Mahak Jain – Organizer, Host, Curator
Mahak Jain is the author of the picture book Maya, a CBC Best Book of the Year, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, and winner of the 2017 South Asia Book Award. Her short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize Stories 28, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Joyland, and Humber Literary Review. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Learn more about Mahak at http://www.mahakjain.com.
Marcia Walker – Organizer, Host, Curator
Marcia Walker’s writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The New York Times, Fiddlehead, PRISM international, Room, EVENT, Antigonish Review, University of Toronto Magazine, This Magazine, The Globe and Mail, CBC radio and The Broken Social Scene Story Project. She has been shortlisted for PRISM’s fiction and non-fiction prize, the Writers’ Union of Canada short prose competition, the Lascaux fiction award and the New Works Playwright Festival. Her plays have been part of Nightwood Theatre’s Groundswell festival and the F.O.O.T. festival. A graduate of the Guelph MFA program, she teaches creative writing at the University of Guelph, University of Toronto, and online at Onelitplace.com. Before becoming a writer, Marcia worked in theatre and as a lawyer. Learn more about Marcia at http://www.marciawalker.ca.
Ana Rodriguez Machado – Curator, Occasional Host
Ana Rodriguez Machado lives and writes in Toronto. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph. In 2016, her poem “Conversations about home in Havana” was shortlisted for the PEN Canada New Voices Award and longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Learn more about Ana at https://anaro.ca/.
Deepa Rajagopalan – Marketing and Promotions Manager, Occasional Host
Deepa Rajagopalan writes creative non-fiction and short stories. Her work has appeared in the Dionne Brand anthology, The Unpublished City II. She’s currently working towards her Creative Writing certificate at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She was a finalist of the Penguin Random House Award for Fiction in 2018. Follow Deepa at https://twitter.com/derajagopalan.
