Read at The Fringe
Congratulations to the winners of our 2020 Read at the Fringe Writing Contest!
FICTION:
1st: Lis Jakobsen, “Me Too, Leda, Me Too”
2nd: Emma Williamson, "Low-Hanging Fruit"
3rd: Wayne Johnston, "Loney"
NONFICTION:
1st: Elise Arsenault, "Field Notes in a New House"
2nd: Tamara Jong, “Vessel”
3rd: Pearl Van Geest, “Gabrielle, Judith, Artemisia, and Me”
POETRY
1st: Chantal Vallis, "Cookbooks for Compasses"
2nd: Lee Parpart, “Clothesline, June, 1984”
3rd: Evan J, “Colonialism for Dummies”
The Eden Mills Writers’ Festival is committed to providing a venue for unpublished or modestly published writers to showcase their work. Our first place winners in the above categories below will read their winning pieces on Thursday September 10 at 7 p.m., as part of "Emerge". Learn more here.
Thank you to this year's Read at the Fringe judges!
Fiction: Omar El Akkad and Sandra Sabatini
Nonfiction: Anna Bowen, Kim Davids Mandar and Suzanne Rintoul
Poetry: Lisa Baird and Sue Graham Parker
Lisa Baird is a writer, a community acupuncturist and a queer white settler living on Attawandaron/Mississaugas of the New Credit territory (Guelph ON). Her poetry appears in various journals including Arc, Grain, and Canthius. Her first book of poetry, Winter’s Cold Girls, was published by Caitlin Press in 2019. www.lisabaird.ca.
Anna Bowen is a Guelph based poet and writer. She has collaborated with visual artists on projects related to space, care labour, landscape, and access. Annabowen.org
Omar El Akkad’s writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, GQ and many other publications. His debut novel, American War, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world.
Kim Davids Mandar’s writing appeared in Sustenance (Anvil Press, 2017), Rhapsody (Vocamus Press, 2018) and Prairie Fire (Winter, 2018). Kim co-hosted Bookish Radio and is currently completing her MSc thesis. She is the editor of In|Appropriate, a collection of interviews with Canadian authors (Fall 2020, Gordon Hill Press).
Sue Graham Parker is retired Executive Vice President, Global Human Resources of Scotiabank and is a lifelong literature enthusiast, having been involved in the Scotiabank Giller Prize for many years. She has been awarded the Ontario Volunteer Service Award, the Trent University Eminent Service Award, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal and was inducted as Governor Emeritus of Trent University in 2019.
Suzanne Rintoul (PhD), has been teaching literary criticism and writing for the last 12 years. Suzanne is the author of Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture: Representational Tensions, along with numerous scholarly articles and reviews of fiction. She is a professor and program coordinator for the Communications Department at Conestoga College as well as the founder of Conestoga's Communications Writing Competition.
Sandra Sabatini's fiction has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prism International, and The New Quarterly, among others. She is the author of two short story collections, The One with the News (Porcupine's Quill, 2000) and The Dolphins at Sainte-Marie (Penguin Canada, 2006). Her scholarly book, Making Babies, was published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2003. Her first novel, Dante’s War was published with Key Porter in 2009.