Reading: Anne DeGrace, Elina Hirvonen, Olive Senior, Mary Tilberg

Anne DeGrace is a librarian, journalist, writer, illustrator, volunteer and multi-tasker. Her stories have appeared in the New Quarterly, Room of One’s Own and Wascana Review. Her previous novels include Treading Water (2005) and Wind Tails (2007). For Sounding Line, DeGrace travelled across the country to her roots in Nova Scotia , where the fog is thick but the people are warm, to recreate in novel form the story of Canada’s most significant UFO incident – sometimes referred to as “Canada’s Roswell.”

Anne Hines is the author of two collections of nonfiction and three novels. She is former humour columnist for Canadian Living and currently writes a weekly humour column for Metro newspaper.

Writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker Elina Hirvonen was born in 1975 in Helsinki. She is a passionate traveller and has journeyed independently through 30 different countries. Hirvonen presents her debut novel, When I Forgot – translated from the Finnish by Douglas Robinson – about the way in which childhood experiences forever impact and shape one’s adult life. When I Forgot, originally published in 2005 by Finnish publishing house Avian, has been translated into several languages and has received a number of glowing reviews, including gracing the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

Olive Senior (Canada/Jamaica) is the author of four books of poetry, three collections of short stories and several award-winning non-fiction works on Caribbean culture. Some of her many awards and honours include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, F.G. Bressani Literary Prize, and the Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award for Excellence, which celebrates the preservation of Jamaica’s cultural heritage. Senior presents Arrival of the Snake-Woman, a collection of powerful and poignant stories that spans a period of about 150 years in Jamaica; beginning with the closing days of slavery in 1838.

Mary Tilberg grew up in Morocco and Liberia before moving to Toronto as a teenager. She holds a B.Ed. and an Honours B.A. in Creative Writing from York University. Her poetry and short fiction are regularly published in Canadian literary journals. Tilberg presents the frontier story Oonagh, a tale of two unlikely lovers braving the dangers of a new land to build a life together.