2020 Featured Authors
Featured 2020 authors are spoken word poet and author Rebecca Thomas, journalist and author Joan Baxter in the Local Chair, introduced in 2019 in recognition of the festival’s 20th anniversary, memoirist and poet Wayne Curtis, acclaimed first-novelist Amy Spurway, and author Pasha Malla, the only featured author this year from outside the Atlantic region. But he was born in St. John’s, NL, so we have a full slate of Atlantic talent!
Rebecca Thomas
Rebecca Thomas is an award-winning Mi’kmaw poet. She is Halifax’s former Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and has been published in multiple journals and magazines. She coordinated the Halifax Slam Poetry team from 2014 to 2017, leading them to three national competitions with the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. I’m Finding My Talk is her first book.
Joan Baxter
Joan Baxter is a Canadian journalist, development researcher, anthropologist, and award-winning author with more than three decades of international experience, much of it on the African continent.
Wayne Curtis
Books In Canada described his work as “A pleasure to read, for no detail escapes his discerning eye.” He is twice winner of the Richards Award for short fiction as well as the Woodcock Award, the CBC Drama Award, and A and B Grants from New Brunswick Arts Board, and The Canada Council for the Arts.
Amy Spurway
Amy Spurway was born and raised on Cape Breton Island, where, at the age of eleven, she landed her first writing and performing gigs with CBC Radio.
Her work has appeared in Today's Parent, the Toronto Star, Babble, and Elephant Journal, as well as in the realms of advertising, marketing, non-profit and corporate communications, education, health, and politics.
Pasha Malla
PASHA MALLA is the author of five works of poetry and fiction, including the story collection The Withdrawal Method and the novel People Park. His fiction has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, an Arthur Ellis Award and several National Magazine awards. His work has also been long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
