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A

Funso Aiyejina
Funso Aiyejina was born in Ososo, Edo State, southwestern Nigeria. He studied in Ile-Ife;  Nova Scotia; and St. Augustine, Trinidad, and taught Literature in English for over a decade at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. He has published short stories, poetry, and articles and reviews on African and West Indian literature, and his radio plays have been broadcast in Bonn, Ibadan, Lagos, and London. He now lectures in the Department of Liberal Arts, University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad where he lives with his wife and two sons.

The Legend of the Rockhills

Works:
The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories (Fiction)

Meena Alexander
Meena Alexander was born in India and raised there and in North Africa. She now lives in New York City, where she is professor of English and Creative Writing at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.  Her work has appeared widely in journals in the United States, Canada, England and India and has also been translated into several languages, including Italian and German. She has published several volumes of poetry, including Night Scene, The Garden, which was produced Off-Broadway in 1988. Her novel Nampally Road was a VLS Editor's Choice and her memoir Fault Lines was published in 1993. In 1993 she was a MacDowell Fellow.

River and Bridge

Works:
River and Bridge (Poetry)

Nurjehan Aziz
Nurjehan Aziz was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, studied in Iran and the United States and immigrated to Canada in 1980. She is a cofounder of The Toronto South Asian Review, now  The Toronto Review, of which she is an editorial board member. She is the publisher at TSAR Publications.

Her Mother's Ashes

Works:
Floating the Borders
(Criticism)
Her Mother's Ashes (Fiction)
Her Mother's Ashes 2  (Fiction)

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B

Shyamal Bagchee
Though balding rapidly, Shyamal Bagchee is an unrepentant romantic. His poetry has been published in literary journals internationally. He attended universities in Delhi; Santiniketan (Tagore's "poet's school"); Hamilton, Ontario; and Toronto. Shyamal Bagchee lives and writes in St. Albert, Alberta. He loves driving very long distances on that province's uncrowded highways and byways. He is a keen and serious photographer.

Shyamal Bagchee

Works:
Gabardine & Other Poems (Poetry)

Salima Bhimani
Salima Bhimani was born in the United Kingdom and raised in Canada. She has a master’s degree in Islam and Globalization, and identifies herself as a South Asian Muslim woman who is also Canadian. She is passionate about spirituality and art, and is active in community development in Toronto.

Salima Bhimani

Works:
Majalis al-Ilm: sessions of knowledge: (Social Commentary)

Frank Birbalsingh
Born in Guyana, Frank Birbalsingh is a professor of English at York University in Toronto. He is a pioneering scholar of Indo-Caribbean studies and edited the ground-breaking collections of studies Indenture and Exile and Indo-Caribbean Resistance

Jahaji

Works:
Jahaji: An Anthology of Indo-Caribbean Fiction (Fiction)
Novels and The Nation (Criticism)

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C

Carmen Cáliz-Montoro
Carmen Cáliz-Montoro was born in Barcelona, Spain. She arrived in Canada in 1988 thanks to a Government of Canada Award, and completed her PhD on poetry at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. She has taught courses on Spanish and English literature and in Women’s Studies both in Canada and in Spain, and has done translations and published her own poetry in both these countries as well as in the United States.

Writing from the Borderlands

Works:
Writing from the Borderlands (Criticism)

Lien Chao
Lien Chao came from China to Canada in 1984. Her first book, Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English, was published in 1997 and won the Gabrielle Roy Award for Canadian Criticism. Her work includes two volumes of bilingual poetry (Maples and the Stream and More Than Skin Deep), and a creative memoir (Tiger Girl (Hu Nu)), and she is the co-editor, with Jim Wong-Chu, of Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Canadian Fiction. She lives in Toronto.

