January 23, 2011

KELLEY JO BURKE

Kelley Jo Burke is an award-winning playwright and poet, a director, storyteller, documentarian, and broadcaster. Her plays have been produced and published in Canada, and around the world, including her stage plays, “Ducks on the Moon”,  “The Selkie Wife”, “Jane’s Thumb”, and “Charming and Rose: True Love, and her most recent radio play “Big Ocean“, which was heard in 7 countries in 2000.

She dramaturges, directs and produces for stage and radio and is the host/producer of CBC Saskatchewan’s radio art performance hour SoundXchange. Kelley Jo also has written and produced a number of documentaries for CBC Radio’s Ideas.

She is the 2009 winner of the Saskatchewan Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Leadership in the Arts, the 2009 City of Regina Writing Award, and the 2008 Saskatoon and Area Theatre Award for Playwriting.

SHARON PLUMB

Sharon Plumb grew up writing stories in a small town that no longer exists, in the mountains of British Columbia. After she moved to the flat prairies, she studied Computer Science and switched to writing computer programs. When her three sons came along, she enjoyed reading to them so much that she started writing stories again.

She has written picture books, novels, poems, and plays. Her picture book Bill Bruin Shovels his Roof was published in 2006 as part of Scholastic Canada’s Literary Place for the Early Years. Draco’s Child, a YA fantasy novel, was published by Thistledown Press in March 2010.You can find out more about her and her books at the website for her writing group, the Saskatchewan Children’s Writers’ Round Robin: http://www.books4kids.ca.

BERNADETTE WAGNER

Author Photo:  Cherie Westmoreland   /   Cover Art:  Kim Menzies

Bernadette Wagner grew up on a small family farm forty-five minutes north of Regina. The gently rolling parkland instilled in her the spirit of the prairies, a love of land, and a commitment to community, all of which come through in her writing. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in journals, anthologies, and magazines and on radio, television and film, in schools, on stages, in the streets and on the web. She has been recognized with the Jerry Rush Scholarship, the W. O. Mitchell Bursary Award, an apprenticeship in the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Mentorship Program for Emerging Writers and a Saskatchewan Arts Board Individual Assistance Award. She extends her gratitude to the strong writing community in Saskatchewan, including the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and its many excellent programs, her family, friends, and communities for their love and support, and Thistledown Press, her publisher, for helping her to make a dream come true. This hot place is her first book.