David Demchuk

Award-winning author David Demchuk has been writing for print, stage, digital and other media for more than 40 years. His debut horror novel The Bone Mother, published in 2017, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Toronto Book Award, the Kobzar Book Award and a Shirley Jackson Award in the Best Novel category. It won the 2018 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in the Adult Fiction category. It was listed in the Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2017, came in at #22 in the National Post’s top 99 books of the year and became a #1 bestseller on Amazon.ca.. His troubling new novel RED X was published by Strange Light in August 2021. He is represented by Barbara Berson of the Helen Heller Literary Agency.

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Gemma Files

Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her short story, “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Five of her short stories were adapted for the television series The Hunger.

In 2000 her award-winning story “The Emperor’s Old Bones” was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Thirteenth Annual Collection (ed. Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow). In 2010 her Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novelette “each thing i show you is a piece of my death” was reprinted in The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Two (ed. Ellen Datlow). Her short story “The Jacaranda Smile” was also a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist.^[2] Her first novel, A Book of Tongues, won the 2010 Black Quill award for “Best Small Press Chill” from Dark Scribe Magazine; it was followed by the sequels A Rope of Thorns (2011) and A Tree of Bones (2012), together comprising “The Hexslinger Series”. A Rope of Thorns was considered a “powerful sequel” to A Book of Tongues by Publishers Weekly.^[3]

Her book, We Will All Go Down Together (about a coven of witches and changelings), was given a favorable review by National Public Radio (NPR).^[4]

Her novel Experimental Film (2015) won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the Sunburst Award for Best Canadian Speculative Fiction (Novel) in 2016.

Danielle Joy Kostrich

Danielle Joy Kostrich is a local playwright, actor and educator. She is the co-author of We Must Have More Men! Barrie and the Great War (2016 & 2017), and writer of The Cenotaph Project (2019) — two plays that focus on the experiences of Simcoe County residents during the First and Second World Wars. She received an Emerging Artist nomination at the 2019 Barrie Arts Awards, and was a juror for the 24-Hour Playwriting Contest for the City of Barrie’s Culture Days in 2020. She sits on the board of directors for Theatre by the Bay.

Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is author of more than 68 books of poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, and non-fiction. His most recent collections of short stories are Down in the Ground (Guernica Editions, 2020), The Hours: Stories from a Pandemic (Ace of Swords, 2021), and Toast Soldiers, that he will be giving the first reading from) published Crowsnest Books (2021). Toast Soldiers is 250 pages of powerful short stories about characters who find themselves confront moments of challenging discoveries from which they cannot turn away.

Bruce Hanson

Bruce Hanson is the award-winning author of a collection of short stories, Tall Pine Tales, a YA mystery novella, Double Cross and a children’s picture book, Elephants in My Stew. His stories have been published in several anthologies.

Bruce has travelled a distance from, beginning his carrier in Electrical Engineering, which included a short stint working on the Space Shuttle’s Canadarm. He has trained with Second City Toronto, appeared on the Cottage Life television show Cottage Cheese, and has worked as an extra for TV and film including Flashpoint, Warehouse 13 and John A.: Birth of a Country.