Jo Treggiari was born in London, England, and raised in Canada. She spent many years in Oakland, California and New York, where she trained as a boxer, wrote for a punk magazine, and owned a gangster rap/indie rock record label. Her novel Ashes, Ashes, a YA post-apocalyptic adventure published by Scholastic Press and also Germany’s Ars Edition, was a multiple award nominee and bestseller. Her novella Love You Like Suicide, was released as a limited edition of the long-running zine Cometbus and sold out within days. Her acclaimed psych-thriller Blood Will Out, was published by Penguin Teen in 2018. Her most recent book is the much-praised Governor General’s Literary Award finalist The Grey Sisters (Penguin Teen 2019). Jo lives with her two children in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia where she co-owns a curated, spirited, independent bookstore Block Shop Books

Our Editors from Nevermore Press, MacIntyre Purcell Publishing, Nimbus Publishing and House of Anansi will be listening keenly then sharing constructive criticism to the Pitchers.T

Chris Benjamin is a journalist, editor and fiction writer. His fourth book, a collection of short fiction called Boy With A Problem (nimbus.ca/store/boy-with-a-problem.html), will be published in September by Pottersfield Press. He recently completed a Writer in Residency for the South Shore Public Libraries (southshorepubliclibraries.ca) with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.
He is the author of three previous books: Indian School Road, which was named a Nova Scotia Book of Influence by the province’s librarians and publishers; Eco-Innovators, which won the Best Atlantic-Published Book Award and was a finalist for the Richardson Non-Fiction Prize; and Drive-by Saviours, a novel that made the Canada Reads Top Essential Books List.
He is currently Managing Editor of Atlantic Books Today and lives in Halifax.

Author of two poetry collections, Any God Will Do and The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon, 2018 and 2020); a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017); and four chapbooks, as well as coeditor (with Sarah Giragosian) of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2022), Virginia Konchan's creative and critical work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Believer, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

.Carol Bruneau is the author of eight books: three short fiction collections, including A Bird on Every Tree (Nimbus Publishing/Vagrant Press, 2017), and five novels, her latest Brighten the Corner Where You Are is inspired by the life of Maud Lewis.
Last year’s A Bird on Every Tree was a finalist for the 2017 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, both of which her first novel, Purple for Sky, won in 2001.
Her other novels include These Good Hands (Cormorant Books, 2015) which explores the life and art of French sculptor Camille Claudel, and Glass Voices, a Globe and Mail Best Book in 2007, and book club favourite. First published by Cormorant, the novel was translated into German and released as Glasstimmen in 2010, and, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, the original was re-released by Nimbus in Spring 2018. Another earlier novel, Berth, is being re-released by Nimbus later this month.
Bruneau’s reviews, stories, essays and articles have appeared nation-wide in newspapers, journals and anthologies. A mother of three sons, she lives with her husband in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

John G. Langley is the author of Steam Lion, a biography of Samuel Cunard, the shipping magnate born in Halifax. After a successful career in law, Langley retired from active practice, and, with a lengthy background as an avid collector and student of Cunard history, established the Cunard Steamship Society. He has been a consultant to producers of films and documentaries on the life of Samuel Cunard and vessels of the Cunard Line. He lectures extensively aboard Cunard liners and other cruise ships. He lives in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. John's latest book "Casey" is about Frederick Walker “Casey” Baldwin—athlete, engineer, aeronaut, sailor, politician, activist, conservationist—was a true gentleman, modest to a fault. As one of Alexander Graham Bell’s young associates, Casey was the first Canadian, and the first born in the British Empire, to fly—a full eleven months before the historic 1909 flight in Baddeck of the Silver Dart.

Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon is a reporter and web editor for CBC New Brunswick. MacKinnon previously worked at the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Telegraph-Journal. She is the winner of a Saint John Arts Award and an Atlantic Journalism Award, and a finalist for two National Newspaper Awards and three Atlantic Journalism Awards. The first edition of Shadow of Doubt: The Trial of Dennis Oland was a national bestseller and a finalist for an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada. It won the New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction. A revised and expanded edition, entitled Shadow of Doubt: The Trials of Dennis Oland, was published by Goose Lane last October, following Oland's retrial for second-degree murder in the 2011 bludgeoning death of his father, multimillionaire Richard Oland.

Phil Moscovitch is a freelance writer, editor, and audio producer with a passion for telling stories who has been publishing non-fiction for more than 25 years. A National Magazine Award finalist, his stories have appeared in publications including The Walrus, Reader's Digest, The Globe and Mail, The Gazette (Montreal), Halifax Magazine, and East Coast Living,
Moscovitz writer regularly for local news site The Halifax Examiner, and Saltscapes, where he does a series of as-told-to stories featuring people from around Atlantic Canada.
A longtime fermentation enthusiast, his book Adventures in Bubbles and Brine (Formac, 2019) explores Nova Scotia fermentation traditions (everything from craft beer to sauerkraut) and the people reviving and reinventing them.
In addition to writing non-fiction, he also produces audio documentaries, writes fiction and comics, and provides writing and editing services to corporations, agencies, and non-profits.
Phil recently graduated from the University of King's College MFA in Creative Non-fiction program, and is working on a book about new understandings of serious mental illness, as well as an upper-elementary fantasy graphic novel series.

William Kowalski is the author of fourteen books, including the international best-sellers Eddie’s Bastard (HarperCollins, 1999) and Somewhere South of Here (HarperCollins, 2001). He is the recipient of the 2014 Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for his novel The Hundred Hearts (Thomas Allen, 2013). He is also the recipient of four nominations for the Ontario Library Association’s Golden Oak Award for his works of fiction for new adult readers of English, published by Orca/Raven. HIs work has been translated into fifteen languages. He has been closely involved with the Port Medway Readers’ Festival since its inception in 2002, and more recently the Lunenburg Literary Festival. He lives in Mahone Bay, N.S. with his wife and children.

Christy Ann Conlin is the author of two acclaimed novels, Heave and The Memento; the former was a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and the Dartmouth Book Award. Her short stories have been published in numerous literary journals, longlisted for both the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the American Short Fiction Prize, and appeared in the anthology Best Canadian Stories.
Her latest book, Watermark (House of Anansi), is a collection of “North Atlantic Gothic” stories offering a gallery of gritty and lyrical portraits, each unmasking the myth and mystery of the everyday. In these evocative and startling stories, we meet people navigating the elemental forces of love, life, and death. An insomniac on Halifax’s moonlit streets. A runaway bride. A young woman accused of a brutal murder. A man who must live in exile if he is to live at all. A woman coming to terms with her eccentric childhood in a cult on the Bay of Fundy shore.

Genevieve Graham is a Halifax-area author with a passion for bringing Canadian History back to life through historical fiction. Since 2015, she's written five nationally bestselling novels about important moments in our history, and she plans to keep on that same track of writing a book a year for many years to come.
Using her love of historical fiction as a palette, Genevieve has done in-depth research into many Canadian highlights, including the Halifax Explosion, life on Nova Scotia’s home front during both World Wars, the reality of German U-boats skulking around Nova Scotia's rocky coves, the Acadian Expulsion, the Klondike Gold Rush, and the early Mounties (NWMP). Her latest, “The Forgotten Home Child”, is based on the true story of Canada’s British Home Children and was an #1 Instant Bestseller across Canada. It remained on the Canadian Fiction bestseller list for 19 weeks, including 11 weeks at #1.