Neil Barclay

Christian Goutsis

Christopher Hunt

Christopher Hunt has performed for theatre companies in Calgary and across Canada for over 30 years and is a founding member of the new Calgary based Black Radish Theatre. He has toured the U.K. with Ghost River Theatre and One Yellow Rabbit and saw many corners of Canada with the solo Shakespeare-inspired show WHEN THAT I WAS. Hunt occasionally works as a director, adjudicator and writer, and enjoys playing a bit of guitar, mandolin, and clawhammer banjo. He has received eight of Calgary’s Betty Mitchell awards for his acting and received the 2018 Harry & Martha Cohen Award for his significant and sustained contributions to the Calgary theatre community.  

Kirk Miles

Kirk Miles’ poems have been produced on CBC’s Alberta Anthology and his poetry and short stories have been published by several journals in western Canada. He won an Alberta Culture award for co-writing the critically acclaimed Juggler on a Drum and in fall, 2007 Bravo aired a half hour special of his life as a poet and clown. Kirk Miles has published four books of poetry and won the Alberta Screenwriters Award in 2009 for a screenplay entitled Shadow Makers. In 2011 he was awarded the Golden Beret Award, from the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, and he has been nominated four times for the Calgary Poet Laureate position.

Bradley Moss

Bradley Moss is Artistic & Executive Director of Theatre Network in Edmonton, Alberta. After completing his MFA at the University of Alberta, Moss joined Theatre Network in 1996 to create the multidisciplinary emerging artist festival – Nextfest. Theatre Network lost their Roxy Theatre is 2015 to a fire, and are currently constructing a brand-new theatre that will open in late 2021. Recent productions Moss has directed include: The Society for the Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, Minerva-Queen of the Handcuffs, the Governor General award-winning Pig Girl, Little One, Midlife, and the Sterling Award winners Let the Light of Day Through, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, among many, many others. Bradley Moss is super happy to be a part of the Eugene-A-Thon by Wordfest.

Morag Northey

Morag Northey is a classically trained solo, chamber, orchestral, and theatrical performer, a writer, and a teacher. Her Calgary performances include a three-year series of solo concerts in St. Mary’s Cathedral offering sound therapy through meditation, improvised cello and voice, as well as a year of monthly concerts and talks via Full Moon Walks in Fish Creek Park. Northey performed at the 2010 Olympics, and in collaboration with First Nations Elder and drummer Lheidli Tenneh, played and sang the Opening Blessing of the 2015 Canada Winter Games. In 2014 she walked the 720 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage carrying her cello, and playing and singing along the way. Northey was awarded a 2015 Betty Mitchell Award for “Outstanding Theatrical Composition” for Butcher at Alberta Theatre Projects.

Valerie Ann Pearson

Val Pearson has been a professional actress since 1979. She has worked across the country from Fredericton, NB to Chemainus on Vancouver Island and many places in between including The National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Alberta Theatre Projects, Theatre Calgary, The Globe Theatre, and the Citadel Theatre.  Pearson is also a director; productions include The Glass Menagerie, The Paperbag Princess, and Crossing Swords. Her film and television work includes roles on Shoebox Zoo, Harvest of Lies, Horses of McBride, Cowboys Don’t Cry, and the award-winning feature film Solitaire for which she won an AMPIA and a Genie nomination. Other awards include a second AMPIA, a Betty, and two Sterling awards. Pearson has been married for fifty years to the same man and has two children and two wonderful grandchildren.

Tyler Perry

Tyler B. Perry is a poet and high school English teacher living in Calgary. He is the author of two books of poetry, Lessons in Falling (2010, B House Publications) and Belly Full of Rocks (2016, Oolichan Books). His third collection, Plausible Wrong Answers, is forthcoming with Frontenac House in September 2020.  

As he approaches the tenth anniversary of the publication of his debut poetry collection, Lessons in Falling, Perry is perennially grateful to Eugene Stickland for being a pioneer of independent publishing through his passion-publishing project, B House Publications, a press dedicated to putting the poems and plays of local writers into the hands of readers. After a fateful meeting at a poetry slam in the Auburn Saloon, Stickland and Perry worked together to put Perry’s poems in print, and since then Tyler has had many opportunities to share his poetry, from being shortlisted for the inaugural Calgary poet laureate position, to traveling to Japan to perform his work at the Yokohama International School, to the subsequent publications of his poems in journals and books. Perry is also one of the executive organizers of Can You Hear Me Now?, Alberta’s provincial school poetry slam competition, which recently held its seventh annual event, despite the constraints of social distancing. He looks forward to resuming the monthly events at Shelf Life Books in the fall.

Grant Reddick

Grant Reddick has been involved with theatre in his home city of Calgary for more than fifty years as an actor, a teacher, an administrator, and an advocate. He is a professor emeritus of the Drama Department of the University of Calgary. During his teaching career he was actively involved in honing the acting program that now turns out some of the most competent and well-trained actors in Western Canada; an accomplishment in which he takes great pride.

