Mentors

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is a creative mentor, editor and poet with a decade of experience leading workshops and facilitating writing projects.

Betsy is the founder and program director of Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She designed and directed The Writer’s Studio at S.F.U. from 2001-2012; and has been a TWS Mentor or on TWS faculty for many of the past twenty years.

Aren X. Tulchinsky, the writer formerly known as Karen X. Tulchinsky, is an award-winning screenwriter, story editor, novelist and director.

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist and has published 25 books of fiction, poetry, and numerous chapbooks.

Gurjinder Basran is the award-winning author of two novels: Everything Was Good-bye (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2010; Penguin, 2012) and Someone You Love is Gone (Penguin Canada, 2017; Harper Collins US, 2017).

Mark L. Winston is the recipient of the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction for his best-selling book Bee Time: Lessons From the Hive, and an Independent Publishers 2019 Gold Medal IPPY Award for his book Listening to the Bees, co-authored with poet Renee Saklikar.

Rachel Rose is the author of four collections of poetry, including Marry & Burn, which received a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for a Governor General’s Award.

Tsiang’s poetry has won the Arc Magazine Reader’s Choice for Poem of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Forward Awards, Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse contest, the Bliss Carmen Poetry Award, and the Re-lit Award.

Susan Olding writes essays, poetry, fiction, and less easily classifiable things. Her writing has won a National Magazine Award, the TNQ’s Edna Staebler Essay Award, the Prairie Fire Contest, and two Event Creative Nonfiction contests, and appears widely in literary journals and anthologies throughout Canada and the US.