Up:Rising

A.G.A. Wilmot (BFA, MPub) is a writer and editor based out of Toronto, Ontario. They have won awards for fiction, short fiction, and screenwriting, including the Friends of Merril Short Story Contest and ECW Press’s Best New Speculative Novel Contest. For seven years they served as co-publisher and co-EIC of the Ignyte- and British Fantasy Award-nominated Anathema: Spec from the Margins. Their credits include myriad online and in-print publications and anthologies. They are also on the editorial advisory board for Poplar Press, the speculative fiction imprint of Wolsak & Wynn. Books of AGA’s include The Death Scene Artist (Buckrider Books, 2018) and Withered (ECW Press, 2024). They are represented by Kelvin Kong of K2 Literary (k2literary.com). Find them online at agawilmot.ca.

Althea Knight is a poet, artist, teacher, and catalyst born in London, England to Jamaican and West African lineages. Poetry has been an enduring companion since age nine, shaping ache and astonishment into language. Her poems serve as witness and confidante, therapist and timekeeper, tracing survival, joy, memory, and the quiet insistence of change. They hold her in dialogue with who she’s been, what she carries, what longs to be released, and what still calls her forward. 4 works appear in Flaunt It’s anthology Love Dimensions, “Perhaps” in Recipes for Sustainability, “Udu you think you are” for the Gardiner Museum and Barbara Schlifer Clinic’s #WeBelieveSurvivors. She read her poem “2053” at Kuumba at Harbourfront in 2023. Althea continues to honour language as a living force, a way to document, disrupt, soothe, and ignite. She is currently shaping a new body of poetic work. Watch for new growth taking root.

Althea Knight is a poet, artist, teacher, and catalyst born in London, England to Jamaican and West African lineages. Poetry has been an enduring companion since age nine, shaping ache and astonishment into language. Her poems serve as witness and confidante, therapist and timekeeper, tracing survival, joy, memory, and the quiet insistence of change. They hold her in dialogue with who she’s been, what she carries, what longs to be released, and what still calls her forward. 4 works appear in Flaunt It’s anthology Love Dimensions, “Perhaps” in Recipes for Sustainability, “Udu you think you are” for the Gardiner Museum and Barbara Schlifer Clinic’s #WeBelieveSurvivors. She read her poem “2053” at Kuumba at Harbourfront in 2023. Althea continues to honour language as a living force, a way to document, disrupt, soothe, and ignite. She is currently shaping a new body of poetic work. Watch for new growth taking root.

Ash Winters is a non-binary writer based out of Toronto. Their poetry and prose have appeared in; Existere, Open Minds Quarterly, The White Wall Review, Free Fall Magazine, Into the Void, and Filling Station. Their first collection of poetry, Run Riot: Ninety Poems in Ninety Days came out with Caitlin Press in January 2021. They live in a small apartment with their beautiful Wife, rambunctious dog Eloise, and tuxedo cat named The Smooch.

Cid V Brunet (they/them) published their debut memoir, This Is My Real Name, with Arsenal Pulp Press in 2021. These days Cid is completing an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia while working as a freelancer and editor. When not working on their upcoming historical fiction novel, Cid enjoys time with their new dog, weightlifting, and caring for an ever-growing collection of houseplants.

Daniel Oudshoorn is a father, fighter, lover, friend, and failure. A formerly homeless youth, he has spent more than twenty-five years actively pursuing life and mutually liberating solidarity in the company of the oppressed, colonized, and left-for-dead.

Elvie C (also, “LVC”) is a writer and creator, who studies and is deeply inspired by nature and the Earth, mysticism, religion, esoteric knowledge and ritual practice. She engages her crafts at her home in the strange surroundings she lovingly calls, the “liminal borderlands of Toronto” (more commonly known as north Scarborough).

Some of her identities (whether self-chosen, bestowed upon by the universe or “assigned’ by others – and sometimes shifting or evolving) include: Queer or Bisexual, Canadian-born Chinese-diaspora, POC, she/her, mother, solo-parent, “crazy”, community member, advocate/activist, insider/outsider, living with chronic physical pain from an auto-immune condition, survivor, friend, human and lover. She has been incarcerated in the mental health system for stretches of time throughout her life. To discover more, please visit: elviec.ca and/or follow her on the Instagram page she keeps promising to start using one-day @LV_see

Emily Couves is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary designer and writer. More of her work can be found in past and upcoming journals from Acta Victoriana, the Bellevue Literary Review, Wingless Dreamer, and more online.

Emily Schooley is a multi award-winning, multi-dimensional artist who tells stories by, about, and for unapologetic & unconventional queer heroines. She creates primarily across theatre, film, and new media as an actor, voiceover artist, director, and filmmaker; her body of work as a writer spans numerous poems, screenplays, short stories, and personal essays.

To date, Emily’s original works have been supported by organizations including Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Creates, Ontario Arts Council, the Canadian Film Centre, Panavision, Sunbelt, and Workman Arts. Emily is also the founder of Laughing Cat Productions, an emerging film production company that focuses on telling bold, forward-thinking, women-driven stories. You can find her online under @EmilySchooley across multiple platforms, and she publishes poetry at @lovepoemsfornobody on Instagram.

Eve Crandall: I have moved between many different art and craft forms in my life, always with delight at learning something new and becoming at least competent at it. I have written fiction and poetry, knitted, quilted, done stained glass and mosaics, folk art painting and paint pouring. From there I discovered pen and ink and also slipped into mixed media collage to highlight wonderful quotes collected over the years. Quilling has also become a passion. So now I have a lovely collection of possible media to create in, and that certainly makes it all never boring. One can never have too many options, especially when creation is so very, very gratifying.

