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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Works:
Alphabet Zen (Poetry)

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.

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

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

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.

Works:
Against an African Sky (Fiction)

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

Works:
Closed Entrances  (Cultural Criticism)

www.kwaiyunli.com

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

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.

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

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.

 www.tariqmalik.net

Works:
Rainsongs of Kotli (Fiction)

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.

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.

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)

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.

Works:
In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (Fiction)

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.

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.

Works:
Ordeal by Fire: A Memoir (Memoir)

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.

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

www.brownstargirl.com

Works:
Consensual Genocide (Poetry)

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.

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.

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.

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

Works:
The Matuschka Case (Poetry)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Works:
Strike the Wok (Fiction)