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Betsy Warland Bio

Author, mentor, teacher and editor, Betsy Warland has published 13 books of creative nonfiction and poetry. The second edition of Warland’s 2010 Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing (Cormorant Books) came out with ten new essays in November 2023.

With their 1984 second book, open is broken, Warland began their LGBTQ+ trailblazer quest. In 1988, Double Negative, the first co-written collection of lesbian erotic love poems written by Warland with Daphne Marlatt was published. In 1991, Warland edited Writing by Dykes, Queers & Lesbians— the first collection of essays written by Canadian and United States authors. In 2016,Warland’s Oscar of Between — A Memoir of Identity and Ideas, investigated the sources of societal violence toward otherness, and Warland expanded their LGBTQ2S+ identity to being a POB = “person of between.” In 2022, a street opera based on Oscar of Between, composed by Lloyd Burritt, was premiered at the downtown VPL.

Currently, Warland is working with Vancouver writers with lived experience of mental health and/or substance use issues. Off the Map: Vancouver Writers with Lived Experience of Mental Health Issues will be published by Vancouver-based Bell Press and edited by Seema Shah, Kate Bird and Warland.

Warland received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2016. In 2021, an annual national prize, The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award, was launched.

Jenn Currin Bio

Jen Currin's new collection of stories is Disembark, just published by House of Anansi. Their collection Hider/Seeker: Stories won a Canadian Independent Book Award, was a finalist for a ReLit Award, and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. They have also published five collections of poetry, most recently Trinity Street (Anansi, 2023); The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for a LAMBDA, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and a ReLit Award; and School (Coach House, 2014), which was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, and a ReLit Award. A white settler of mixed, mostly western European ancestry, Currin lives on the unceded ancestral territories of the Halkomelem-speaking peoples, including the Qayqayt, Musqueam, Kwikwetlem, and Kwantlen Nations, in New Westminster, BC and teaches creative writing and English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Heather Plett is an international speaker, facilitator, and author of the acclaimed book The Art of Holding Space. She is also the co-founder of the Centre for Holding Space and has trained people from all over the world in her Holding Space Practitioner Program. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Harvard Business Review and the Globe and Mail and has been referenced in curriculum for nurses, hospice care workers, yoga teachers, and military chaplains. Learn more at heatherplett.com.