2023 Ambassador

Christina Myers

Christina Myers is a writer, editor and former journalist. Her novel The List of Last Chances (2021) was longlisted for the 2022 Leacock Medal and shortlisted for the Fred Kerner Book Award. Her next book, Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife, a collection of essays, is forthcoming from House of Anansi in 2024. She is currently at work on her next novel. Her writing has also appeared in magazines, journals, online and in a dozen anthologies, including one that she edited. She is a member of Da’naxda’xw First Nation, north Vancouver Island, and currently juggles writing, parenthood and the rest of life from her home in Whalley, North Surrey.

2022 Ambassador

Joseph A. Dandurand

Joseph A. Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation located on the Fraser River about 20 minutes east of Vancouver. He resides there with his three children, Danessa, Marlysse, and Jace. Joseph is the Director of the Kwantlen Cultural Center. Joseph received a Diploma in Performing Arts from Algonquin College, studied Theatre and Direction at the University of Ottawa, and has been the Storyteller in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library. His thirteen books of poetry include I WANT by Leaf Press (2015), HEAR AND FORETELL by BookLand Press (2015), The Rumour by BookLand Press (2018), SH:LAM (the doctor) by Mawenzi Press (2019),  and The Corrupted by Guernica Press (2020). He is also the author of a children’s play, Th’owixiya: The Hungry Feast Dish by Playwrights Press Canada (2019), as well as children’s books, The Sasquatch, the Fire, and the Cedar Baskets (2020) and The Magical Sturgeon (2022) published by Nightwood Press, along with a poetry manuscript, The Punishment (2022). He keeps busy storytelling at many events and schools.

2021 Ambassador

Betsy Warland

Betsy Warland is the author of fourteen books of creative nonfiction, memoir, and poetry.

A leading mixed-genre writer, teacher, and manuscript mentor/editor in Canada, her collection of essays on writing, Breathing the Page—Reading the Act of Writing, became a bestseller in 2010. A second edition, with new material, will be released in 2023. Warland’s most enduring book, Bloodroot—Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (2000), was released in a second edition in 2021, with a foreword by Susan Olding, and a long essay reflecting on the book twenty years later by

Warland.

2020 Ambassador

Yvonne Blomer

Writer, editor, teacher and poet, Yvonne Blomer is the author of The Last Show on Earth, Caitlin Press, 2022 and the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, which explores body, time and place. She holds an MA in Creative Writing Poetry with Distinction from the University of East Anglia. Her other books of poetry include As if a Raven, The Book of Places and A Broken Mirror, Fallen Leaf. She works as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir. She served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015–2018. In 2018 Yvonne was the Artist-in-Residence at the Robert Bateman Centre and created Ravine, Mouse, a Bird’s Beak a chapbook of ekphrastic ecological poetry in response to Bateman’s art. In 2017 Yvonne edited the anthology Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press) with poets responding to their connection to the Pacific from the west coast of North America, and as far away as Japan and New Zealand. Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds is the second in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies published by Caitlin Press and edited by Yvonne.