MEET THE 2022/23 STORY coaches
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CHOOSE YOUR STORY COACH!
What sets the Author Development Program apart from other mentorship programs? YOU - the Story Maker - get to choose who you want to be your mentor. We can't guarantee that you will get the person you want, but we make every effort to accomodate requests. Browse this year's Story Coaches and select your top three who you think will help you meet your writing goals. If you're still not sure, contact us and we can help. |
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2022/23 Story Coaches
Poetry, Playwriting, Essays
ONLINE OR IN PERSON
(Calgary and area) |
Bertrand Bickersteth is a poet, playwright, essayist and educator who was born in Sierra Leone and raised in Alberta. His work is deeply rooted in questions of identity at the confluence of place and space. As a Black writer he is committed to elevating other writers of colour whose work is often overlooked or misunderstood. He feels a strong responsibility to help establish the ongoing visibility and literary presence of these writers. Incidentally, he is happy to work with other writers too, as his approach applies to anyone who has had a central aspect of their identity dismissed, denied, or reviled by society.
Bertrand’s collection of poetry, The Response of Weeds, was a finalist for multiple awards and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, the 2021 High Plains Book Award in the category of First Book, and the Eighth Annual Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. His writing has appeared in many places including Geist, Prairie Fire, The Walrus, The Sprawl, the CBC project Black on the Prairies, and Biblioasis’s Best in Canadian Poetry 2023. He is currently working on a collection of poems highlighting the history of Black cowboys in western Canada. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and writes about Black identity on the Prairies. |
Adult Fiction (anything but horror), Nonfiction, Memoir
ONLINE
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S. Portico Bowman writes to puzzle and play. Infinite structures of language craft the images for characters who have unpredictable and transformative lives. Bowman grew up on the Canadian Prairies, and lived for a short while in Massachusetts. She later received her MFA degree in Ceramics at UT Knoxville in Tennessee. Bowman is also a graduate of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto.
Bowman taught in Kansas for twenty years where she worked as an art professor, art writer and gallery director at Pittsburg State University. She was recently awarded a Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation grant for her second book, Would You Give Up Arms For Wings: a story inspired by the visionary life and writings of Paulus Berensohn. Bowman has been invited by the Literary Press Group of Canada to give a reading at Memorial University in St. John’s Newfoundland in November 2022 from her first novel Cashmere Comes From Goats, published by Stonehouse Publishing. Portico lives with her husband Tom and their understanding cat Florence in Prairie Village, KS and teaches at Francis Parker School in San Diego, CA when she can. |
Adult Fiction (all genres)
ONLINE OR IN PERSON
(Calgary and area) |
Pam Clark is a Calgary poet, educator and author of an award winning historical novel, Kalyna (Stonehouse Publishing). She has mentored authors aged 6 to 66 and finds tremendous joy in others’ expression and fulfillment as writers. She believes creativity sparks from both inside and outside the writer and that writing is a catalyst for building connection and community and for social change. As a mentor, she merges playfulness and possibility in a myriad of strategies that invite writers to embrace taking risks with their unique voice. Pam finds solace in nature and walking is part of her personal writing practice. You can reach Pam www.pamkclark@weebly.com and on Twitter @pam_k_clark |
Poetry, Long and Short Fiction (all genres) Creative Nonfiction
ONLINE OR IN PERSON
(Calgary and area) |
paulo da costa is a writer, editor and translator living in Mohkintsis/Calgary. He is the recipient of the 2020 James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction, the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region, the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and the Canongate Prize for short-fiction. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published widely in literary magazines around the world and translated into Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese. The Midwife of Torment is his latest book of fiction.
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Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Short Fiction
ONLINE OR IN PERSON
(Calgary and area) |
Vivian Hansen has four books of poetry: Leylines of My Flesh (Touchwood Editions 2002), Angel Alley (Passwords Enterprises 2004) A Bitter Mood of Clouds, and A Tincture of Sunlight (Frontenac 2013 and 2017). She is currently working on a novella memoir: The Book of Ferns. She has an essay in You Look Good For Your Age (University of Alberta Press 2021), and a poem in The (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Press 2022). Vivian teaches creative writing with the University of Calgary.
