InkWell Staff

Maya Ameyaw was born and raised in Toronto by a family of artists. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in the InkWell anthologies, The Double World (2017), The Unexpected Sky (2018), I Am a Lake (2019), and Brillance is The Clothing I Wear (2021) which she helped to compile and curate with grants from the Toronto Arts Council. When It All Syncs Up, her debut young adult contemporary novel, will be published by Annick Press in May of 2023.

Maya is the peer support specialist for InkWell Workshops.

Kathy Friedman’s debut collection of short stories, All the Shining People, is forthcoming with House of Anansi in 2022. Her writing has previously appeared in literary magazines including The New Quarterly, PRISM international, Grain, Geist, Room, Canadian Notes & Queries, Humber Literary Review, and This Magazine. She has been a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, runner-up for the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and PRISM international’s short fiction contest, and was nominated by PRISM for the Journey Prize. Kathy has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and a BFA in Creative Writing from UBC. She teaches creative writing in the University of Guelph’s department of Open Learning. 

Kathy is the co-founder and artistic director for InkWell Workshops.

Dominik Parisien is an editor, writer, and poet. He is the author of the poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and his writing has appeared in Maisonneuve, PRISM International, EVENT, This Magazine, and The Literary Review of Canada, among others. He co-edited, with Navah Wolfe, The Mythic Dream, Robots vs Fairies, and The Starlit Wood, all published through Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press, and Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, with Elsa Sjunneson. He also edited the 2019 and 2020 program for the FOLD and he is an associate prose editor for Plenitude Magazine. As an editor, he has won the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, British Fantasy, and Aurora Awards. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual French Canadian. He lives in Toronto.

David James Brock is a playwright, poet, and librettist whose plays and operas have been performed in cities across Canada, the US, and the UK. He is the winner of the 2011 Herman Voaden Canadian National Playwriting Award for his play Wet. Brock is the author of two poetry collections, Everyone is CO2 & Ten-Headed Alien both released by Wolsak & Wynn. He has created text for opera and new music with companies that include Noise Opera, Tapestry New Opera, Young People’s Theatre, the Canadian Art Song Project, Write off The Keyboard, FAWN Chamber Creative, and the Paul Dresher Ensemble. For Scottish Opera, Brock co-created Breath Cycle with Gareth Williams, a multimedia operatic theatre project developed with cystic fibrosis patients, which was nominated for a 2014 Royal Philharmonic Society Award. His most recent play, A Million Billion Pieces premiered at Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre in 2019 and was nominated for 5 Dora Mavor Moore Awards.

For more information, visit his website at www.davidjamesbrock.com. 

Liz Howard’s debut collection Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for poetry, and was named a Globe and Mail top 100 book. A National Magazine Award finalist, her recent work has appeared in Canadian Art, The Fiddlehead, Poetry and Best Canadian Poetry. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She served as the 2018-2019 Distinguished Canadian Writer in Residence at the University of Calgary and has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at UBC Kelowna, Douglas College, and Sheridan College. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.