26th Annual Writing Contest Judges
Short Fiction - Natalie Zina Walschots:
Natalie Zina Walschots is a writer and game designer. She is the author of Hench, a novel about the mistreated and undervalued employees of supervillains, which was a finalist on the 2021 season of Canada Reads and nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is presently working on the sequel, entitled Right Hand, which is due to be released in Fall 2024. Her work also includes LARP scripts, heavy metal music journalism, video game lore, and weirder things classified as "interactive experiences." Her writing on the interactive adventure The Aluminum Cat won an IndieCade award, and her poetic exploration of the notes engine in Bloodborne was featured in Kotaku and First Person Scholar. She is (unfortunately) the author of two books of poetry: Thumbscrews, which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains. Natalie sits on the board of Dames Making Games, a space for queer and gender-marginalized people to create games freely, where she hosts interactive narrative workshops. She plays a lot of D&D, participates in a lot of Nordic LARPs, watches a lot of horror movies and reads a lot of speculative fiction. She is presently relocating from Toronto to Nova Scotia, so she can write by the sea.
Poetry - Kayla Czaga
Kayla Czaga is the author of the poetry collections For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019) and the forthcoming Midway (House of Anansi, 2024). Her work has been short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Frequently anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English series, her writing has also appeared in The Walrus, Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people.
Critical Review - Kyle Wyatt
Kyle Wyatt has served as the editor-in-chief of the Literary Review of Canada since 2019. He holds a doctorate in English literature from the University of Toronto
Bill MacDonald Prize for Prose - Nonfiction - Susan Goldberg
Susan Goldberg’s work has appeared in, among other places, the New York Times, Ms., Toronto Life, Catapult, Full Grown People, Lilith, Stealing Time, and The Manifest Station, as well as on the CBC and in several anthologies, including HerStories’ Mothering through Darkness: Women Open up about the Postpartum Experience and the 50th anniversary anthology of Ms. Magazine's best writing. Her short story "Refresh" was a recent finalist in The Writers' Union of Canada's annual short prose contest. She is coeditor of the anthology And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families. She lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she can’t/won’t stop collecting and refinishing midcentury modern furniture. Find more at susanlgoldberg.com, and @susan_l_goldberg, and @milk.n.bread on Instagram.