Alexis Marie Chute, '07 BA,  is an award-winning visual artist, filmmaker, art gallery curator, and bestselling author of 7 books, including the fantasy trilogy Above the Star, Below the Moon, Inside the Sun, and memoir Expecting Sunshine. Her latest non-fiction books include Prairie Spirits, The Eternal Summer of Alberta’s Herbarium, Memorable Murals, and Moments in Focus. Her artwork is represented at the Art Gallery of Alberta and her documentary films have screened worldwide. She is the curator of Wild Skies Art Gallery, the Red Brick Common Public Art Gallery, and is co-founder of InFocus Photo Exhibit. Her most recent venture is Wild Skies Press, a hybrid-Canadian book publisher that produces beautiful art books, poetry collections, fiction and non-fiction titles. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and is passionate about creativity, healing, resiliency, and wellbeing on the “joy journey.”

An award-winning non-fiction writer, Carissa Halton (she/her), '03 BA, released her debut historical novel, Revolution Songs in October 2025. She is also the author of Little Yellow House: Finding Community in a Changing Neighbourhood (a finalist for the 2019 Edmonton Book Prize). Her work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and anthologies and her essays have won both National and Alberta Magazine Awards. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta with her family. 

Conor Kerr (he/him), '12 BA, is a national award winning (and losing) Metis/Ukrainian writer and bird hunter living in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). Born in Saskatoon, raised in Buffalo Pound Lake and Drayton Valley. He is a member of the Metis Nation of Alberta. His Ukrainian family are Settlers on Treaty 4 Territory.

Conor is the author of the novels Avenue of Champions (2021), Prairie Edge (2024) and the poetry collections An Explosion of Feathers (2021), Old Gods (2023), and the forthcoming poetic novella Beaver Hills Forever (2025). His debut novel, Avenue of Champions, won the 2022 RELIT Award, was shortlisted for the 2022 Amazon/Walrus Debut Novel Award and longlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize. Old Gods was shortlisted for the 2023 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and named one of CBC’s Best Books of 2023. Prairie Edge was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize and the 2024 Writer’s Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Award.

Gavin Bradley (he/him), '15 MSc, is an Irish writer, musician and palaeontologist from Belfast, living as a permanent resident in Edmonton, on Treaty 6 Territory. His debut poetry collection, Separation Anxiety, won the UNESCO Bridges of Struga International Poetry Award 2023, and was reprinted with an English/Macedonian translation. His play Seanchaí won Best Overall Production and Best New Work at both the Edmonton Stage Struck! Festival and Alberta Provincial One Act Play Festival. Recently, he received the University of Alberta New Horizons Alumni Award recognizing the outstanding professional achievements and contributions to the community of University of Alberta graduates. You can follow him at: gavinbradleywrites.ca or on Instagram @gavinbradleywrites. 

Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). NISHGA won both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel’s latest work, a novel titled Empty Spaces, is forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in Canada (fall 2023) and from Yale University Press for the world excluding Canada (spring 2024). Abel completed a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.

Lauren Seal (she/her), '13 BA, is a writer, librarian, and St. Albert’s third Poet Laureate. She mentors the teen and young adult poets of SWYC, the Spoken Word Youth Choir, and performs in the adult incarnation of the group. When she’s not busy recommending books to library patrons, Lauren can be found reading, writing, and composing poems in her head on long dog walks.

Rachael Lammie, '09 BA, is a freelance editor, named one of Edmonton, Canada's six top book editors in 2022. After completing a Master of Arts degree, she pursued contract work to be at home with her son. She has been the in-house editor for various publishing companies, which inspired her to start her own. She stays connected to academia by helping academics with an ESL background prepare manuscripts for journal submission to peer-reviewed English-speaking journals. She keeps active while studying Karate. "Simon's Time" is Rachael's debut novel.