In this first collection of poetry and short fiction from The Banff Centre's Writing Studio program, 41 of the program's most accomplished alumni are gathered in an unforgettable anthology.

Edna Alford is the author of two collections of short fiction, A Sleep Full of Dreams and The Garden of Eloise Loon. She received the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (co-winner) in 1981 and the Marian Engel Award for fiction in 1988. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including The Oxford Collection of Canadian Short Stories, The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women, Best Canadian Stories and others. She was co-founder and co-editor of Dandelion magazine, fiction editor of Grain magazine (1985-90) and has co-edited the Banff Centre Press anthologies Meltwater, Rip Rap and Intersections. Edna continues to edit and teach fiction as well as work on her own creative writing. She was the writer-in-residence at the Francis Morrison Library in Saskatoon in 2001 and has served as the program director for the Writing with Style and associate director for prose in the Writing Studio at The Banff Centre.
Don McKay is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Paradoxides. He has won two Governor General's Awards for Poetry and has been shortlisted twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize, most recently for Camber: Selected Poems, which was a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year. McKay is also known as a poetry editor, and he has taught poetry in universities across the country.
Rhea Tregebov is the author of poetry, fiction and children's picture books. She has also edited a number of anthologies. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, where she teaches poetry, children's literature and literary translation. Her work has received a number of literary awards, including the J. I. Segal Award for fiction, the Pat Lowther Award, the Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award, and the Malahat Review Long Poem Award. Since Tregebov works in several genres with a variety of publishers, this site is designed to give readers a sense of her writing as a whole, as well as details on her publications, background, and teaching. .
Rachel Wyatt immigrated to Canada with her family in 1957. She was Director of the Writing Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts during the 1990s and has appeared at writer's conferences across Canada and internationally. She has won the CBC Literary Competition Drama Award and was Awarded the Order of Canada in 2002 and the Queen's Jubilee Medal in 2003.

Edna Alford's profile page

Don McKay has published numerous books of poetry, including Birding, or desire (1983), Night Field (1991), Apparatus (1997), Another Gravity (2000), Strike/Slip (2006), The Muskwa Assemblage (2008), and Paradoxides (2012). He won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2007, two Governor General's Awards for Poetry (in 1991 and 2000), a National Magazine Award in 1991, the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Poetry (in 1983 and 2013), and the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award in 2013. His books have also appeared on the shortlists for the Governor General's Award for Non-fiction (in 2002), the Governor General's Award for Poetry (in 1983 and 1997), and the Griffin Poetry Prize (in 2001 and 2005). He was named to the Order of Canada in 2009

McKay is also a respected editor, teacher, and scholar. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Sage Hill Writing Experience. He has served as editor and co-publisher of Brick Books since 1975, and from 1991 to 1996, he edited The Fiddlehead. He presently lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Don McKay's profile page

Rhea Tregebov is the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, most recently All Souls' (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019). She has also published five popular children's picture books including The Big Storm and What-If Sara, which are set in Winnipeg. She has edited ten anthologies of essays, poetry and fiction, most recently Arguing with the Storm. Her work has received a number of literary prizes, including the Nancy Richler Award for fiction (for Rue des Rosiers) as well as the Segal , Prairie Schooner Readers' Choice Award, and the Malahat Review Long Poem Award for her poetry. Rue des Rosiers is her second novel. The Knife Sharpener’s Bell, her first, won the J.I. Segal Prize in English Fiction. Born in Saskatoon and raised in Winnipeg, Tregebov lived for many years in Toronto, working as a freelance writer, editor, and instructor. From 2005 to 2017 she taught Creative Writing at UBC. She is now an Associate Professor Emerita at UBC. 

Rhea Tregebov's profile page

"The Meltwater collection illuminates small aspects of the human ... and even at times rises to luminosity."
-J.S. Porter, The Globe and Mail