Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate Emerita of Calgary (2016-18). Her most recent book, The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021), won the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for Best Canadian Poetry and was short-listed for the Exile Robert Kroetsch Award for Experimental Poetry. She was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for literary contributions to Alberta (2022). She is a Walrus and TEDX talker, and was the Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). She won the Lois Hole Award for Editorial Excellence for Poetry in Alberta (2019). Micheline attained a Ph.D. at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in English Language and Literature with a specialization in Creative Writing and 20th Century Canadian Poetics. She is retired from teaching creative writing at Mount Royal University in Calgary, where she won the 2015 Teaching Excellence Award, and the 2018 Distinguished Faculty Award. She serves as Executive Acquisitions Editor for Poetry at Frontenac House since 2012, and has edited Griffin Award and Lammy award winners. Her work has been translated into Farsi, Chinese, and Italian.
Crystal Mackenzie is born and raised in Calgary and has been writing for over twenty years. She studied creative writing in both fiction and poetry at Mount Royal University. She has been an editor at FreeFall Magazine since 2013, taking over as Managing Editor in 2019. Her prose poem “The Songwriter’s Club” was published in YYC POP: Poetic Portraits of People (Frontenac House) in 2020. She writes out of her childhood home where a postcard view of downtown and the Rocky Mountains often distracts her. Other welcomed distractions in her life are her daughter’s ever evolving views on humanity and listening to her talented partner Ryan read drafts of his own work. Crystal is most inspired in her own writing when exploring the Rocky Mountains or the banks of the Bow River.
Skylar Kay is an emerging writer from Calgary. Her debut collection of haiku and haibun, Transcribing Moonlight (2022), won the 2023 BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her cat, Soup, is also very cute.
Sarah Howden is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto where she studies climate change denial and American literature. She writes both poetry and fiction.
Shelley McAneeley M.A. Arch, undergrad Philosophy ponders art in its many forms. You can enjoy some of her poems in Drifting Like a Metaphor (2018), from Frontenac House.
Vincent Potter is a Calgarian writer and pansexual pancake flipper. His poetry can be found in 2015 – 2018 print issues of our magazine, and his book reviews are available both in print and online.
Michaela Ritchie is a writer, poet and recovering journalist from Calgary. She currently develops programs at Calgary Public Library, and sits on the board of the FreeFall Literary Society.