Read Our Exceptional Authors Ganz to Hayes

Rhonda Ganz

Frequent Small Loads of Laundry

Rocksalt

Force Field, 77 Women Poets of BC

Winner of the ReLit Poetry Award
Finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Finalist for the Victoria Butler Book Prize

Crime fiction, reality TV and bad dreams inform Rhonda Ganz’s poetry, which has appeared in Rattle, The Malahat Review, Room, on city buses and in the anthologies Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Poems from Planet Earth, Poet to Poet and Force Field: 77 Women Poets of BC. A poem of hers was chosen by Harvard Design Magazine for their December 2015 issue “Shelf Life.” She has been a featured reader at Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria, WordStorm in Nanaimo, Word on the Street in Vancouver and at the inaugural Galiano Literary Festival. Rhonda Ganz was born in Kenya. She lives in Victoria, B.C., where she works as a graphic designer and editor. She shares a home with one human and varying numbers of cats. She speaks German and can hold a conversation in Swahili. She has been known to write poems on the spot for people in hotel lobbies, parks and cemeteries.
reganz.com

Kerry Gilbert

Little Red

Tight Wire

Gilbert grew up in the Okanagan. She has lived on Vancouver Island, in South Korea, and in Australia. She now lives back in the valley, where she teaches Creative Writing at Okanagan College and raises her three children. Her first book of poetry, (kerplnk): a verse novel of development, was published in 2005 with Kalamalka Press. Her second book of poetry, Tight Wire, was published in 2016 with Mother Tongue Publishing. Tight Wire was shortlisted for the ReLit Prize in 2017.
She won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award for Best Suite by an Emerging Writer 2016/2017. The suite is the core of a new verse manuscript called Little Red. Also, three of Kerry’s poems made the long list for the 2017-2018 Ralph Gustafson Prize for the Best Poem.

Shirley Graham

Shakespearean Blues

Forcefield, 77 Women Poets of BC

Rocksalt

111 West Coast Literary Portraits

Blue Notes

Finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry

Graham has been writing, publishing in literary magazines and giving readings in Canada and the U.S. for three decades. She studied writing and literature at UC Irvine, UCLA, Brown University, the Sorbonne in Paris, and in private workshops with a range of writers, including Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, Robert Haas and Mark Strand. Her books include Blue Notes (m)Other Tongue Press, What Someone Wanted and Book of Blue (Black Moss Press). She is a psychologist and lives on Salt Spring Island with her husband, poet Peter Levitt.

Peter Haase

Liverpool Lad, Adventures Growing Up in Postwar Liverpool

Love of the Salish Sea Islands

Haase is an electrician/builder, singer/musician, artist, gardener, letterpress printer, former preacher and scriptural teacher and political activist. Born in Everton, Liverpool, he immigrated to Australia in Dec. 1966, then Canada in 1971, living in Toronto, the Yukon and Vancouver, before settling on Salt Spring Island in 1990. He married Canadian writer Mona Fertig and they have a son and daughter. This is his first book. He is working on the sequel titled, Double Immigrant.

Joan Haggerty

The Dancehall Years

Finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize

Haggerty was born in 1940 and raised in Vancouver, B.C. From 1962 to 1972 she lived and wrote in London, England; Formentera, Spain; and New York City. Returning to the B.C. coast, she made her home in Roberts Creek and Vancouver where she taught in the Creative Writing Dept. at U. B.C. She began a second career as a high school teacher in the Bulkley Valley in 1990. Her previous books are Please, Miss, Can I Play God?, Daughters of the Moon, and The Invitation which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in 1994.

Diana Hayes

This is the Moon's Work

Forcefield, 77 Women Poets of BC

Rocksalt

111 West Coast Literary Portraits

Love of the Salish Sea Islands

Hayes studied at the University British Columbia and Victoria, receiving a B.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Her published books include Moving Inland, The Classical Torso In 1980, The Choreography of Desire, and Coming Home (anthology). Her play, Islomania: Saga of the Settlers, was produced by Salt of the Earth Productions. She is currently Production Manager for Salt Spring’s Theatre Alive, a member of Photosynthesis and started the Salt Spring Seal Swim Team in 2002. Over the past decade, Diana Hayes has expanded her poetic vision into the realm of photographic dreamscapes and narratives. She divides her time between writing, photography, producing literary events and has just started Raven Publishing.

Mother Tongue Publishing Limited