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Lien Chao

Works:
Beyond Silence (Criticism, History)
The Chinese Knot and Other Stories (Fiction)
Maples and the Stream
(Poetry)
More Than Skin Deep
(Poetry)
Strike the Wok
(Fiction)
Tiger Girl (Hu Nu)
(Creative Memoir)

Jennifer Cook
Jennifer Cook was born and educated in England and immigrated to Canada in 1967. She has lived and worked in many different countries. She now lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

www.jennifercook.ca

Madeline Coopsammy

Works:
Flight Across the Mekong (YA Fiction)

Madeline Coopsammy
Madeline Coopsammy was born in Trinidad. She studied at Delhi University, India, and came to Canada in 1968, settling in Winnipeg where she attended the University of Manitoba to become a certified teacher. Her poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies and journals in Canada and the United States.

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Madeline Coopsammy

Works:
Prairie Journey (Poetry)

Rienzi Crusz
Rienzi Crusz was born in Sri Lanka and came to Canada in 1965. Educated at the Universities of Ceylon, London (England), Toronto, and Waterloo, he is at present Reference and Collections Librarian at the University of Waterloo. He is widely published in magazines in Canada and the US, and the author of ten collections of poetry.

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Gambolling with the Divine

Works:
Gambolling with the Divine (Poetry)
Insurgent Rain (Poetry)

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D

Cyril Dabydeen
Cyril Dabydeen has written poetry, short stories, and novels, and has edited A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape and Another Way to Dance: Contemporary Asian Poetry in Canada and the U.S. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Canada, the US, the UK, India, and the Caribbean, and been anthologized in many places including Best Canadian Short Stories, Caribbean New Wave: Contemporary Short Stories and the Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse. He has been recommended for a Journey Prize and a National Magazine Award.

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Listen to a reading by Cyril from authorsaloud.com

Cyril Dabydeen
 
Works:
Another Way to Dance (Poetry)
Drums of My Flesh
(Fiction)
Hemisphere of Love (Poetry)
My Brahmin Days and Other Stories
(Fiction)

Rocio Davis
Rocio Davis was born in Manila, Philippines and has degrees from the Ateneode Manila University (Philippines) and the University of Navarre (Spain).  She is currently Associate Professor of American and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Navarre.  Her main research interests are the fiction of the Asian diaspora, postcolonial literature, narratology, and children’s literature.

Transcultural Reinventions
 
Works:
Transcultural Reinventions (Criticism)

Raywat Deonandan
Raywat Deonandan's short stories have appeared in several countries, including Canada, the United States, England and China. He has won two Hart House Literary Prizes and First Prize in the 1995 Canadian Author’s Association National Student Short Story Contest. His book Sweet Like Saltwater won the Guyana Prize for Best First Work. His interests include Karate (in which he has a black belt), biotechnology, space exploration, and ancient history.  Of Indian ancestry, Guyanese origin and Canadian citizenship, Deonandan makes his home in both Toronto and Washington DC.

Raywat Deonandan

Works:
Divine Elemental (Fiction)
Sweet Like Saltwater (Fiction)

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G

Zulfikar Ghose
Zulfikar Ghose was born in Sialkot (now in Pakistan) and spent a couple of decades in England before moving to the United States where he teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. He is the author of ten novels, five books of poetry and four books of criticism.

Veronica and the Gongora Passion

Works:
Veronica and the Góngora Passion: Stories, Fictions, Tales, and One Fable (Fiction)

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H

Bing He
Born and raised in Beijing, China, Bing He moved to Canada in 1992. She has published widely in major journals and newspapers in China and is the special correspondent for Globe Weekly in Canada. Her poetry in English has appeared in several journals and anthologies.

  Interview

Bing He

Works:
Alphabet Zen (Poetry)

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I

Arnold Harrichand Itwaru
Arnold Harrichand Itwaru is the author of the modern classic Shanti and eleven other books. He was born in Guyana and resides in Toronto, Canada. A visual artist as well, he writes compellingly on a wide range of subjects. In Guyana he received two national awards for his poetry. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Toronto.

Arnold Harrichand Itwaru

Works:
Closed Entrances              (Cultural Criticism)
Home and Back (Fiction)
The Invention of Canada(Criticism)

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K

Chelva Kanaganayakam
 Chelva Kanaganayakam is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and a scholar of postcolonial literature.

