Laurie Ray Hill is best known in this area as a playwright. Several of her plays have been produced locally and one of her plays was selected as a finalist in the Theatre B.C. Canadian National Playwrighting Competition and another as Eastern Ontario Drama League’s Best Original Script. Laurie has spent many years running creative writing groups and classes, some through Loyalist College. She has also met many families and individuals in our listening area through her work in Vision Loss Rehabilitation. She travelled in Northumberland and Peterborough for CNIB and later in Hastings and Prince Edward, teaching travel skills to people with low or no vision. All along, she has been secretly writing novels. Recently retired, she is happy to work on bringing these to light. She is pleased that her novel, Paper Stones, is being published by Inanna.

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Antony Di Nardo has just published his fifth book of poetry, Gone Miss ng. He wrote his first poem when he was sixteen but published his first collection, Alien Correspondent (Brick Books) when he was 61. Early on in his adult life, Antony had some poetry and fiction accepted by the Northern Ontario Poetry Anthology and the Squatchberry Journal but his long career as a teacher and school administrator took him away from poetry. It wasn’t until he was anticipating and then actually retiring that he felt able to immerse himself in poetry again. Recently he wrote an article for the journal, Fiddlehead, Among the Foxgloves: Recollections of a Sexagenarian Poet so we start the programme by asking him about this.

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Kurt Palka was born and educated in Austria. He began his working life in Africa where he wrote for the African Mirror and made wildlife films in Kenya and Tanzania. While working as a journalist, he covered the war in Vietnam and events in the Middle East for television. He has worked on international stories for CTV and GLOBAL TV, written for American and Canadian publications such as the Chronicle Herald and the Globe and Mail, and worked as a Senior Producer for the CBC. CLARA (originally published in hardcover as PATIENT NUMBER 7) his fifth novel was a finalist for the Hammett Prize. He is also the author of THE PIANO MAKER and THE HOUR OF THE FOX, published in July 2018 by McLelland and Stewart, is Kurt’s seventh novel

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Shane Joseph is the author of six novels and three collections of short stories. Shane’s second novel, After the Flood, a dystopian novel of hope, was released in 2009 and won the Write Canada Award for best novel in the futuristic/fantasy category. This novel was released in 2020 in a Kindle version. His short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in literary journals and anthologies all over the world. His blog at www.shanejoseph.com is widely syndicated and he has a monthly column in The Sri Lankan Anchorman journal, and is the Book Reviews Editor for Devour Art & Lit Magazine. Shane’s fifth work of fiction, Paradise Revisited, a collection of short stories that continues to explore the immigrant experience, was short listed for the Re-Lit award in 2014. His latest novel, Circles in the Spiral, will be released in October 2020. Shane talks about his most recent work as an author and publisher.

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