Georges Arsenault | Laurie Brinklow | Erin Casey | Ray Cronin | Yvette Doucette | Tanya Davis | David Helwig | Deidre Kessler | Drea MacDonald | John MacKenzie | Brent MacLaine | Steven Mayoff | Fraser McCallum | Nudie | Louise Oxley | Lee Ellen Pottie | John Smith
Georges Arsenault
Historian and folklorist Georges Arsenault was born in Abram’s Village, Prince Edward Island. He holds a B.A. degree in Political Science from Université de Moncton and a Masters degree in Folklore from Université Laval.
From 1977 to 1982, Georges Arsenault worked as a cultural officer for the St-Thomas Aquinas Society (PEI’s main Acadian and Francophone Society) and then became Visiting Professor in Acadian Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island for three years.
From 1986 to 2003, he was the host of Radio-Canada’s morning radio show for Prince Edward Island. He now works as a freelancer and lives in Charlotttetown..
He has published several books on the folklore and history of the Acadians of Prince Edward Island. Among them are :
- The Island Acadians 1720-1980
- Acadians Legends, Folktales, and Songs from Prince Edward Island
- Acadian Christmas Traditions
- Acadian Mi-Car me: Masks and Merrymaking
He has contributed several articles to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and to The Island Magazine. His most recent was published in Red and is titled “My Mother’s Miminegash.”
Laurie Brinklow
Laurie Brinklow is a poet, editor, and former book publisher from Prince Edward Island. She founded Acorn Press in 1993, and published books about Prince Edward Island/by PEIslanders until she sold the press to go to University of Tasmania, pursuing her dream to do a Ph.D. with Dr. Pete Hay at the School of Geography and Environmental Studies. Her poetry has been published in a chapbook, Scars, as well as in several anthologies and literary journals in Canada and Tasmania. She did her Master of Arts in Island Studies at University of Prince Edward Island, exploring island identity in the fiction of Wayne Johnston (Newfoundland) and Alistair MacLeod (Cape Breton Island). Her Ph.D. research explores people’s attachment to islands by looking at how Tasmanian and Newfoundland artists express their “islandness” through their art. She is keeping a blog of her adventures at tasmania-bound.blogspot.com.
Erin Casey
Photo: Mark Yammine
Erin is a newly minted member of the PEI Writers’ Guild board of directors. In her day job as Writing Centre Coordinator at UPEI, she shepherds students through the world of words, organizes good clean wordy fun like adult spelling bees, and generally fights the good fight for writing on campus. Erin is also a graduate student working towards a Master’s in Educational Leadership from UPEI. In addition to her writing life, Erin has worked in the areas of women’s issues, housing, literacy, and has spent time as a professional writer and cartoonist.
Ray Cronin
Ray Cronin is Director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
He was born in New York, NY in 1964, and grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Bachelor of Fine Arts) and the University of Windsor (Master of Fine Arts). The author of several catalogue essays, as well as numerous articles for Canadian and American art magazines, he was the Visual Arts Columnist for the Daily Gleaner (Fredericton) and Here (Saint John). In 2000 he received the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Review in the Arts.
Prior to 2001 Ray Cronin was a freelance writer, curator and artist based in Fredericton, New Brunswick. In 2001 he assumed the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. He was the founding curator of the Sobey Art Award and served as chair of the Sobey jury until 2008. He currently serves on the Sobey Art Award Governance Committee.
In 2006 he was appointed Senior Curator at AGNS, and in December of 2007 he added the position of Acting Director and Chief Curator to his duties. He was named Director and CEO of AGNS in June of 2008. His recent and upcoming curatorial projects include survey exhibitions of the work of Thierry Delva, Nancy Edell and Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg, as well as the nationally touring exhibitions Graeme Patterson: Woodrow and Arena: The Art of Hockey. Ray Cronin has taught at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design and NSCAD University, as well as having delivered lectures and talks at galleries across Canada.
He is married to the artist Sarah Maloney, and lives with her and their three daughters (18 year-old Mollie, 16 year-old Kathryn, and 12 year-old Maggie) in Halifax.
Yvette Doucette
Yvette Doucette lives in Charlottetown, PEI, in an orange house, surrounded by elegant elms, lovely birch, happy horse chestnuts, lots of fir trees, maple of two varieties—and a beautiful perennial garden in the front yard. She is mother to Uma (14) and Mathurin (12), and shares house with them and her partner Mark.
A poet and Islander, some of the themes that occupy her thoughts and writing are: curiosity, place, wonder, the earth and the body, nature, what makes us tick, rhythm, sound, being a mother, love, loss, and death. She is a founding member of a writing group composed of 9 Prince Edward Island women, WWW.
