Yvonne Blomer is an award-winning poet and the author of the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, and three books of poetry, as well as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir. She served as the city of Victoria’s Poet Laureate from 2015–2018. In 2018, she curated and created a show of environmental ekphrastic poems in response to Robert Bateman’s art, the result of which is the collection Ravine, Mouse, a Bird’s Beak (Nose in Book Publishing, 2018). In 2017, Yvonne edited the anthology Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press), with poets responding to their connection to the Pacific from the west coast of North America and as far away as Japan and New Zealand. Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed is the second in a trilogy of poetry anthologies with a focus on water.
Jenna Butler is an Albertan poet, essayist, editor, and professor. She is the author of six books and the recipient of several national arts awards, including a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award, three Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Awards, and a recent longlisting for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Internationally, her work has been shortlisted for the Salt and Bridport Prizes (UK), and the High Plains Book Awards and Foreword INDIE Awards (USA). As a board editor for NeWest Press, she has edited over thirty books of poetry and fiction in Canada. A woman of colour interested in multiethnic narratives of place, Butler teaches creative and environmental writing at Red Deer College and runs an off-grid organic farm.
