Carleigh Baker is a nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân / Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwu7mesh, and səl̓ilwəta peoples. As an “urban” person of mixed ancestry, she has a complicated relationship to identity and to the land, and often deals with both in her writing. Her debut short story collection, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award.

Sara Barron completed her PhD in Urban Forestry at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and has research experience in the areas of urban forests, urban planning and design, and landscape architecture. For a number of years, she worked on large-scale sustainable community planning and climate change research projects with both the Design Centre for Sustainability and the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning.

Lois Beardslee (Anishinaabe = Lake Superior Ojibwe) grew up back and forth between rural northern Michigan and remote family bush camps in northern Ontario. She is the author of several books, including The Women’s Warrior Society, and her traditional artwork is in public collections, including the Smithsonian and the Royal Ontario Museum.

Tzeporah Berman, BA, MES, LLD (honoris causa), has been designing and running environmental campaigns in Canada and around the world for over 25 years. She is a government advisor on climate policy, a writer, and a mom of two boys. She is the author, with Mark Leiren-Young, of This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge (2011). She is also the International Program Director of Stand.Earth. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Christopher Campbell-Duruflé is an attorney specialized in international environmental and human rights law, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the different implementation mechanisms of the Paris Agreement and their potential to hold Parties accountable. He has participated to the United Nations climate negotiations from COP 21 to COP 24, in the context of which has supported and learned from the delegation of Burkina Faso.

Stephen Collis’s books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010), DECOMP (with Jordan Scott, Coach House 2013), and Once in Blockadia (Talon Books 2016). His most recent book, Almost Islands (Talon Books 2018) is a memoir of his friendship with poet Phyllis Webb. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Alison Colwell is a writer working primarily in the field of speculative fiction, a community organizer, and the manager of the Galiano Community Food Program, the mission of which is “Building Community through the Medium of Food!” Alison Colwell lives on Galiano, with her family and a menagerie of animals, including a feral peacock.

Ashlee Cunsolo is a passionate researcher, environmental advocate, and community-engaged social science and health researcher working at the intersection of place, culture, health, and environment. She is a leader in the field of the mental and emotional impacts of climate change and ecological grief. She currently lives in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, on the homelands of the Innu and the Inuit of Labrador with her partner and their four boys.

Colleen Doty is a writer and researcher living with her family on what is now known as Galiano Island. A past three-time winner of the Surrey Young Adult fiction contest, she writes poetry, short stories and is working on a novel. She has over 20 years’ experience conducting research for modern and historic Indigenous claims.She is chair of the local seed library.

Ann Eriksson, author and biologist, has written five adult novels and two books for middle readers, Dive In! Exploring Our Connection with the Ocean and Bird’s Eye View: Keeping Wild Birds in Flight. Her newest children’s book project is about climate change migrants. Ann works for the Salish Sea Nearshore Habitat Recovery Project restoring eelgrass and shoreline ecosystems. She lives on Thetis Island, BC and is a director of the Thetis Island Nature Conservancy. www.anneriksson.ca

Suzanne Fournier is a journalist and author who writes about Indigenous, environmental and political history. Her 1998 book Stolen From Our Embrace was awarded the 1998 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction BC Book Prize. Her 2014 book Shore to Shore: The Art of Ts’uts’umutl Luke Marston is about Coast Salish and Portuguese-Canadian art and history. Suzanne has also written about Japanese-Canadian and Indigenous history on Galiano Island. She is a director of the Galiano Conservancy Association.

Elysia French is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. French’s research examines the art and visual culture of climate change and its relations to public environmental understanding. This research builds on her doctoral work that examined visual narratives of the Tar Sands, as important modes of inquiry, in order to counter the tendency to render oil invisible.

Rosemary A. Georgeson is a Sahtu Dene and Coast Salish writer, filmmaker, multi-media artist, and storyteller. Born and raised in a fishing family on what is now Galiano Island, her film We Have Stories: Women in Fish (2014) explored the role of women in the BC fishing industry. She was the 2014 Aboriginal Storyteller at the Vancouver Public Library. Most recently, she was co-author of the groundbreaking play Weaving Reconciliation: Our Way (2018).

