Contributors

Jars Balan is an Edmonton author, poet, editor, and literary translator. Since 2000 he has served as Coordinator of the Kule Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre for the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. A specialist in the history of Ukrainians in Canada, he has written and published extensively on Ukrainian Canadian literature and drama. Another of his interests is the inauguration of organized religious life among Ukrainian immigrants to Canada.

Donna Coates is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Calgary. She has published dozens of articles and book chapters on women’s literary responses in fiction and drama to the First and Second World Wars, to the Vietnam War, and to contemporary warfare. With Sherrill Grace, she has selected and co-edited Canada and the Theatre of War, Volume One: Eight First and Second World War Plays (2008), and Volume Two: Six Contemporary Plays (2010). With George Melnyk, she has edited Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature (2009). Her edited collection of essays, Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre, appeared in 2015. She is currently completing a manuscript on Australian women’s fictional responses to twentieth-century wars and is compiling an eight-volume anthology set on women and war for Routledge Press’ History of Feminism series.

Moira Day is a Professor of Drama, Adjunct Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies program and associate of the Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies unit at the University of Saskatchewan. She has published and edited extensively in the area of Canadian theatre. A former co-editor of Theatre Research in Canada (1998-2001), she has also edited two scholarly play anthologies featuring the work of pioneering and contemporary western Canadian playwrights, and a book of essays on contemporary western Canadian theatre and playwriting. She has also co-edited two special issues of Theatre Research in Canada: Canadian Theatre Within the Context of World (with Don Perkins, University of Alberta) and Theatre and Religion in Canada (with Mary Ann Beavis, St. Thomas More College). She also recently co-edited a special issue of Canadian Theatre Review, titled “The New Saskatchewan.”

R. Douglas Francis is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Calgary, where he specializes in Canadian intellectual history and western Canadian history. He is the author of Frank H. Underhill: Intellectual Provocateur (1986), Images of the West: Changing Perceptions of the Prairies, 1690-1960 (1989), and The Technological Imperative in Canada: An Intellectual History (2009). He is a co-author of a two-volume history of Canada: Origins: Canadian History to Confederation, 7th ed. (2012), and Destinies: Canadian History since Confederation, 7th ed. (2012). He has co-edited a number of volumes, including Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration and Identity (2006) and The Prairie West as Promised Land (2007), and has published numerous articles in his areas of specialty.

Katherine Govier is an Edmonton-born novelist, whose first novel, Random Descent, described the lives of Alberta townspeople. Her next Alberta novel, Between Men, was set in late nineteenth-century Calgary. She has published a total of ten novels, three short story collections, and several works of non-fiction. She spends her summers in Canmore, Alberta. She has received both the Marian Engel Award and the Toronto Book Award for her writing. Her latest novel, The Three Sisters Bar and Hotel, was published in 2016. It is set in Canmore.

Tasha Hubbard (Nêhiyaw/Nakota/Metis) is a filmmaker and writer, and the mother of a nine-year-old son. Her first solo writing/directing project Two Worlds Colliding, about Saskatoon’s infamous Starlight Tours, premiered at ImagineNATIVE in 2004, was broadcast on CBC’s documentary program Roughcuts in 2004, and won the Canada Award at the 2005 Geminis. Her recent animated short film, Buffalo Calling, screened as part of the Ga Ni Tha exhibit held on the occasion of the 2015 Venice Biennale. She is in post-production on an NFB-produced documentary about a 1960s Scoop family. As part of her academic career at the University of Saskatchewan, Tasha does research in Indigenous digital media, the buffalo and Indigenous ecologies, and Indigenous women and children’s experiences.

George Melnyk is Professor Emeritus of Communication, Media and Film Studies at the University of Calgary. He began his research into Alberta literature in the 1990s. The result was the two-volume Literary History of Alberta (1998-99). In 2003 he co-edited The Wild Rose Anthology of Alberta Prose with Tamara Seiler. This collection was followed in 2009 with Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature, which he co-edited with Donna Coates. Professor Melnyk is the author or editor of over twenty-five books relating to Canada. He is also an essayist, whose latest collection, First Person Plural, was published in 2015.

