Jacob
Alvarado
POET. EVents & communications assistant.
Jacob Alvarado is a writer, poet, and publishing professional. His latest writing can be found in The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing, Serendipity NewsMag, and Tessellate: An Anthology.
Jessica
Hiemstra
POET. Volunteer.
Jessica Joy Hiemstra is a visual artist and award winning set-designer. She works in a variety of mediums on many kinds of surfaces – from watercolour and thread on paper to acrylic on acetate to plastic sewn into canvas. Jessica’s also a writer, editor and illustrator. From poetry to children’s books to murals to large-scale installations, Jessica thinks of making art as an act of listening – to space, to other people, to her materials. They say an adventure is a story you don’t know the ending of – and it’s with this approach Jessica squares off with whatever she’s making. In the words of Azar Nafisi, Jessica believes “Art is as useful as bread”. One of the things people often ask her is “what’s the difference between all the things you do?” Jessica doesn’t distinguish much between her mediums. Instead she chooses the best medium for exploring whichever question, concern or exaltation is most pressing to her in the moment – from delight in the body to sorrow and anger at how poorly we care for our world and each other. Sometimes she uses words, sometimes pencil, sometimes paint. Jessica likes what Paul Klee once said about art – that one eye sees, the other feels.
Jim
Johnstone
POET. Volunteer.
Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poetry including The Chemical Life, which was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award. Johnstone has also won several awards including the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Robin Blaser Award, and Poetry’s Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, he curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry.
Kirby
POET. Publisher.
Kirby’s work includes Poetry Is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021), What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020), This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019), She’s Having a Doris Day (KFB, 2017). Edited Not Your Best 2, The Queer Ass Fuck Issue (KFB 2021). They are the publisher at knife | fork | book.
R.
Kolewe
POET. Layout designer.
R. Kolewe was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto. Educated in physics and engineering at the University of Toronto, he pursued a successful career in the software industry for many years. He now lives in Toronto and writes full time. His work has appeared in various online and print magazines, and he has published four collections of poetry, A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Talonbooks, 2023), The Absence of Zero (Book*hug, 2021), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017), and Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014) as well as several chapbooks.
Lannii
Layke
POET. VOLUNTEER.
Lannii Layke is a young, Black writer, editor, and interdisciplinary designer from Tkarón:to (Toronto). They attend to crafting memory and fine jewellery. In French, os is bone. This is their first physical collection of poems.
Dale
Martin Smith
POET. Volunteer.
Dale Martin Smith is the author most recently of Flying Red Horse and Sons (KFB, 2017). He teaches poetry at Toronto Metropolitan University. dalemartinsmith.com
Erín
Moure
POET. Volunteer
Erín Moure is an award-winning poet and translator with more than 15 books to her credit. Originally from Calgary, Moure wrote her first collections of poetry in Vancouver – Empire; York Street, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 1979; Wanted Alive; and Domestic Fuel, which won the 1985 Pat Lowther Prize. Her 1988 work Furious won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. She was twice shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize: in 2002 for Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person and in 2006 for Little Theatres. The latter work won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry in 2005. She has also published four chapbooks: The Whisky Vigil, Excess, Visible Spectrum, and Search Procedures, or Lake This. Her most recent collection is O Cadoiro. Erín Moure works as a freelance editor and communications specialist in Montreal.
Hoa
Nguyen
POET. MUSE/ADVISOR Guest curator: Fertile 23.
Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry including Red Juice, Violet Energy Ingots, and A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. She is a member of She Who Has No Masters, a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries. Hoa lives in Tkaronto where she serves as a Visiting Practitioner for the Faculty of Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University. In 2019, her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature.
brandy
ryan
POET. Volunteer.
brandy ryan (she/her) is a cis-femme meandering poet who loves to collaborate and blur genres and forms. she has published two chapbooks — full slip (Baseline Press, 2013) and After Pulse (co-written with Kerry Manders; kfb, 2019) — as well as pieces in CV2, Windsor Review, MediaTropes, and elsewhere. with Kerry Manders, she curates and hosts an inter-disciplinary art series called The Thing About…. they are also currently working on a photo-poetic collaboration called “Queering Domesticity / Domesticating the Queer.”
Kate Sutherland
POET. Volunteer.
Kate Sutherland was born in Scotland, immigrated to Canada as a child, and grew up in Saskatoon. She studied first at the University of Saskatchewan, then at Harvard Law School. She is the author of two collections of short stories, Summer Reading (winner, Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book) and All in Together Girls, and the poetry collection, How to Draw a Rhinoceros (shortlisted for a Creative Writing Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment). Her stories and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry and Best American Experimental Writing. She has done residencies at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and at the Leighton Artist Studios in Banff. She lives in Toronto where she is a professor and conducts research in the fields of Tort Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Law and Literature at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University.
Knife Fork Book 