The Writers’ Guild of Alberta is excited for the finalists for the 2019 Alberta Literary Awards and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Each year, the Alberta Literary Awards and the City of Edmonton recognize and celebrate the highest standards of literary excellence from Alberta and Edmonton authors.
Winners will be announced and awards presented at the Alberta Literary Awards Gala on Saturday, June 8, 2019 at the Coast Edmonton Plaza Hotel in Edmonton in conjunction with the WGA annual conference, Writing Across Worlds.
Click on the tabs below to learn more about this year’s finalists!
More photos and bios will be added soon.
Welcome to the Anthropocene is ALICE MAJOR‘s 11th poetry collection. She has also published an award-winning essay collection on poetry and science. Alice is a long-time supporter of the literary community, who served as president of the Writers Guild along with many other arts organizations. As first poet laureate of Edmonton, she established the Edmonton Poetry Festival. She received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award in 2017.
KELLY SHEPHERD’s second full-length poetry collection, Insomnia Bird: Edmonton Poems, was published by Thistledown Press in fall 2018. Shift, his first collection, was published by Thistledown in 2016 and longlisted for the Edmonton Public Library’s People’s Choice Award in 2017. He has written six poetry chapbooks, and a seventh is forthcoming from the Alfred Gustav Press. Kelly is also the poetry editor for the environmental philosophy journal The Trumpeter. Kelly has a Creative Writing MFA from UBC Okanagan, and an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Alberta. Originally from Smithers, British Columbia, Kelly lives in Edmonton, and teaches English and Communications at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
CARISSA HALTON grew up in the Rockies where she learned everything she knows about romance from the Blairmore library. When she was 10-years old, she looked up from such a book and fell in love with a boy. Over time, they moved to Edmonton, then had three kids in a little yellow house in the inner city, about which she wrote her first book. Carissa’s writing about culture, politics and design has appeared in Today’s Parent, Alberta Venture, and Azure, among others. Her essays have been anthologized and have won an Alberta and National Magazine Award. She is currently writing a novel (it’s not a romance).
CLEM MARTINI is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter with over thirty plays, and twelve books of fiction and nonfiction to his credit, including the W.O. Mitchell Award-winning Bitter Medicine: A Graphic Memoir of Mental Illness,the recently launched The Unravelling, andThe Comedian. His texts on playwriting, The Blunt Playwright, The Greek Playwright, and The Ancient Comedians are employed widely at universities and colleges. He currently teaches in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary.
FRAN KIMMEL is the author of two books. Her debut novel, The Shore Girl, was shortlisted for the BPAA’s Trade Fiction Book Award, named a CBC Top-40 Book, and won the Alberta Reader’s Choice Award in 2013. No Good Asking was released in Canada in 2018 and will hit bookshelves in Germany later this year. Fran’s short stories have appeared in literary journals from coast to coast and have twice been selected for The Journey Prize Stories anthology. Born and raised in Calgary, Fran now lives in Lacombe with her husband and overly-exuberant Labrador retriever.
JOSHUA WHITEHEAD is an Ojibwe-Cree, Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017) which was shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, and Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp) which was long listed for the Giller Prize and shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award. Currently he is a doctoral student at the University of Calgary (Treaty 7) where he teaches and focusses on Indigenous literatures.