Yvette is fortunate, again this year, to facilitate an after-school creative writing club with talented students at Bluefield High School (thanks to Richard Baker and the PEI Writers’ Guild), and has a new group for Junior High Students at her home. She draws inspiration and joy from this volunteer activity.
She is currently working on a book about the Island music scene, a screenplay, and polishing up her first poetry manuscript, draft titled, Body of Red, of Blue.
You can find some of Yvette’s poetry at: this town is small.
And hear her read occasionally at Red Earth Women Presents at the UPEI faculty lounge on the third Thursday of the month.
Tanya Davis
Tanya Davis is a poet. She is a storyteller. She is a musician and a singer-songwriter and she fuses these elements together in a refreshing matrimony of language and sound, side-stepping genre and captivating audiences in the process. With the release of her third album, Clocks and Hearts Keep Going (Nov 2010), she affirms her well-earned place in the ranks of thoughtful and hard-working Canadian Artists.
Since bursting onto the Halifax music scene in 2006 with her debut, Make a List, Tanya has garnered praise from industry, audience, and peers, as well as multiple award nominations, including one for her sophomore release, Gorgeous Morning, for the 2009 ECMA Female Recording of the Year. She is a 2 time winner in the CBC National Poetry Face-off as well as the Canadian Winner of the 2008 Mountain Stage NewSong contest. In 2009, with support from Bravo, she collaborated with independent filmmaker Andrea Dorfman to produce a short videopoem entitled How to Be Alone; 8 months after being posted on Youtube it has over 3 million views and has been posted on countless websites and blogs around the world, from Brazil to China. It’s also been featured at numerous film festivals, including The Worldwide Short Film Festival and the VideoPoetry Festival (Berlin) and recently won Tanya the Video of the Year Award from Music Nova Scotia.
Hearts and Clocks Keep Going, was produced in collaboration with celebrated artist Jim Bryson. This album, like those before it, features strongly Tanya’s unique and vulnerable style, full of poignant lyrics, catchy melodies, and expressive, if unconventional, arrangements. She is currently at work on a feature-length show based in music and performance poetry, as funded by The Canada Council for the Arts and was recently commissioned to write and perform an original piece for the Opening Ceremonies of the 2011 Canada Winter Games. Her first book, At first, lonely, was published June 2011 by Acorn
Press. She is currently the Mayor’s Poet Laureate of Halifax, NS.
David Helwig
David Helwig was born in Toronto in 1938 and lived there for most of his first ten years, then moved with his parents to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario where his father ran a small business repairing and refinishing furniture and buying and selling antiques. He attended the University of Toronto and the University of Liverpool. His first daughter was born in England and the second in Kingston where he taught at Queen’s University. He published his first stories, in Canadian Forum and The Montrealer, while still an undergraduate. For two summers he worked in summer stock with the Straw Hat Players, mostly as a business manager and technician, working with such actors as Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs, William B. Davis and Timothy Findley.
While he taught at Queen’s University, he did some informal teaching in Collin’s Bay Penitentiary and he wrote A Book about Billie with a former inmate. In 1974, John Hirsch hired him as literary manager of CBC television drama, and he spent two years in this position, supervising the work of story editors and the department’s relations with writers. From 1976 to 1980, he taught part time at Queen’s while doing a great deal of freelance work, and in 1980, he gave up teaching and became a full-time freelance writer.
He has from the beginning written both fiction and poetry as well as a wide range and radio, televison and journalism.
One of his daughters is a writer and political activist. The other is a chemist and art conservator. He has two grandchildren.
His avocation is vocal music. After abandoning this for some years, he returned to it in his forties and has sung with a number of choirs in Kingston, Montreal and Charlottetown. He has appeared as bass soloist in Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St Matthew
Passion, and Mozart’s Requiem.
Deidre Kessler
Deirdre Kessler holding a Tasmanian devil joey (a baby) at Trowunna Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre, Mole Creek, Tasmania, Nov. 2010.
Deirdre Kessler is a Prince Edward Island-based author of two dozen books for children, young adults, and adults, including a recent book of poetry for adults, Afternoon Horses, and Canadian Children’s Book Centre Our Choice Award-winning Brupp Rides Again and Lobster in My Pocket. She teaches creative writing and children’s literature with the Department of English of the University of Prince Edward Island. She is recipient of the 2010 UPEI Award for Teaching Excellence by a Sessional Lecturer. She was writer in residence at the Kelly Street Writer’s Cottage in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2007 and in 2010 artist in residence at the King’s Bridge Cottage, Cataract Gorge, Launceston, Tasmania, and participated in the 2007 and 2010 Tasmanian Poetry Festivals.