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Young Adult/Middle Grade Fiction
ONLINE OR IN PERSON
(Calgary and area) |
Alexandra Latos has published young adult and adult fiction. Her young adult novel UNDER SHIFTING STARS was published by Clarion Books in 2020 and won the 2020 W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. It was a Junior Library Guild selection, a 2022 American Library Association Rainbow List selection, a Canadian Children’s Book Centre Best Books for Kids & Teens selection, a Shelf Awareness starred selection, and was highly recommended by School
Library Journal and Canadian Review of Materials. Her romance novel INSTALOVE was published by Bloomsbury USA in 2016. She is currently an MFA candidate in the UBC School of Creative Writing (distance) program, where she has held multiple teaching assistant positions in the following courses: Introduction to Creative Writing, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, Introduction to Writing for Graphic Forms, and Introduction to Writing for Children/YA. www.alexandralatos.com |
Long and Short Fiction (science fiction & fantasy)
ONLINE OR IN PERSON
(Calgary and area) |
Heather Osborne has been writing science fiction and fantasy all her life. Her first novel, Songbroken, was published by Forest Path Books in 2022. Her short stories have been anthologized in Seasons Between Us (2021), Shades Within Us (2018), and The Sum of Us (2017). Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Swelling With Pride: Tales of Queer Conception and Adoption (2018). Heather earned her doctorate of creative writing from the University of Calgary in 2018. Since 2010, she has been an associate editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. Heather teaches creative writing at the Alexandra Writer’s Centre.
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Adult and Middle Grade/Young Adult Fiction (all genres), Creative Nonfiction, Memoir
ONLINE OR IN PERSON
(Calgary and area) |
Tina Petrick practiced law in Vancouver, before pursuing creative opportunities in television, educational technology, marketing, and writing. Her middle grade novel will be published in April 2023 by a small American press (under a penname), and her second novel is presently on submission in collaboration with a major entertainment company and a top literary agency. Her humor essays have been published in literary journals, travel magazines, and The Globe and Mail, one of which went viral as the newspaper’s most shared personal essay of the year on social media. Her speculative short fiction and horror screenplays have received top placements in regional and international competitions. As a copywriter, she’s worked with leading brands including Apple and Indigo, and as a teacher, she’s worked as a sessional instructor at the University of Calgary. She works across genres and enjoys writing memoir, humor, travel, middle grade, adult speculative fiction, literary fiction, and horror.
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Short Fiction (speculative)
ONLINE
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From doing public readings at a protest rally to having a story printed on a beverage container, Holly Schofield has spent the past ten years exploring all facets of writing short speculative fiction. She now has over 100 short stories in print, including publications in Lightspeed, Analog, and Escape Pod.
Her stories have garnered favourable reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Tor.com, as well as a starred Kirkus review, and are required reading at several post-secondary institutions. She has written in many subgenres of the speculative fiction arena, everything from hard science fiction to literary magical realism to hopepunk. She has been a juror for the Speculative Literature Association and recently became a fiction editor at Solarpunk Magazine. Her writing craft articles have appeared in SFWA publications and elsewhere. She has mentored emerging speculative storytellers through SFWA and Ancestral Futures, and critiqued numerous short story manuscripts through various avenues. She finds joy in mentoring writers. hollyschofield.wordpress.com |
Poetry, Fiction (all genres)
ONLINE OR IN PERSON
(Edmonton and area) |
Anna Marie Sewell’s artistic practice centres collaborative projects at the intersections of culture, language, and modality, no doubt influenced by her pre TRC upbringing in a defiantly mixed-race (Mi’gmaq/Anishinaabe/Polish) family. She is a member of Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation, born in that territory but raised in the Peace Country, and long resident in Amiskwaciy/Edmonton.
Fierce by background, Anna Marie values play, humour and experiment as a means to maintain a joyous spirit in the face of the world’s arduous challenges. To be a writer is to be blessed with the task of finding and revealing the through-line of beauty and wonder that ignites the soul. Edmonton’s 4th Poet Laureate (2011-13), Sewell has toured widely as a poet, in Indigenous Theatre, and most recently, embarking upon a quest into the world of international, translation and adaptation rights, with trips to Frankfurt and London Book Fairs. Ms. Sewell is also a cultural educator, co-recipient of the 2022 Principal’s Award for Curriculum Design at Queens University. And while 2019 - 20 Writer-in Residence at MacEwan University, she began collaborating with choral composer Mari Alice Conrad; their works include Journey Song (Cypress Publishing 2022), and the Chatman Award winning At First Light. Connect to Ms. Sewell’s written work through prairiepomes.com, via her poetry collections Fifth World Drum (Frontenac House 2009) and For the Changing Moon: Poems & Songs (Thistledown Press 2018), or via her debut novel, Humane (Stonehouse Publishing 2020). Watch for the sequel, Urbane, in 2023. |