Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, features new and previously unpublished poetry and poetics from 108 BC poets. Dynamic and groundbreaking, this first anthology of BC poetry in over 31 years, features an eclectic mix of new, mid-career and established BC poets writing in a rich variety of styles, from Nelson to Masset, Prince George to Vancouver.

Mona Fertig is a poet, publisher, editor and founder of The Literary Storefront, Canada’s first literary centre (1978-1985) and Mother Tongue Publishing. She grew up in Vancouver’s Kitsilano and Burnaby and attended the Vancouver School of Art. She has been writing poetry since she was a teenager and has given hundreds of readings in many cities and towns across Canada as well as NYC and San Francisco. Her books of poetry include Mouth for Music (1979), 4722 Rue Berri (1986), Sex, Death & Travel (1998) and The Unsettled (2010), well as The Life and Art of George Fertig (2010). Fertig edited the anthologies Love of the Salish Sea Islands, The Summer Book, and 111 West Coast Literary Portraits (2012). She assisted in curating the George Fertig and Jack Akroyd exhibitions at the Burnaby Art Gallery, and the Unheralded Artists of BC Exhibition at Mahon Hall. She was a founding member of the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets, The Federation of BC Writers, the BC Book Prizes, and has been the BC/Yukon Rep of The Writers’ Union of Canada and P.E.N. Canada. In 2016, the Vancouver Public Library honored her as a Literary Landmark. She has lived on Salt Spring Island with her husband Peter Haase, for over 30 years, where they raised two children.

Mona Fertig's profile page

Harold Rhenisch is an award-winning poet, critic, and cultural commentator. His awards include the Confederation Poetry Prize in 1991 and the BC #38: Yukon Community Newspapers Association Award for Best Arts and Culture Writing in 1996. He is a seven-time runner-up for the CBC/Tilden/Saturday Night Literary Contest. In 2005, he won the ARC Magazine Critics Desk Award for best long poetry review and the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for "Abandon." He won this prize again in 2007 for "The Bone Yard." His non-fiction book Tom Thomson's Shack was short-listed for two BC Book Prizes in 2000. For its sequel, The Wolves at Evelyn, he won the 2007 George Ryga Award for Social Responsibility in Literature. He is the author of 32 books of poetry, fiction, biography and essays and choreographed Richard Rathwell’s Human Nation for the paper stage. Along with the Norwegian Olav Hauge, he is one of the two poets in the world who learned to write and edit poems by pruning fruit trees, an experience documented in his The Tree Whisperer (Gaspereau, 2021). A direct heir of Bertolt Brecht’s theater, through the dissident playwright and novelist Stefan Schütz, whose radio play Peyote he translated and published, he has invented a theatrical set of cross-genre literary interventions. He has secretly edited and mentored over a hundred writers in the hinterlands of Canada unserved by its university and publishing system and is currently writing a transcultural natural history curriculum and a history of British Columbia centred in the Indian Wars of the American West.

Harold Rhenisch's profile page