In the fall of 2011, The Acorn Press will publish Dreamtime, a bedtime book for the very young, and in February 2012, Danger: Keep Out!, a novel for early grades that is part of the Porcupine Chapter Book series, will be launched in Toronto at the 36th annual language arts conference, Reading for the Love of It.
Deirdre Kessler’s recent publications include the essay, “On Day 24 the Mountain Moved Inside,” in the Autumn 2011 issue of Island, a Tasmanian literary magazine; a long poem, “Come from away: 40° South looks at 46° North,” in issue 42 of Famous Reporter; and a review of Islands: LiNQ (Literature of Northern Queensland), volume no. 37, for Island Studies Journal (Vol. 6, No. 1) May 2011.
Deirdre Kessler is recipient of a 2011 writing grant from the Prince Edward Island Council of the Arts to write a novel for young adult readers, The Space Behind the Garage. Other of her popular children’s books are Lena and the While, Home for Christmas, Spike Chiseltooth, The Private Adventures of Brupp, Brupp on the Other Side, Brupp in the Land of Snow, and Bigfoot Sabotage.
Kessler has given hundreds of, probably over a thousand, readings in schools and libraries in Canada, the U.S., the Netherlands, and Germany. She is a founding member and past president of the Prince Edward Island Writers’ Guild and since 1989 has conducted many writing workshops for the Writers’ Guild for adults and children, as well as hundreds of writing workshops under the aegis of other organizations.
Kessler’s non-fiction books include Exploring The Island, which is now in use in all grade six Island history classes; A Prince Edward Island Christmas (Nimbus, 2004); Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Favourite Places (Lorimer, 2nd ed., 2010; 1st ed. 2001); and a 496-page biography of Wanda Lefurgey Wyatt, A Century on Spring Street (recipient of P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation Writing Award, 2000).
Deirdre Kessler worked with CBC Radio and Television for five years as arts reporter, movie reviewer, and host of CBC Radio’s “The Story Show” for children. Her hour-long documentaries have been aired on CBC Ideas and The Arts Tonight.
She was project director and part of the creative team of the international-award-winning CD-ROM, A Bend in the Road: The Life and Work of L.M. Montgomery, was co-chair of the L.M. Montgomery Institute for a number of years, and has attended and participated in nearly every international symposium held biannually by the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island.
In October 2010, she was invited to participate in the 25th annual Tasmanian Poetry Festival. In November 2010, she was writer in residence in the King’s Bridge Cottage, Cataract Gorge Cottage, Launceston, Tasmania. During this artist in residency she worked with students in grades 4 and 5 at Trevalyn and West Launceston Primary Schools, giving writing workshops.
Her adult short stories and poems have been published in a number of collections and journals, including Landmarks: An Anthology of New Atlantic Canadian Poetry of the Land (The Acorn Press, 2001), Gifts to Last (Goose Lane, 1997), and The Fifth and Fourth Morningside Papers.
Subtracting by Seventeen, a long poem, won the Milton Acorn Poetry Award first prize, and this poem and others were published in a chapbook the Saturday Morning Chapbook series, edited by David Helwig, Hugh Macdonald, and the late Joseph Sherman. Her poetry chapbook Rearranging the Sky was published in 2007, and an upcoming poetry chapbook, Echidna on the Snake Gully Track and other Cataract Gorge Poems, will be launched at the 2011 PEI Writers’ Guild Pen & Inkling Festival.
Drea MacDonald
A restless soul by nature, Prince Edward Island’s Drea Macdonald pens songs that offer a fresh perspective on the “tried and true” themes of lost love, growing up, and hitting the road. She has recorded two e.p.’s from 2008 – 2010, and is currently working on a full length album with a new backing band, “The Wildebeards”.
Performing solo, Drea boasts strong vocals carrying confessional lyrics, and aggressive acoustic strumming. As part of The Wildebeards, the acoustic is left behind to make room for three electric guitars, multiple backup vocals and a solid, bluesy rhythm section.
Brent MacLaine
Brent MacLaine is the author of four collections of poetry. Wind and Root (Vehicule), These Fields Were Rivers (Goose Lane), and Shades of Green (Acorn), which won the Atlantic Poetry Prize. His most recent collection is Athena Becomes a Swallow published by Goose Lane in 2009. The author of many academic publications and a winner of the national 3M award for excellence in teaching, he is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Prince Edward Island and resides in Rice Point.
John MacKenzie
John MacKenzie has published 3 books of poetry. He lives in Charlottetown contemplating, occasionally, the exact amount of duct tape and cardboard he will need to build his retirement home.