Joseph Pivato is Professor of Literary Studies at Athabasca University, Edmonton. His research is focused on ethnic minority writing and Canadian literature. His publications include several books, such as Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke (2012), Mary di Michele: Essays on Her Works (2007), Echo: Essays on Other Literatures (1994), F.G. Paci: Essays on His Works (2003), Contrasts: Comparative Essays on Italian-Canadian Writing (1985 and 1991), Caterina Edwards: Essays on Her Works (2000), The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing (1998), Pier Giorgio Di Cicco (2011), and articles in academic journals and book chapters. He has been a Visiting Professor at Macquarie University and the University of Wollongong in Australia, at the University of Udine in Italy, and the University of Toronto, and an invited speaker at international conferences. After a B.A. (English and French) from York University, Toronto, he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) from the University of Alberta.

Neil Querengesser is Dean of Arts at Concordia University of Edmonton. He is a Professor of English literature specializing in Canadian poetry and its intersections with the discourses of science and theology. His recent publications include articles on the poetry of Tim Lilburn, Margaret Avison, and Susan McCaslin. He is also co-editor of the authoritative edition of Robert Stead’s Dry Water (University of Ottawa Press, 2008).

Tamara Palmer Seiler is Professor Emeritus (Canadian Studies) in the Department of Communication, Media and Film, at the University of Calgary. Her research and teaching interests have included Canadian and American literature, rhetoric, Canadian immigration history, narratives about immigrant and ethnic minority experience, multiculturalism, North American cultural history, and the West in North America. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on the representation of immigrant and ethnic minority experience in Canadian literature, and is the co-author/editor of several books and articles on Alberta history and culture. Her latest book (co-authored with Robert M. Seiler) is Reel Time: Movie Exhibitors and Movie Audiences in Prairie Canada, 1896-1986 (Athabasca University Press, 2013).

Geo Takach is Associate Professor, School of Communication and Culture, Royal Roads University. He is a veteran writer, filmmaker, and instructor who has taught diverse aspects of communication at four Albertan universities and beyond. His efforts as a professional communicator and/or artist span hundreds of publications in speeches, print, film, radio, television, and cyberspace. His epic exploration of essences of Alberta’s soul led to the production of a documentary film for television (Will the Real Alberta Please Stand Up?), an award-winning book bearing the same title, and an award-winning Ph.D. dissertation (University of Calgary) in the area of environmental communication. His research has been profiled in national, provincial, and local media, where he has also been quoted as an expert on issues around Alberta, identity, and the bituminous sands. His most recent books are Tar Wars (University of Alberta Press, 2016) and Scripting Environmental Communication (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Harry Vandervlist is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary. He writes on modernist fiction, in particular Samuel Beckett’s early work, and on Canadian literature, focusing on the Banff poet Jon Whyte (whose collected poems he edited in 2000) and literary representations of the Rocky Mountains. He has published numerous reviews and author profiles of Canadian poets (Quill and Quire, Alberta Views Magazine, and Fast Forward Weekly), and has served on the editorial boards of the University of Calgary Press and NeWest Press. Recent publications include “The Challenge of Writing Bioregionally: Performing the Bow River in Jon Whyte’s Minisniwapta: Voices of the River” (The Bioregional Imagination, edited by Thomas Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, University of Georgia Press, 2012) and “Re-Envisioning Epic in Jon Whyte’s Rocky Mountain Poem ‘The Fells of brightness’” (Sustaining the West, edited by L. Piper and L. Szabo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015).  

Cynthia Zimmerman has been a commentator on Canadian playwriting and on the voice of women on the Canadian stage for her whole career at Glendon College, York University. Now Professor Emerita, she continues to publish and teach in her research specialty areas, Canadian theatre and contemporary women playwrights. Previously book review editor of Modern Drama and omnibus reviewer of drama for “Letters in Canada,” the University of Toronto Quarterly annual survey of publications, she has authored or co-authored a number of books and produced numerous articles, chapters, and public papers. She is the editor of the three-volume Sharon Pollock: Collected Plays (2008), The Betty Lambert Reader (2007), and Reading Carol Bolt (2010), published by Playwrights Canada Press.