant parents in Montréal and raised in Winnipeg, has devoted over two decades to empowering communities made marginalized. An accomplished poet, her debut collection, eat salt | gaze at the ocean (2020), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and explores themes of Black sovereignty and the Haitian diaspora. Currently residing on the Traditional Territories of the Homalco, Tla'amin, and Klahoose, Junie mentors emerging writers at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. Beyond her professional life, Junie enjoys writing, coaching, consulting, and raising goats.

CANISIA LUBRIN, author of Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst, has won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Windham-Campbell Prize. She coordinates the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. Her debut fiction, Code Noir: Metamorphoses, won the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. She is the 2025 Vancouver Writers Fest Guest Curator.

CECILY NICHOLSON is an award-winning poet and professor in the School of Creative Writing at UBC. She has held the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer in Residence SFU (2017), Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor (2021) and Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley (2025).

DANEZ SMITH is the author of four poetry collections: [insert] boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff.  They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.

KAREN SOLIE grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. Her five previous collections of poetry–Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, and The Caiplie Caves –have won or been shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, Griffin Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and more. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she splits her time between Scotland and Canada.

PAUL VERMEERSCH is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020, followed in 2025 by NMLCT. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON.