Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate Emeritus of Calgary (2016-18). Her most recent book is The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021), She is a Walrus talker, a TEDX talker, and she was the Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). She won the Lois Hole Award for Editorial excellence in 2019. Micheline attained a Ph.D. at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in English Language and Literature with a specialisation in Creative Writing and 20th Century Canadian Literature. She teaches creative writing at Mount Royal University in Calgary where she won the 2015 Teaching Excellence Award, the 2018 Distinguished Faculty Award, and was short-listed for the Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry. She serves as poetry acquisitions editor at Frontenac House Press since 2012. She is the co-founder of Freefall Literary Society and remains a consulting editor. Her book Little Wildheart (U of A Press 2017) was long listed for both the Pat Lowther and the Raymond Souster Awards. Her collection Whirr and Click was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther award (2013).
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.