Empowerment series 2026

Tara McGowan-Ross

Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Mi’kmaq multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her work has been featured in print and online, as well as anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry, Anthologie de la poesie actuelle des femmes au Québec, Letters from Montreal, and in the forthcoming Speech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health. She is the author of poetry collections Girth and Scorpion Season, as well as the memoir Nothing Will Be Different, which was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award for nonfiction. She writes the cultural criticism newsletter Theatre of Cruelty on Substack, hosts Drawn & Quarterly’s Indigenous Literatures Book Club, is a storyteller and cultural animator for children, and is a freelance critic of art, music, literature, and theatre. She is primed and ready for your paid writing opportunity. Contact her at taramcgowanross.substack.com

Antoinette Rychner

Antoinette Rychner, née en Suisse en 1979, diplômée de l’Institut Littéraire, écrit du théâtre et de la prose. Plusieurs de ses pièces sont publiées aux éditions les Solitaires Intempestifs.
Son premier roman, Le Prix (Buchet-Chastel, 2015), lui vaut un Prix suisse de littérature en 2016. Après le monde, (idem, 2020) rencontre un large écho auprès du public et des médias francophones. Ma forêt, troisième roman, paraît en 2025 aux éditions Fugue.
Elle crée également des performances littéraires.

Daniel Tammet

Daniel Tammet was born in 1979 and grew up in East London. He was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy as a child, and with autism and synaesthesia as a young adult, and his neurodivergence has profoundly shaped his life and work. Having always felt like an outsider in his native country and language, he spent a gap year in Lithuania and later emigrated to France. He holds a First Class Honours degree in the humanities from the Open University and has worked as a full-time writer since 2005. His books of memoir, essays, creative nonfiction and poetry explore perception and cognition while narrating the neurodivergent experience. The autobiographical Born On A Blue Day (2006) delves into his synaesthesia, a blending of the senses, which allows him to process abstract information in tangible forms: words appear to him as colours and textures, numbers as shapes and personalities. If Tammet’s writing is deeply informed by personal experience it ranges far beyond it to depict the mental states of others, from a Soviet grandmaster (in Mishenka, 2016) and a supercentenarian Frenchwoman (in Portraits, 2018) to an autistic Japanese woman’s research into the psychology of loneliness (in Nine Minds, 2024). Tammet’s work has taken him across North and Central America, the UK and Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and is studied in English, literature and psychology departments in schools and universities in many countries. His books have been translated into thirty languages and won numerous distinctions.

Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Ayelet Tsabari

Ayelet Tsabari is the author of Songs for the Brokenhearted, winner of a National Jewish Book Award for fiction, The Canadian Jewish Literary Award for fiction, and one of Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2024. Her memoir, The Art of Leaving, was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Her first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Ayelet teaches creative writing at The University of King’s College MFA and at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing.

Ouanessa Younsi

Née en 1984, Ouanessa Younsi est poète, autrice et médecin psychiatre. Récemment, elle a publié Soigner, écrire (Presses de l’Université de Montréal) qui lui a valu de recevoir le prix du Gouverneur général du Canada 2025, dans la catégorie de l’essai. Elle a aussi publié cinq recueils de poésie chez Mémoire d’encrier : Prendre langue, Empruntée aux oiseaux, Métissée, Nous ne sommes pas des fées (co-écrit avec Louise Dupré) et Quand je vis, ainsi que Soigner, aimer un essai qui retrace son parcours comme soignante et qui fut finaliste aux prix du Gouverneur général en 2017, dans la catégorie de l’essai. Elle a également co-dirigé le recueil collectif Femmes rapaillées.