Biographies

Born in Los Angeles, Daniel Baird lived and worked in New York City from 1989, where he was a founder of The Brooklyn Rail, a magazine for which he worked as an art editor, feature writer, and monthly columnist.

Nicholson Baker is the author of several novels, including The Mezzanine, Vox and The Fermata, and four works of non-fiction: U and I, The Size of Thoughts, Double Fold (winner of the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award), and Human Smoke. Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet whose career is falling apart. As Chowder struggles to write, he gradually realizes he is no longer writing an introduction to his poetry, but a tender, romantic, often hilarious novel.

Jacqueline Baker is the author of A Hard Witching and Other Stories, which won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction.

In March of 1961, at the height of the Cold War, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg left New York for India. In 1990, Deborah Baker (U.S.A.) moved to Calcutta, where she studied Bengali and wrote In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Gerbrand Bakker worked as a subtitler for nature films and a gardener before writing his prize-winning debut novel, The Twin, which Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee calls “a novel of restrained tenderness and laconic humour.” The Twin, the story of a man who has just lost his twin brother in a car accident and is obliged to take his place at their small family farm, is translated from the Dutch by David Colmer and is set to be made in to a film in the near future.

Yvonne Bambrick is a life-long year-round Toronto cyclist. She is Executive Director of the Toronto Cyclists Union, is one of the key organizers of Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market, was the original Community Animator at the Center for Social Innovation, and regularly contributes as a photographer to Momentum, Spacing, Dandyhorse, Corporate Knights and Green Power Magazines.

Brent Bambury is the host of CBC Radio One’s Day 6, a weekly magazine show that blends the best of the worlds of news, current affairs, pop culture, the net, lifestyle, and leisure. Brent launched his radio career at CBC stations in Saint John, Halifax and Montreal, and has worked for a number of programmes on CBC Radio, including Brave New Waves, Off the Cuff, All in a Day, GrooveShinny, as well as CBC TV's Midday.

Russell Banks has received numerous prizes and awards for his work, including the O. Henry and Best American Short Story Awards and, most recently, the 2011 Common Wealth Award for Literature. His previous novels include Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter and Rule of the Bone. He lives in upstate New York. A contemporary tale of guilt and redemption, Banks’ Lost Memory of Skin is a riveting mystery about a young outcast who must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration.