BIPOC Writers Connect

Vincent Anioke is a Nigerian Canadian writer and software engineer. His short stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and Passages North. He won the 2021 Austin Clarke Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 CBC Short Story Prize, the 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2024, his debut short story collection Perfect Little Angels was published by Arsenal Pulp Press. It was a finalist for the 2024 Dayne Ogilvie Prize and the 2024 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. He is currently working on a novel. Photo: Samuel Nwaokpani.

Denise Chong’s prize-winning books portray the lives of ordinary people caught in the eye of history. Among her works are her family memoir, The Concubine’s Children and The Girl in the Picture, about the Vietnam War’s most famous casualty. Denise’s most recent book is Out of Darkness, about Rumana Monzur, who suffered a shocking domestic assault. The book, set in Bangladesh and Canada, goes behind the wall of Rumana’s marriage to expose the tyranny of domestic violence. Photo: Monique de St. Croix.

Kevin heronJones is Brampton’s 2025 Writer in Residence. A storyteller in the tradition of the ancient African griots using literature to educate and entertain. He uses his arena to inspire and encourage creativity and a love of literature amongst our young people. Kevin grew up in Jane/Finch and Brampton. He has published three novels, three books of poetry, and has been featured on six spoken word poetry albums. Listen Fiction is his narrating platform.

Born and raised on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh peoples (colonially known as “Vancouver”), now based in Tkaronto (“Toronto”), C.E. Gatchalian (he/him/his) is a Filipino diasporic queer author, editor, playwright, dramaturge, teacher, and consultant. The author of six books and co-editor of three anthologies, he was the 2013 recipient of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, is a two-time Jessie Richardson Theatre Award recipient, and is a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist. His plays have been produced nationally and internationally, as well as on radio and television. Formerly Artistic Producer of the frank theatre company in Vancouver, he is currently Community Engagement Producer for CultureBrew.Art, a digital database and community-building platform for Indigenous and racialized artists. His memoir, Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty and the Making of a Brown Queer Man, was published in 2019 by Arsenal Pulp Press, and he is co-editor of the recently published Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing, published by Cormorant Books. In 2022 he was one of the recipients of the one-time only Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia's Arts & Music Awards for his contribution to the arts in BC. Photo: Raymond Shum, Tempest Photo.

Jackie Khalilieh is a Palestinian Canadian author who believes that young adult readers should have the option and freedom to read about evergreen issues facing teens in an authentic, positive way. Like many autistic women, she received her diagnosis as an adult. Something More, her debut YA novel, was shortlisted for the Ruth & Sylvia Schwartz Award, as well as the Snow Willow Award and the Amy Mathers Teen Book Award, and was selected for several Best Books of 2023 lists, including the New York Public Library and Audible Canada, among others. She resides just outside Toronto, Canada, with her husband, two daughters, and Samoyed, Pearl. 

Jónína Kirton, an Icelandic and Red River Métis poet, was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Treaty 1, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis. She currently lives in New Westminster, BC, the stolen land of the Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples. Jónína graduated from the SFU Writer's Studio in 2007 and since that time has published three books with Talonbooks. She was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her third book, Standing in a River of Time, released in 2022, merges poetry and lyrical memoir to take us on a journey exposing the intergenerational effects of colonization on her Métis family.

A Governor General finalist in nonfiction, Rowan McCandless is the Black and biracial author of Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments (Dundurn Press, 2021). She writes from Winnipeg which is located on Treaty One territory. Her award-winning fiction and creative nonfiction appear in print and online journals. She is the creative nonfiction editor with The Fiddlehead and the First Vice-Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada.

Li Charmaine Anne (she/they) grew up in the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations otherwise known as Vancouver, BC. Her first novel Crash Landing won the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in Young People’s Literature—Text. Recent works can be found in The Tyee and SAD Mag. Charmaine is currently spending the year in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung Peoples.

Padma Viswanathan is an award-winning writer and translator published in eight countries. Her short fiction, translations, and essays can be found in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Recent publications include Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime, and The Charterhouse of Padma, a novel. Padma is Professor of Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas—Fayetteville, and founder of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program.

Nour Sallam is an associate literary agent at P.S. Literary Agency representing adult fiction and nonfiction. She has a BA in English Literature and Political Science from the University of British Columbia and studied publishing at Toronto Metropolitan University. As an Arab woman and an immigrant, she loves books that amplify joy and connection, and/or feature complex and nuanced histories, power dynamics, or underrepresented narratives. She represents upmarket and commercial fiction as well as select literary fiction. She also works on thrillers, mysteries, horror, and romance. In nonfiction, she is drawn to big-idea books and narratives on pop culture, art, and nature.