Daniela Elza lived on three continents before immigrating to Canada in 1999. Her latest poetry collections are the broken boat (2020) and slow erosions (2020). Her work has won numerous contests and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology multiple times. She placed second in the 2022 Ken Belford Poetry Prize for Social Justice. She is a founding member of the Place Mattering Matters Collective and advocates for affordable housing in her community in Vancouver, located on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Gilles Cyrenne lives on the ancestral unceded territory of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil Watuth people. He coordinates the Downtown Eastside Writers Collective, serves as President of the Carnegie Community Centre Association, and is a mentor for the UBC Hum Writing 101 Program and for the UBC Science 101 Program which provide a series of free lectures for DTES and Downtown Southside residents. He has published one book of poetry and is working on a second. Cristy Watson currently creates on the lands of the Tsuu T'ina and is an award-winning author of eight novels for middle-grade and YA readers (Orca Book Publishers and Formac/Lorimer), as well as having her poetry included in anthologies such as: Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press), Contemporary Verse 2, and The Poetry Marathon Anthology (2017-present). She won HM in the first Coffee Shop Author Contest (sponsor, Oolichan Press) and has volunteered for over a decade at the Surrey International Writers Conference and, recently, with the BC Federation of Writers. Prior to the pandemic, she hosted an open mic in Surrey, BC.