About the Authors:

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by the artist Augusto Cascales. Visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.

Born in the Mekong Delta, Hoa Nguyen was raised and educated in the United States and has lived in Canada since 2011. A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Hoa has had the privilege to work and teach widely in North America. She is the author of several books including As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. Her fifth book of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was named a finalist for a Kingsley Tufts Award, National Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award and has garnered additional support from The Poetry Foundation, Library Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her writing has been promoted by such outlets as Granta, Harper’s Magazine, PEN American Center, CBC Books, Boston Review, The Best Canadian Poetry series, Poetry, The Walrus, and Pleiades. In 2019, she was nominated for a Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a prestigious international literary award often compared with the Nobel Prize in Literature.

A well-regarded and popular teacher of creative writing, she has more than 20 years’ experience teaching across genres in intimate workshops and large lectures in community, undergraduate, and graduate settings. Since 2015, she served as faculty at Bard College’s MFA program in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts where she was named co-chair of the discipline of writing and served in that capacity from 2020 to 2023. She currently teaches poetry and creative writing at Toronto Metropolitan University as an assistant professor and serves as a mentor for writers as part of the graduate programs at Guelph University and the University of Toronto.