Join acclaimed authors, Catherine Bush, Lawrence Hill, Canisia Lubrin, Alicia Elliott, Blain Watters, and Carrianne Leung for an evening of conversation about writing, art, and language as forces for change, hope and imagining better futures. This event will also kick off 20th anniversary celebrations of our nationally acclaimed MFA program in Creative Writing!
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Meet the Authors
Catherine Bush is the author of the story collection Skin (2025), winner of a Foreword Indies Silver Prize, and five novels, including the widely acclaimed Blaze Island (2020), a Globe & Mail Best Book, and The Rules of Engagement (2000), a New York Times Notable Book. Her books have been shortlisted for the Trillium Prize, City of Toronto Book Award, and Books in Canada First Novel Award. She is also an essayist, whose work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays. The recipient of numerous fellowships, she was the 2024 Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she was the Coordinator of the Guelph Creative Writing MFA for fourteen years. She lives in Toronto and eastern Ontario.
Lawrence Hill began writing at the age of six, when his father made him write letters justifying why he deserved to have a kitten, a pair of jeans, and a pair of running shoes. The letters yielded good results, so he kept writing. He is the award-winning, internationally bestselling author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Book of Negroes, Any Known Blood and The Illegal. Lawrence has volunteered with Crossroads International, The Black Loyalist Heritage Society, and The Ontario Black History Society. With Book Clubs for Inmates, he visits with book clubs in federal penitentiaries. He is writing new novel about the thousands of African-American soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway in northern British Columbia and Yukon during World War Two. 
Canisia Lubrin is the author of five books, Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, The World After Rain (2025), Code Noir and Bright Machine (2026). Her honours include a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Griffin Poetry Prize, Derek Walcott Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She has been twice a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. The World After Rain earned Lubrin her second OCM Bocas Prize for poetry. She is associate professor and coordinator of the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA and the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. Code Noir, Lubrin’s fiction debut andwinner of the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, has 59 drawings by celebrated visual artist Torkwase Dyson. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin lives in Whitby.
Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer living in Brantford, Ontario and is well known for her far-reaching voice and contributions as a contemporary Indigenous thinker. Her first book of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada and was nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. Elliott's debut novel, And Then She Fell is described as "a mind-bending, gripping novel about Native life, motherhood and mental health that follows a young Mohawk woman who discovers that the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences." And Then She Fell was named as the Globe and Mail and CBC Best Book of the Year for 2023 and longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Alicia is also the winner of the 48th annual Amazon Canada First Novel Award for 2024.
Blain Watters started as an improviser and sketch writer and wrote plays for festivals including Fringe and Summerworks. After studying at the Canadian Film Centre, he won a scholarship to Banff and started working in the Lost Girl writer's room and went on to write the first season of Netflix's Between. He wrote feature film Sleeping Giant which premiered at Cannes and was called one of the best movies of the year by the Toronto Star. His short films have been in festivals around the world, and his live-off-the-floor musical web-series Haunters has over a million views. He has two scripts currently shopping and is currently writing this bio.
Carrianne Leung is a fiction writer and educator at the University of Guelph in Creative Writing. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Equity Studies from OISE/University of Toronto. She is the co-editor with Lynn Caldwell and Darryl Leroux of Critical Inquiries: A Reader in Studies of Canada. Her debut novel, The Wondrous Woo, published by Inanna Publications was shortlisted for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. Her collection of linked stories, That Time I Loved You, was released in 2018 by HarperCollins and in 2019 in the US by Liveright Publishing. It received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, named as one of the Best Books of 2018 by CBC, That Time I Loved You was awarded the Danuta Gleed Literary Award 2019, shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards 2019 and long listed for Canada Reads 2019. Her most recent novel, titled Wonderland Road was released by Harper Collins Canada in 2026.