Jack Semple

Bio Forthcoming 

Kevin Solez

Kevin Solez is a teacher, writer, translator, and editor. He is currently editing The Pandemic Poems/Canadian Poets on the Present which will be released in August, 2020 and can be pre-ordered at pandemicpoems.ca.  A Sessional Lecturer in Classics at MacEwan University, he is also working on a book about Homer’s Iliad (learn more at ravenresearchgroup.wordpress.com). Solez, who has lived most of his life in Baltimore and Edmonton, has published scholarly articles, journalism, and poetry in Canada, the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Austria.  

Twitter:@KevinSolez

Stardale Girls

Eugene Stickland

Eugene Stickland was born in Regina. He began his studies at the University of Regina in music, graduated with a Honours BA in English, and then went on to Toronto’s York University where he completed an MFA in Theatre. After graduating, Eugene and some York classmates formed the ACT IV Theatre Company, producing his early plays The Family, darkness of the edge of town, and Quartet. Eugene returned to Regina briefly and taught at what is now known as the First Nations University. It was at this time his daughter Hanna came into the world (1992).

Eugene came to Calgary in 1994 with the Alberta Theatre Projects’ production of the play Some Assembly Required, which went on to have over 100 productions worldwide. He wrote nine more plays following that during a 10-year residency at ATP. In 2009, Eugene wrote a play for his friend Joyce Doolittle titled Queen Lear. After a successful run in Calgary, it went on to have a two-year run in translation in Istanbul and throughout Turkey. Following his time at ATP, Eugene wrote a popular weekly column for the Calgary Herald. In 2015, he published his first novel, The Piano Teacher, which received the W.O. Mitchell Award. His new book First and Last is the text from his first large cast play, written specifically for Calgary’s St. Mary’s University.

Eugene is completing a new novel, In My Time of Dying, as well as a new play based on the life of Saskatchewan-born American artist Agnes Martin. He lives alone in Calgary’s Beltline neighborhood.

Mary Vlooswyk   

It’s been said a poem makes a sound that readers recognize as their own. Vlooswyk writes to come closer to making that sound. Her poetry was shortlisted for Quattro Books’ inaugural “Best New Poet in Canada” contest in March 2018. She placed third in a Canada 150 poetry contest. Vlooswyk’s writing has appeared in Asahi Shimbun, Mothers Always Write, FreeFall, GUSTS, Moonbathing, Wales Haiku, and Wild Musette, as well as the following anthologies: A Pebble In My Shoe, Haiku Canada, A NeverEnding Story, Startled By Joy and Gift of Silence: A Haiku Tribute to Leonard Cohen. Her writing is forthcoming in YYC POP, Pandemic Poems, and Climbing Lightly Through Forests: A Tribute To Ursula Le Guin.

Tim Williams

Since his teenage years in Southern California, Tim Williams has steadily risen to the upper ranks of acoustic roots and blues performers, with a combination of vocal, guitar, and song writing skills. Winner of the International Blues Challenge 2014 in Memphis, TN, he has toured extensively and opened for B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, ZZ Top, Taj Mahal, Dr. John, and many more. His blues-based music incorporates elements of both Mexican and Hawaiian music as well.  Beginning his career as a teenager in the coffee houses of Southern California, Tim has taken his music to Mexico, Cuba, The United Kingdom, Italy, Slovenia, Germany, Hungary, Australia, Morocco , and most parts of the U.S. and Canada…in a career spanning more than five decades.

Sheri D Wilson

Sheri-D Wilson, aka Mama of Dada, is an international artist known for her electric performance-style, as well as the award-winning author and creator of 13 books, 4 short films, and 4 albums which combine music and poetry. High Priestess of Spoken Word in Canada, in 2019 Wilson was appointed to the Order of Canada for her contributions as a Spoken Word Poet and her leadership in the community. In 2017, she received her Doctor of Letters—Honoris Causa from Kwantlen University. Other awards include The City of Calgary Arts Award, the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, Women of Vision Award, and The USA Heavyweight Champion Title. Wilson was Calgary’s Poet Laureate 2018-2020. She is also a Marriage Celebrant and Ceremonialist.

Website: www.sheridwilson.com

Ben Wong

John Wright

John Wright has worked in theaters across Canada, from Halifax’s Neptune Theatre to the Vancouver Playhouse. A 46-year veteran of the Canadian stage, he has appeared in many productions of new Canadian plays at Theatre Nework including  All Clear (by Eugene Stickland), Alberta Theatre Projects in The Drawer Boy and Still Desire You; at Workshop West Theatre in The Mighty Carlins, and The Seed Savers; and at Shadow Theatre in That Darn Plot, and The Flyfisher’s Companion.

With his partner Marianne Copithorne, he has been a regular performer in the Free Will Players Shakespeare Festival in Edmonton since 1995, appearing in over fifty productions. In 2011 a scholarship for needy children to attend Camp Shakespeare was named in his honour.

Wright has also been a regular television and film actor, with credits that include MacGyer, The Beachcombers, Ray Bradbury Theatre, and Small Sacrifices.

In 2015, after announcing his retirement from the stage, he was awarded a Sterling Award “In Recognition of a Career of Extraordinary Performances.” Since then, he has acted in summer productions by Free Will Players.