Hiromi Goto gratefully lives on the unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil Waututh Nations. She is the author of the novels Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), which won a Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book, and The Kappa Child (2001). She has also published poetry, short stories, and works for children and young adults, including Half World (2009). She’s at work trying to decolonize her relationship to the Lands.

Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta), and she currently lives in Treaty 20 territory (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. She has two books of poetry, Rove and Settler Education, and she recently published a collaborative chapbook with artist Amanda Rhodenizer called The Larger Forgetting.

Deblekha Guin is the founding Executive Director of Access to Media, an organization that uses digital media, creative collaboration, and facilitation to engage emerging change-makers in personally and socially transformative storytelling practices. A self-professed back seat driver, she’s much more at home supporting social and climate justice work from behind the scenes. She moved to Galiano Island after her second semester of grad school in the early 90s, and has lived there ever since.

Dylan M. Harris is a PhD Candidate in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. There, he studies the stories we tell (and don’t tell) about climate change. Specifically, he is interested in how stories are used to construct climate knowledge and, more importantly, in the capacity for stories to transform our collective imagination about climate change. Find more information about him and his work visit dylanmharris.com

Peter Hobbs is a doctor of philosophy, a master of fine art, and writer of fictions. He has published on a variety of subjects, including gay ghosts, dog pheromones, and a comic book ethnography, The Tale of the Sarnia Nose (2017). He has had solo exhibitions in Canada and the United States, and has participated in group shows in Ireland, England and Japan. Currently, Peter teaches drawing and thinking at OCAD University in Toronto.

David Huebert is a self-styled dirty nature writer whose work has won the CBC Short Story Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize, among other accolades. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David recently completed a PhD on “species panic” in American literature and a second book of poetry, Humanimus, forthcoming in 2020.

Sonnet L’Abbé is a poet, professor and songwriter. She is the author of A Strange Relief, Killarnoe, and Sonnet’s Shakespeare. In 2014 she edited the Best Canadian Poetry anthology, and her work appears in many anthologies of Canadian verse. Her chapbook, Anima Canadensis, won the 2017 bp Nichol chapbook award. She teaches creative writing and English at Vancouver Island University.

Timothy B. Leduc is author of the book A Canadian Climate of Mind: Passages from Fur to Energy and Beyond (MQUP, 2016) that looks at the colonial roots of today’s climate change-energy issues. He is faculty in land-based Social Work at Wilfrid Laurier University, and has also published Climate, Culture, Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North (UOP, short-listed for 2012 Canada Prize in the Social Sciences).

Christine Lowther has authored three poetry collections and a memoir, Born Out of This, which was shortlisted for a BC Book Prize. She won the creative non-fiction category of the Federation of British Columbia Writers 2016 contest, Literary Writes, and the inaugural Rainy Coast Arts Award for Significant Accomplishment in 2014. Co-editor of two nonfiction anthologies, she happily contributes to other editors’ projects now, especially those that work to save the planet!

Kyo Maclear is an essayist, novelist and children’s author. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages and published in over twenty countries. She recently completed a PhD focused on climate change (York University) and is currently associate faculty with Humber College’s School for Writers and the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA program. Her most recent books are the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life and the graphic novel Operatic.

Lauren Magner is an artist, care worker, and community organizer who is grateful to live as a guest on the traditional Coast Salish lands currently known as Galiano Island. The island’s diverse and resilient forest, ocean, animal, and human communities inspire her work, art, and life. Her best friends are ferns, and her botanical art can be found at http://thelooseleafgaliano.ca/papery/.

Emily McGiffin is the author of two books of poetry (Between Dusk and Night, Brick Books 2012 and Subduction Zone, Pedlar Press 2014); a third is forthcoming from the University of Regina Press in 2021. Her scholarly book, Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics (University of Virginia Press 2019) examines the environmental politics of printed and oral isiXhosa poetry. She lives on Gitxsan territory in Hazelton, B.C.