Chelva Kanaganayakam

Works:
Configurations of Exile  (Interviews)
Dark Antonyms and Paradise (Criticism)
History and Imagination  (Essays)
Lutesong and Lament (Fiction)
Moveable Margins (Criticism)

Farida Karodia
Farida Karodia was born and raised in South Africa. Later she moved to Canada and now spends her time between the two countries. She is the author of Daughters of the Twilight, Coming Home and Other Stories, and A Shattering of Silence.

Against an African Sky

Works:
Against an African Sky (Fiction)

Natasha Ksonzek
Natasha Ksonzek is an artist, writer and book cover illustrator.

 

Closed Entrances

Works:
Closed Entrances  (Cultural Criticism)

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L

Kwai-Yun Li
Kwai-Yun Li's Hakka parents emigrated from Moi-yen, China to Calcutta, India, where Kwai was born. She grew up in Chattawalla Gully, in the old part of the city, and came to Canada through an arranged marriage. She is a co-author of A Kiss Beside the Monkey Bars, a collection of short stories.

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www.kwaiyunli.com

Works:
The Palm Leaf Fan and Other Stories  (Fiction)

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M

Rozena Maart
Rozena Maart was born and raised in District Six, Cape Town, South Africa. In 1987 she was nominated for South Africa's "Woman of the Year" award for starting the first Black feminist organization. She moved to Canada in 1989 and published her first book of poetry in 1990, Talk about It!  She has lectured throughout Canada and the United States with Speak Out! Speakers Bureau. In 1992, she won the Journey Prize for Best Short Fiction for her short story, "No Rosa, No District Six". Rozena Maart lives in Ontario.

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Rozena Maart

Works:
Rosa's District 6 (Fiction)
The Writing Circle (Fiction)

Anand Mahadevan
Anand Mahadevan was born and raised in India. He came to Canada in 1996 and has been educated in the United States, Germany and Canada. He lives, writes and teaches in Toronto.

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www.anand-mahadevan.ca

Works:
The Strike (Fiction)

Tariq Malik
Tariq Malik was born and raised in Pakistan. He lived for twenty years in Kuwait, working as an industrial chemist, before emigrating to Canada in 1995. He has continued to work in his chosen field, having taken to heart writer Annie Dillard's advice: "Experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade." Rainsongs of Kotli is his first book. He lives in Vancouver.

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 www.tariqmalik.net

Tariq Malik

Works:
Rainsongs of Kotli (Fiction)

Irene Marques
Irene Marques holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, a Masters in French Literature, and Bachelor of Social Work. She was born and raised in Portugal and emigrated to Canada at the age of 20. Irene has published poetry, academic articles, and short fiction in various Canadian and international journals.

  Read an excerpt

 

Tariq Malik

Works:
Wearing Glasses of Water (Poetry)

Kagiso Lesego Molope
Kagiso Lesego Molope was born in South Africa in 1976 where she also grew up, before moving to Canada in 1997. Dancing in the Dust is her first novel.

  Interview
 

Dancing in the Dust

Works:
Dancing in the Dust (Fiction)

Muhammad Umar Memon
Muhammad Umar Memon writes fiction and criticism in Urdu and English and has also translated widely from modern Urdu fiction, of which he has published four volumes. He has edited Studies in the Urdu Ghazal and Prose Fiction.

Domains of Fear and Desire

Works:
Domains of Fear and Desire: Urdu Stories (Fiction Anthology)

Arun Mukherjee
Arun Prabha Mukherjee came to Canada from India in 1971 as a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of Toronto. An Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto, she is the author of The Gospel of Wealth in the American Novel: The Rhetoric of Dreiser and His Contemporaries (1987), Towards an Aesthetic of Opposition: Essays on Literature, Criticism and Cultural Imperialism (1988), and numerous books and articles on postcolonial literatures, women’s writing and critical theory. She has edited an anthology of writings by women of colour and aboriginal women entitled, Sharing Our Experience (1993), and contributed entries on several South Asian women writers to A Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990)

Postcolonialism: My Living

Works:
Oppositional Aesthetics (Criticism)
Postcolonialism: My Living (Criticism)

Sophia Mustafa
Of Kashmiri origin, Sophia Mustafa was born in India in 1922 and grew up and went to school in Nairobi, Kenya. She was married in 1940 and moved to Tanganyika in 1948 with her husband. She was one of the first women members of parliament in Tanzania when she wrote The Tanganyika Way, published by Oxford University Press in 1961. She moved to Canada with her husband in 1989 and currently lives in Brampton, Ontario. She has three grown-up children.