Steven Mayoff
Steven Mayoff was born and raised in Montreal, lived in Toronto for 17 years and has made Foxley River, PEI his home since 2001. His fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines across Canada and the U.S.A. including Grain, the Malahat Review, Pottersfield Portfolio, the Dalhousie Review, Mobius Magazine, Euphony and the Vocabula Review as well as the Dublin Review and Crannog (Ireland), The Arabesques Review (Algeria) and Upstairs At Duroc (France).
He has collaborated on one stage play, Bully, produced at The Theatre Centre in Toronto, and three radio plays – Call Waiting, Afterlife and Phone Booth — for CBC Radio. In 2000 he was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award for his contribution as a lyricist to the show Swingstep, which was produced at The Ford Centre in North York, Ontario. His one-page screenplay, The Dim Sum of its Parts, was made into a film and has garnered almost 400,000 viewings on Youtube.
He has won the David Adams Richards Prize and was a Top 100 Semi-finalist for the Amazon.com Breakout Novel Award. His first fiction collection, Fatted Calf Blues, won a 2010 PEI Book Award, was shortlisted for a 2010 ReLit Award and is currently a Top 5 finalist for the CBC Cross-Country Bookshelf for the Maritimes. A full-length screenplay adaptation of Fatted Calf Blues was a Top 100 Semifinalist in the 2010 Scriptapalooza competition.
Fraser McCallum
A singer-songwriter from Hazel Grove, PEI, Fraser wears numerous hats throughout the Island Arts and Entertainment scene and can be found holding on to his as the band leader of local folkers, Racoon Bandit. Racoon Bandit picked up a 2011 Music PEI Award and a 2011 ECMA nomination for their debut album Campcraft and recently released their first full length album, Into the Hills (Collagen Rock Records). Fraser has also made a local name for himself as a standup comic and writer performing improv, standup and sketch comedy with a variety of troupes since returning to his beloved Island in 2007.
Nudie
Persistence, a weird name and musical exuberance have won Prince Edward Island’s Nudie and the Turks a few high file supporters and a growing legion of fans.
Born in Ontario, and after calling Toronto, Montreal, Arizona, Texas and New York City home, singer/songwriter Nudie chose to hang his hat in Charlottetown, P.E.I… It wasn’t long before he put together a band and started a residency at he local bootleggers…
In the spring of 2006, Nudie had the idea to follow Willie Nelson’s Maritime Tour, busking for the people going into each venue, then playing a show at a club in each city….the seed of this idea came from the band doing the same at a George Jones show. They met George backstage and his fiddle player sat in with the band out front; his sage advice was ” do what’s in your heart and good things will happen to you “.
Four shows into Willie’s ten city tour, they got on the bus, hung out with the band and crew and were asked to play the end of tour party.
Since then, Nudie and the Turks continue to keep busy playing the Maritimes, Ontario, Quebec and Western Canada, as well as U.S. shows on Colorado, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
The fall of 2011 will see the band release their latest recording, and continue to play music the way Hank Williams would have liked it; great songwriting, minimal instrumentation, a strong voice and an everyman attitude.
Louise Oxley
Louise Oxley is a Tasmanian poet whose work has appeared in Australian and overseas journals over the past 15 years. She has published two collections, Compound Eye (2003) and Buoyancy (2008), both with Five Islands Press. Buoyancy was shortlisted in the 2008 Western Australian Premier’s Literary Awards. Louise has also won a number of national awards for individual poems, including the Melbourne Poets Union and Tom Collins Prizes, and the Bruce Dawe Prize in both 2004 and 2007. She is represented in Best Australian anthologies and a small selection of her work, Sitting with Cézanne, is published as a chapbook by Picaro Press. Louise is currently Tasmanian writer-in-residence at UPEI, an exciting break from her work as a language and academic skills adviser to international students at the University of Tasmania.
Lee Ellen Pottie
Lee Ellen Pottie earned a B.A. Honours in English from the University of Prince Edward Island and an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Windsor, and is completing an M.A. in History at the University of New Brunswick. Raised in Halifax and Montreal, she lives in Fredericton, where she is Executive Director of the New Brunswick Provincial Capital Commission, and national coordinator for the Canadian Capital Cities Organization’s “Canada 150,” a project preparing for Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017. She is a frequent visitor to P.E.I. (in her spare time).
John Smith
Born in Toronto in 1927, John Smith took degrees in Mathematics and Physics and in English Literature at the University of Toronto. Formerly Dean of Arts, and for 25 years a professor of English at the University of Prince Edward Island prior to retirement in 1992, he is currently Professor Emeritus, and lives in Charlottetown. He was appointed by the Legislative Assembly to a two-year term, 2003-2004, as Prince Edward Island’s first Poet Laureate. Seven collections of his poetry have been published, most reently Maps of Invariance, in 2005, and Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove, by Acorn Press, in 2004.