Deborah McGregor joined York University’s Osgoode Hall law faculty in 2015 as a cross-appointee with the Faculty of Environmental Studies; she currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice. Professor McGregor’s research has focused on Indigenous knowledge systems and their various applications in diverse contexts including water and environmental governance, environmental justice, health and environment, and climate justice. She is Anishinaabe from Whitefish River First Nation, Birch Island, Ontario.

Hillary McGregor is the Manager of Indigenous Wellness and Sport Ontario’s Standing Bear youth leadership initiative. A graduate of Humber College’s Sport Management program, he is currently a student in Georgian College’s Anishnaabemowin and Program Development program where he is learning more about his Anishnaabe language and culture. A resident of Toronto, Hillary maintains close ties with family members in Whitefish River First Nation, Birch Island, Ontario.

Emily Menzies has spent over 20 years co-creating workshops, trips, and classroom programs, and she helped establish the Millard Learning Centre on Galiano Island to equip the next generation of leaders to solve our climate crises. Now a mother and a secondary social studies teacher pursuing a Masters degree in special education, Emily is researching how to mainstream a truly inclusive, ecology-based, restorative approach to our education system for Indigenous, settler, and newcomer young people.

Astrida Neimanis, grown up by the waters of Hamilton and Lake Ontario, is currently Senior Lecturer of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney on Gadigal land, in Australia. She writes mostly about water, weather, and bodies, often in collaboration with others. She is co-editor (with Cecilia Chen and Janine MacLeod) of Thinking with Water (2013), and author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017).

Rebeccah Nelems is a sixth generation settler of Celtic descent on Stó:lō Nation land, currently living on Lekwungen territory with her two sons. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology / Cultural, Social and Political Thought at UVic, Associate Faculty with Royal Roads University’s School of Leadership, and a 2015 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Scholar. Her dissertation asks: in this age of hyperconnectivity, with whom/what/where do people have a sense of kinship, connection and belonging?

Reed Osler is a parks naturalist and environmental educator with over 19 years’ experience leading programs in parks, protected areas and other wild spaces. She is currently the Education Coordinator at the Galiano Conservancy Association where she facilitates day and multi-day hands-on environmental education programs for both youth and adults. She includes a number of creative pursuits in her programs including writing, song and theatre.

Philip Kevin Paul is a W̱SÁNEĆ person who lives in W̱JOȽEȽP (Tsartlip). He has taught writing, English, and SENĆOŦEN and worked with the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences developing a comprehensive map of traditional W̱SÁNEĆ territory. His first book, Taking the Names Down from the Hill, won the BC Book Prize for poetry; his second, Little Hunger, was shortlisted for The Governor General’s Award. He is currently completing a book based on traditional W̱SÁNEĆ stories.

Richard Pickard lives and works as a settler on the traditional lands of the Lekwungen people. He teaches composition, literature, and the environmental humanities at the University of Victoria. Increasingly, and in solidarity with his students, his work has moved toward questions of climate change: in the classroom, in his research, and in his creative efforts.

Holly Schofield is a speculative fiction writer who travels through time at the rate of one second per second, oscillating between the alternate realities of city and country life. Her short stories have appeared in such publications as Analog, Lightspeed, and Canada’s own Tesseracts, and have been translated into several languages. Recent climate fiction includes stories in Cli-Fi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change and Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers. Find her at hollyschofield.wordpress.com.

Andrew Simon is an ecologist and naturalist dedicated to the Salish Sea bioregion, whose practice spans the socioecological continuum with a focus on the role of citizen science in biodiversity research. Currently, his research explores the implications of climate change for plant and pollinator communities of the Southern Gulf Islands. He continues to find room for more species in his heart as the curator of the Biodiversity Galiano project (biogaliano.org) and beyond (salishseabiodiversity.org).

