West Ambrose is a scrivener and performing artist. Check out his ever queer works at westofcanon.com. If you want anything published in The HLK quarterly or The Crow’s Nest, just ring for the masthead, and let them know.

Margo LaPierre is a freelance literary editor and a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She has juried for the Canada Council for the Arts' and the Ontario Arts Council's literary funding programs. Her work has been published internationally in anthologies and journals, including in Arc, carte blanche, CV2, The Ex-Puritan, filling Station, and Plenitude. She won the 2021 Room Poetry Award, the 2020 subTerrain Fiction Award, and her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and TNQ's Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Award. She has served on Arc Poetry magazine’s executive and editorial boards since 2019 and is a member of the poetry collective VII. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and a graduate certificate in publishing from Toronto Metropolitan University. She lives as a settler on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land, colonially known as Ottawa. Her second full-length poetry collection, Ajar, an exuberant first-person account of bipolar disorder, was published by Guernica Editions in October 2025.

Fareh Malik, from Hamilton, Ontario, is also a spoken-word artist. He is the winner of the 2022 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, Hamilton Art’s Shirley Elford Prize, and Muslim Hands Canada’s 2020 Poetry Contest. In 2023, Streams that Lead Somewhere won the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry, and was longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Fareh was a Best of the Net finalist in 2021, and that same year a Garden Project recipient. His individual works have been published by literary magazines such as Waccamaw Journal, 86 Logic, Lucky Jefferson, Chitro, and Twyckenham Notes. In 2020 some of his work was on exhibit in the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. Fareh tells the stories of his struggle and of the community around him in the hope that others can find inspiration and companionship in it.

Greg Santos is a poet, editor, and educator. He is the author of Ghost Face and several other poetry collections. He is the Editor in Chief of the QWF’s online literary journal carte blanche. He is an adoptee of Cambodian, Portuguese, and Spanish heritage. He lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal with his wife and two children.

Sabrina Spenser Smith is a Winnipeg-based poet, essayist, and photographer. Her debut book of poetry, A brief relief from hunger, was published by Gordon Hill Press in 2023.Sabrina's writing also appears in The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, The Capilano Review, Poetry Is Dead, Vallum, subTerrain, The Puritan, and SAD Mag.She holds a BA in creative writing and journalism from Vancouver Island University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia.

Rhea Tregebov is the author of poetry, fiction and children’s picture books. Her eighth collection of poetry, Talking to Strangers, which was released by Véhicule Press in April, 2024, has won the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, was long-listed for the Al & Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize and is short-listed for the Western Canada Jewish Book Award for poetry. Her poems have also earned the Pat Lowther Award, Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award, and the Malahat Review Long Poem Award. Tregebov’s 2019 novel, Rue des Rosiers, was short-listed for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and won the Nancy Richler Memorial Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, The Knife Sharpener’s Bell (2009), a Globe and Mail Jim Bartley Top 5 book, won the J.I. Segal Award and was shortlisted for the Kobzar Award. She has also published five popular children’s picture books, among them the Sasha series, illustrated by Hélène Desputeaux, creator of the Caillou television series. Tregebov has edited numerous anthologies, including Arguing with the Storm, an anthology of stories by women writers which she co-translated from the Yiddish.