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.

Born and raised in Kingston, Ontario, Britta Badour, better known as Britta B. is an award-winning artist, professor, and poet living in Toronto. She is the author of the poetry collection and audiobook, Wires That Sputter. Her work has been celebrated as a Trillium Book Award Finalist for Poetry, shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, as well as longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the CBC Poetry Prize. Britta holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph and teaches spoken word performance at Seneca College and OCAD.

Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet, hybrid genre writer, judicial assistant, and editor of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent. Co-founder of the experimental Riverbed Reading Series, they are a creative nonfiction editor for long con magazine and a member of Room’s editorial collective. Their debut collection, Blood Belies (Wolsak & Wynn), was shortlisted for the 2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Their second collection, Through the Eyes of Another, is forthcoming in Spring 2027. Photo: Nicolai Gregory.

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.

Kyle Edwards is the author of the novel Small Ceremonies. He grew up on the Lake Manitoba First Nation and is a member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation. He has worked as a journalist for Native News Online, ProPublica, and Maclean’s, and has held fellowships at Harvard and Stanford Universities. He has won two National Magazine Awards for his reporting and was named Emerging Indigenous Journalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists in 2019. He is currently a Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California.

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.

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.

Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian writer living in Treaty 1 (Winnipeg). She was selected as a 2025 Writers Trust Rising Star. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and appeared on their list of 30 writers to watch. In 2023, she was a Journey Prize winner and a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Jones has been selected as a winner and finalist in contests by Prairie Fire, Room, Malahat Review, Prism International, Freefall, ex-Puritan, Grain, SubTerrain, and Bayou Magazine. She has published work in The Fiddlehead, EVENT, and the Through the Portal anthology. Her debut novel, The World So Wide, was published in April 2025 and a short story collection is forthcoming in 2027, both by Cormorant Books.

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.

Kai Thomas is an author and educator. His background and body of work span from land stewardship, carpentry, and small-scale farming to historical research and scholarship.  His debut novel, In the Upper Country, was awarded the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust prize for fiction and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. The work has been featured in news outlets such as NPR, CBC, The New York Times, and the Globe and Mail.

Linda Trinh is a Vietnamese Canadian author and she writes fiction and nonfiction for kids and adults. Her award-winning early chapter book series, The Nguyen Kids, explores Vietnamese culture and identity with elements of the supernatural, spirituality, and social justice woven in.  Her upcoming book, The Healer and the Phoenix, the first installment of a four-book contemporary fantasy chapter book series, explores themes of social justice, empathy, and resilience.

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 a literary agent at The Caldwell Agency, representing adult fiction and nonfiction. She was previously an associate literary agent at P.S. Literary Agency. 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. 

Namitha Rathinappillai (she/they) is a fat queer Tamil poet. Currently based in Toronto, she was the first female and youngest director of Ottawa’s Urban Legends Poetry Collective (ULPC). They are a two-time Canadian Festival of Spoken Word (CFSW) team member with ULPC, and they published their first chapbook titled "Dirty Laundry" with Battleaxe Press in November 2018. In 2019, she won the RBC Youth Ottawa Spirit of the Capital Award for Arts and Culture. They enjoy crafting, writing letters to friends, and looking at the moon. Photo: Adrienne Row-Smith.

Zeina Sleiman is a Palestinian Canadian writer based out of amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Her short story "My Father’s Soil" was shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2025 and her debut fiction novel Where the Jasmine Blooms was released in April 2025. She was listed among 22 “Writers to Watch” by CBC books in 2025. Zeina is a Tin House workshop alum and is the recipient of grants from the Silk Road Institute, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council. She has a PhD in Political Science and her writing often draws on her academic background and research interests.

Born and raised in India and now living in Vancouver, Canada, Kailash Srinivasan’s narratives often highlight personal, economic, religious, and political fractures in our society. He also writes about injustice and inequality. His prose and poetry have appeared in several Canadian and international literary journals. His work has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards for Fiction, the CBC Short Story Prize, the Bridport Prize for Fiction, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and the Into the Void Fiction Prize. He’s currently working on his first novel and a short story collection.

Kern Carter is a Toronto-based novelist known for his compelling storytelling in books like And Then There Was Us and Boys and Girls Screaming, which delve into themes of family, friendship, and relational conflict. Beyond his novels, Kern has cultivated a dedicated following for his insightful writing on the historical and contemporary connections between literature and popular culture. An experienced educator, Kern teaches professional writing at the college level, where he has designed courses on Storytelling and Narrative, as well as The Business of Writing. He also leads workshops on craft and storytelling and is a sought-after public speaker recognized for his expertise in creative culture.