Freda Sze is a writer with a love for literature and the slight difficulty of turning words into experience. Fiction makes life bigger than being yourself, and a way into worlds of existence, transporting across time and space and the fourth dimension.  Freda lives in Toronto, Canada, and enjoys crepes, sparkling water, and anything that makes things cozy.  She looks forward to the next book, next story, and the next protagonist that can change her world again.

Zimmer (they/she) is a Mad/disabled writer, musician, artist, and performer. They have poetry and prose in The Vault, Lived Collective, Workman Arts’ Literary Anthology, and Feels Zine, where they are a regular contributor. Their live readings include Feels Zine, With/out Pretend, Issues Magazine Shop, and literary symposia at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, the University of Calgary, and York University. In their disability advocacy, they’ve presented their work about ableism in academia at several universities, work which featured in The Toronto Star.

They are trained in classical piano and have composed music for independent production companies. Their artwork has been displayed at Show Gallery and Nuit Blanche. As an actor, they performed in “Passport to Madville” (hosted by Workman Arts), the Hamilton Fringe Festival, and the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival. They were the 2025 Workman Arts literary artist-in-residence. The Toronto Arts Council funded their book in progress.

Katherine Sarah Palakovic (she/her) is a fitful writer and enthusiastic editor. Hailing from Hamilton, Canada’s city of waterfalls and steel, she writes about queerness, disability, belonging, and why she absolutely needs to own a horror shop’s worth of houseplants even as they slowly consume her. Katherine believes that a difficult life can still be beautiful, and also that noise-cancelling headphones are magic. Her words have found homes in places like Chestnut Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Renaissance Press, and if the writer could she would crawl into their pages and live there too. Until then, she lives in Toronto.

Leah Bobet: Author, editor, critic, and community organizer Leah Bobet’s novels have won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder, and Prix Aurora Awards; her short fiction is anthologized worldwide. Her poetry has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, and Canthius, and has placed in the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize and the Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry. She was the Utopia Award-winning poetry editor for Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice’s 2021 issue and read for Grist’s Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest. She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds grassroots food security networks, and plants both tomatoes and trees. Visit her at www.leahbobet.com.

Luke Kernan holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Victoria. His thesis, “Re-worlding the Self in Graphic Narratives” (2024), examines lived experiences of psychosis and how arts-based practices can translate those sensory states. Additionally, Luke is a poet, graphic novelist, and mental health activist.

His Liminalities article, “Psychotic Bodies/Embodiment of Suicidal Bipolar Poets” (2020), also delves into the topic of suicide and psychiatry from a creative, theoretical, and Mad Studies lens. Since 2009, Luke has been performing poetry sets at spoken-word venues across Western Canada. As a mental health advocate, he has organized poetry and music open mics, Unquiet Minds I and II, to support and fundraise for youth mental health initiatives as well as compiling, editing, and printing a book titled Unquiet Minds: Youth Anthology of Art and Poetry (2022), which features youth submissions that explore the theme of mental health as it intersects with their lives.

Mathhew Tomkinson is the author of oems (Guernica Editions 2022), Paroxysms (Paper View Books 2022), and For a Long Time (Frog Hollow Press 2019), as well as a collection of collaborative short fiction, Archaic Torso of Gumby (Gordon Hill Press 2020), with Geoffrey D. Morrison. His writing appears in Literary Hub, 3:AM Magazine, Minor Literature[s], Full Stop, The Ex-Puritan, Exacting Clam, and elsewhere. He is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia, and his academic work has been published by or is forthcoming from Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury Publishing, McGill-Queen’s University Press, and Palgrave Macmillan. He lives in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam territory.

Myriad Augustine is a queer and disabled interdisciplinary artist whose focus is on own-voice stories centering multiply-marginalized perspectives. With a long history as an organizer and educator, they have worked to advance social justice issues and facilitate intersectional solidarity, often through their non-profit community organization ‘The Wheelhouse’ and through their self-designed curriculum on community-focused disaster preparedness (‘Get Out Alive, Together!’ or ‘GOAT’). The latter has earned mention in publications such as Broken Pencil and Briarpatch, as have their accompanying zines on the topic. Myriad has also spoken on panels, consulted for organizations, and designed curricula, strongly focusing on the subjects of diversity and inclusion as collective efforts.

Nadja Lubiw-Hazard:  Prior to turning to full-time writing, Nadja worked as a veterinarian.  She is the author of the novel The Nap-Away Motel, and an upcoming short story collection, The Life of a Creature. She also writes for children. Nadja is a trained creative writing workshop facilitator, and has worked with Firefly Creative Writing, The Writers Collective of Canada, East End Arts, and CAMH Collaborative Learning College. A life-long animal-lover and long-time vegan, her writing often explores themes related to the more-than-human world. She lives with her wife, their two adult daughters, and a feisty fluffy cat in Toronto.

Paulette Andria Hamilton: I am a BIPOC Workman arts Artist.  I  write with humour, pop culture and music in mind at all times. I try to let the muse take me and the reader into a journey grounded in Fantastical  realism.  I’ve been doing spoken word poetry for years.  How I write is an act of rebellion because I truly believe rules were made to be broken. My artist name is PAH.

Parvati Mehmi is a transgender and disabled multidisciplinary artist from Brampton, Ontario. Inspired by The Lord Of The Rings, Parvati wrote a short story at the age of 12, picking up more art forms as she got older, learning FL Studio and Photoshop as a teenager. Most of her art centers around themes of gender, culture and identity, as well as her experiences with mental health and illness. While no longer making as much art as before due to her mental and physical health, her art can be found on her Instagram at @parvatimehmi, with her music at her Bandcamp at parvatimehmi.bandcamp.com