In the Shadow of Kirinyaga

Works:
In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (Fiction)

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N

Tahira Naqvi
Tahira Naqvi grew up in Lahore, Pakistan. She teaches English at Western Connecticut State University and has taught Urdu at New York University and Columbia, and is a writer and prolific translator. Her short stories have appeared in journals and have been widely anthologized. Her first collection of stories, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan, was published in 1997. Among her translation credits are the works of Sa’adat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai. She lives in New York with her husband and three sons.

Dying in a Strange Country

Works:
Dying in a Strange Country (Fiction)

Rita Nayar
Rita Nayar has a university degree in psychology and a teaching certificate from the University of Sheffield, England.  A senior corporate professional in Toronto, she is also an artist and a poet. She has written her memoir, Ordeal by Fire, for the thousands of men and women who, through a twist of fate, have found themselves in tragic and unforgiving circumstances, and are desperate to free themselves from a hopeless and dead future.

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Rita Nayar

Works:
Ordeal by Fire: A Memoir (Memoir)

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P

Sasenarine Persaud
 Sasenarine Persaud is the author of eight books. He received the 1996 K M Hunter Foundation Emerging Artist Award for his fiction and the 1999 Arthur Schomburg Award for his pioneering of Yogic Realism and his “outstanding achievements as an author, poet and literary theorist.” Persaud’s fiction, essays and poetry have been published in Canada, England, India, The Middle East, the United States, and the West Indies.

The Hungry Sailor

Works:
A Writer Like You (Poetry)
Canada Geese and Apple Chatney (Fiction)

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a U.S.-raised, Toronto-based queer Sri Lankan writer, spoken word artist and teacher. Her writing has been published in the anthologies Colonize This!, Dangerous Families, With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, the Lambda Award-nominated Brazen Femme, Without a Net, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws and A Girl's Guide To Taking Over the World. A frequent contributor to Colorlines and Bitch magazines, she has performed her work throughout the United States and Canada.

www.brownstargirl.com

Works:
Consensual Genocide (Poetry)

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S

Trish Salah
Born in Halifax and currently living in Toronto, Trish Salah is a poet, doctoral student, education worker and union activist. She is a member of the Stern Writing Mistresses and her writing has appeared in various magazines and anthologies including Blood+Aphorisms, Blood Kiss: Vampire Erotica, Borderlines, Descant, The Diasporic Imagination, Queen Street Quarterly, Ribsauce: a cd /anthology of words by women, Tessera, TNT: Transsexual News Telegraph, and most recently, Fireweed, Brazen: Transgressing Femme Identity, and Bent on Writing. With Mirha-Soleil Ross and Bobby Noble, she is currently co-editing Counting Past 2, a multidisciplinary collection of transsexual and transgender art and criticism. Wanting in Arabic is her first book of poetry.

Trish Salah

Works:
Wanting in Arabic (Poetry)

Sam Selvon
Sam Selvon was born in Trinidad, where he completed his first novel, A Brighter Sun, which brought him instant recognition. Later he moved to UK, where he spent more than twenty years and wrote most of his major works. He is widely recognized as one of the major Caribbean writers to have emerged in the post-War era and has been awarded the Guggenheim fellowship.

An Island is a World

Works:
An Island is a World (Fiction)
Those Who Eat the Cascadura (Fiction)

John Stewart
John Stewart was born in Trinidad and educated at California State University, Stanford University, and the University of California in Los Angeles. His short stories have appeared in, among other places, The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories (1990) and Best West Indian Short Stories (London: Nelson, 1981). He is a recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Award for Last Cool Days. Currently he is professor and director of African American and African Studies, University of California, Davis.

