Yosef Wosk VMI Fellowship

Yosef Wosk is an Adjunct Professor in Humanities, a Simons Fellow, a Shadbolt Fellow, and former Director of Interdisciplinary Programs in Continuing Studies at Simon Fraser University where he developed seminal programs such as The Philosophers’ Café and The Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars. In addition to being an ordained rabbi and receiving two honorary doctorates, he holds Ph.D.s in Religion & Literature as well as in Psychology, and Masters degrees in Education and Theology. As a businessman, he is president of Binyan and Kolbo Holdings. Widely travelled—including expeditions to both the North and South Poles—Dr. Yosef Wosk is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. An active media commentator, public speaker and published author, he has founded hundreds of libraries on all seven continents and supported museums in many countries, has endowed Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, and has taught thousands of students over the past fifty years. Identified as one of the top ten thinkers and most thoughtful citizens in the province, Dr. Wosk is included in Canadian Who’s Who and has been presented with numerous awards including The Order of Canada, The Order of British Columbia, The Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee Medals, and a Culture Beyond Borders Medal from the United Nations. In May 2022 he received the Freedom of the City Award, Vancouver’s highest civic honour.

Diary Marif, a Canadian-Kurdish writer and freelance journalist born in Iraq, obtained a Master’s degree in history from Pune University in India in 2013. Since 2018, Marif has dedicated his focus to hybrid memoirs, particularly as a war child, and has contributed three book chapters to various projects. He writes for several national and international media outlets. In recognition of his work, he received an Honorable Mention for the Susan Crean Award for Nonfiction in 2022.

Petra Chambers (she/her) lives in the traditional territory of the Pentlatch people. She was the 2024 Yosef Wosk Fellow for the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. During her fellowship she worked on her first book-length project Utopia, Dystopia and Solastalgia in the Salish Sea under the mentorship of Betsy Warland. Petra writes creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms. Her work has been published by PRISM International, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Exile Editions, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others. She writes book reviews for the British Columbia Review. Her first poem was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. Learn more at https://petrachambers.com/.

Shantell Powell is a two-spirit swamp hag and elder goth raised in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid all over Canada. A graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University, LET(s) Lead Academy at Yale University, and the University of New Brunswick, she’s held residencies with Roots. Wounds. Words., Banff Centre for the Arts, IMPACT Festival, and Femme Folks Fest. Her writing appears in Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, Ex-Puritan, Arc Poetry, and more, and has also been anthologized. A Pushcart and Aurora nominee, she’s a two-time recipient of the Waterloo Arts Fund and was the 2023 Yosef Wosk Fellow for the VMI. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods. You can find her on Mastodon at https://c.im/@Shanmonster or at her writing blog “Because Nudity is Only Skin-Deep” at http://shanmonster.dreamwidth.org

Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet, spoken word artist, educator and filmmaker based in western Canada. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work all over Canada, and internationally at festivals and showcases in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and Lithuania. Brandon is ever-grateful for the power of poetry as a spiritual technology and social force. He is devoted to using poetry as a tool for refining his sense of justice, love, and intimacy. Brandon Wint’s poems and essays have been published in The Ex Puritan, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Black Writers Matter, among other places. Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut collection of poetry. In recent years, his films have screened at  DOXA documentary film festival and Reelworld Film Festival and Vancouver International Film Festival Centre.

Jide Salawu is a literary scholar and Canada-based Nigerian poet. He is the current managing editor of OlongoAfrica and founding conversationalist at Brown Bamboo. Salawu’s work has appeared in Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Transition, Grain, This Magazine, Lolwe, Poetry Society of America, Fiddlehead, This Magazine, LitHub, Popula, The Mantle, The Republic, Preachy, CBC, and Public Parking. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland published under African Poetry Book Fund, and Contraband Bodies forthcoming in Fall 2025 under NeWest Press (Canada) and Narrative Landscape (Nigeria). A pushcart nominee, Salawu was shortlisted for Babishai Niwe African Poetry Prize in 2015 and 2017. He won the James Patrick Folinsbee award for creative writing at the English and Film Studies (EFS) program, University of Alberta. His research work has appeared in Africology, Journal of African Cultural Studies, African Identities, and forthcoming in Journal of African Literature Association. Currently, he is rounding off his PhD program at the EFS program of the University of Alberta, Canada.

Pervin Saket was a 2024 writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa as a Fellow of the International Writing Program. She is the Poetry Editor of The Bombay Literary Magazine and the Literature Curator of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai. She was the inaugural Fellow for the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive 2021. In the same year she was awarded the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize. Her second poetry manuscript was a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize. Her most recent books include a series of ten landmark biographies-in-verse for children. She is currently working on a new novel set in the Zoroastrian community in India.