Indra Singh is attempting to live convivially, learning from the many trees, flowers, ferns, fish, bushes, birds, snakes, spiders, and microfauna that she shares habitat with on beautiful Salt Spring Island, BC. She has published poetry in The Capilano Review. She is currently working on completing her PhD in Environmental Studies at York University, where she is on the Creative Review Team for UnderCurrents magazine.

Jamie Snook was born in Mary’s Harbour, Labrador, within the NunatuKavut territory of the Southern Labrador Inuit. As the long-standing Executive Director for the Torngat Wildlife, Plants and Fisheries Secretariat he has a first-hand perspective on Indigenous co-management in Canada. Jamie is also a Ph.D. Candidate in Public Health at the University of Guelph’s Department of Population Medicine.

Bernard Soubry is a climate researcher, baker, and bike mechanic who lives and works between Montréal; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Oxford, UK. A former farmer, he is completing a doctorate about how food systems adapt to climate change at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute. His poems have previously been published in RISE and in other places. His technical writing about UN-level environmental negotiations occasionally appears in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

Lisa Szabo-Jones, a photographer, writer, walker, scholar, and educator, grew up by the Salish Sea. She co-founded The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. She is a Co-Editor of the edited collections Activating the Heart and Sustaining the West and of an ARIEL special issue, Postcolonial Ecocriticism among Settler-Colonial Nations. She is published in Canadian Literature, ISLE, Alternatives Journal, ESC, and Greening the Maple.

Jesse Thistle is a road allowance Michif from northern Saskatchewan. His Métis-Cree (Michif) Mom was raised on Erin Ferry Road Allowance just outside of Deben, SK; his father was a Métis-Scot with roots in Timiskaming, Ontario. Jesse’s journey from homeless addict and criminal to successful PhD student is unusual among graduates, but his path has shaped the way he approaches homeless studies, Indigenous history, criminology, social work, addiction studies, and storytelling. Jesse is a Trudeau and Vanier scholar in the Department of History at York University and is currently also the Resident Scholar of Indigenous Homelessness at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. https://jessethistle.com/

Zoe Todd (Métis) is an artist and scholar from amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton), Canada. She writes about fish, science, art, prairie fossilscapes, Métis legal traditions, the Anthropocene, extinction, and decolonization in urban and prairie contexts. Her current work focuses on the relationships between people, fish, and other nonhuman kin in the context of colonialism, environmental change, and resource extraction in Treaty Six Territory, Alberta, and the Lake Winnipeg watershed more broadly.

Betsy Warland has published 12 books of creative nonfiction, lyric prose and poetry. Warland’s 2010 book Breathing the Page became a bestseller. Her most recent book is Oscar of Between: A Memoir of Identity and Ideas (2016). Nature is present in all her books and she is currently writing about Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park, Vancouver. Director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, Warland received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award for Literary Excellence in 2016.

Evelyn C. White is the author of Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: A Photo Narrative of Black Heritage on Salt Spring Island (2009) and of the biography Alice Walker: A Life (2004). She is an alumna of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she was honoured for her Master’s thesis on “The Racial Development of Blind Black Children.” She also holds degrees from Harvard University and Wellesley College.

Levi Wilson is a teacher in the Greater Victoria School District, who completed his BA in First Nations Studies and History and BEd in Indigenous Perspectives from Simon Fraser University in 2016 and 2017 respectively. He is a member of the Gitga’at (Hartley Bay) First Nation, with strong familial ties to the Hwlitsum (Lamalcha) First Nation. Until recently, he had the privilege of living within his southern traditional territory, including his hometown of Galiano Island.

Rita Wong coedited Downstream: Reimagining Water (with Dorothy Christian). She has written six books: beholden (with Fred Wah), perpetual (with Cindy Mochizuki), undercurrent, sybil unrest (with Larissa Lai), forage, and monkeypuzzle. Arrested for her principled opposition to the TransMountain pipeline expansion, Wong is also active in solidarity efforts to protect the Peace Valley from being destroyed by the Site C dam as well as calling for BC and Canada to respect Wet’suwet’en law and land.