Looking for Josephine and Other Stories

Works:
Last Cool Days (Fiction)
Looking For Josephine and Other Stories (Fiction)

Fraser Sutherland
Fraser Sutherland was born and raised in Nova Scotia, and is now living in Toronto. He is a widely travelled freelance writer, critic, editor, and lexicographer. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including eight volumes of poetry, four of nonfiction, and one of short fiction. His work has been translated into Albanian, Farsi, French, Italian, and Serbo-Croat. A member of PEN, he has a special interest in immigrant and exiled writers.

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Works:
The Matuschka Case (Poetry)

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T

Sanjay Talreja
Sanjay Talreja is a film-maker who has been working in the visual medium—primarily documentaries—for a number of years in India, Canada and the US. He is also Assistant Professor teaching documentary and media-related classes at the University of Windsor.

Strangers in the Mirror

Works:
Strangers in the Mirror (Social and Cultural Criticism)

H Nigel Thomas
H Nigel Thomas was born in St Vincent. He attended university in Montreal and for ten years was a teacher with the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal. He is now professor of literature at Laval University.  His published works include the novel Spirits in the Dark, which was short-listed for the 1994 Quebec Writers’ Federation Hugh MacLennan Fiction Award; How Loud Can the Village Cock Crow, short fiction; and Moving through Darkness, poetry.

  Interviews

 
Works:
Behind the Face of Winter (Fiction)
Return to Arcadia (Fiction)  
Why We Write (Nonfiction)

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V

Salimah Valiani
From a Tanzanian Asian family, Salimah Valiani was brought up in Calgary, Alberta, educated at McGill and LSE, and currently resides in Cape Town where she works in development issues. She has published widely in journals and magazines.

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Breathing for Breadth

Works:
breathing for breadth (Poetry)

Yvonne Vera
Yvonne Vera was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Her works Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals and Nehanda  were short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Award Africa Region in 1993 and 1994, respectively.

Why Don't You Carve Other Animals

Works:
Nehanda (Fiction)
Why Don't You Carve Other Animals
(Fiction)
Without a Name
(Fiction)

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W

Nalini Warriar
Nalini Warriar won the McAuslan First Book Award in 2002 for her collection of short stories Blues from the Malabar Coast. She has conducted writing workshops and writes reviews for the Montreal Gazette. She wrote the Quebec City chapter in Write Across Canada. Nalini was born in Kerala, India, and has lived in Heidelberg, Germany, and Strasbourg, France. She is a cancer researcher and a biotech consultant fluent in German and French. She lives in Quebec City.

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Nalini Warriar

Works:
Blues From The Malabar Coast (Fiction)
The Enemy Within (Fiction)

Betty Warrington-Kearsley
Betty Warrington-Kearsley was born in England but grew up with her Chinese family in a kampong in Singapore. She also writes Haiku and short stories, and is working on a memoir. She won first prize in ARC’s 2004 Diana Brebner Poetry Award, was co-winner in the 2004 Ray Burrell poetry contest, and was short-listed for the 2004 Shaunt Basmajian Poetry Award. She has published in several magazines and anthologies, including Tracking Ground and Yawp 2005 (University of Ottawa), The Delicate Art of Paper Passing 2006 (Carleton University), and the 58th Basho International Festival Anthology (Japan) 2004. Betty also writes under her pen name, Pe-Lien.

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Works:
Red Lacquered Chopsticks (Poetry)

Jim Wong-Chu
Jim Wong-Chu is co-editor of the critically acclaimed anthologies, Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Chinese Canadian Writing, and Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese Canadian Poetry. He is a founding member of the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop.

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Strike the Wok

Works:
Strike the Wok (Fiction)

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Z

Barnett Zumoff
Barnett Zumoff is Professor of Medicine in Albert Einstein College of Medicine and in Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and is Emeritus Chief of Endocrinology at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. He is fluently bilingual in Yiddish and English and is currently President of the Congress for Jewish Culture, and the Forward Association. He has published eight volumes of poetry, in addition to individual translations published in journals. He has a volume of translation of poetry by Peretz Miranski in press and has completed a translation of Emanuel Goldsmith’s “Anthology Of Yiddish Poetry In America, 1870-2000; Volume 1.”