Carol Finlay is the founder and director of Book Clubs for Inmates. She was among 26 people announced as new members of the Order of Ontario on Dec. 15^th 2016. Carol is an ordained Anglican priest, a retired English teacher and her organization now has about 80 volunteers running reading groups in 28 prisons in all parts of the country.

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Jane Kelly is the founder and publisher of Watershed Magazine.

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Wally Keeler was born and raised in Cobourg.  He describes his occupation as Poetentate, and his location as People’s Republic of Poetry. His work has been published in a number of literary journals, including Prism, the Fiddlehead, Descant, and others. His poetry collection Walking on the Greenhouse Roof was published by Delta Canada, to excellent reviews. His most recent book is Cobourg Is My Poem Town (2013). Wally’s primary interest is poetry and he has spent his life promoting it.

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Sharon Ramsay Curtis has a varied and multi-faceted creative life. She has been a poet, a teacher, a potter, a painter in water-colours, a maker of drawings, collector of words and a raconteur.  Recently she has turned her attention to creating children’s stories. Her first book, Edward Covered is now in print and she is writing her second story.

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Malcolm Telford has had a long and distinguished career as a researcher and professor of zoology at the University of Toronto. Now in his retirement, he has published a non-academic book about people who have been important to him, his life and scientific topics that interest him, called Flying Sand Dollars, Left Handed Crabs. Giant Earwigs and Other Curiosities

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John B Lee has published over 55 books of poetry and has won over 100 Canadian and international awards for his work. He wrote his first poem at the age of nine for his father and published his first prize-winning volume of poetry at twenty-one.

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Kathryn MacDonald is a poet and travel writer  who has adventured across the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa. Her love of exploring places and experiencing different cultures has led to her newest collections of travel poems, for which the working title is Bluu/Azul/Blue; Part 1 “Cure for Love: Flight”; Part II “In Love with the Wind”. She is the author of  A Breeze You Whisper (Hidden Brook Press, 2011) and her poems have been published in literary journals such a Descant and Fiddlehead. Her novella, Calla and Edourd was published in 2009.

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Ingrid Ruthig has won many awards for her poetry. She discusses her most recent book, THIS BEING which has just become a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award through the Canadian League of Poets.

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Jonathan Bennett is a novelist and poet. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which is The Colonial Hotel (ECW Press, 2014). His previous work includes the critically acclaimed novels, Entitlement and After Battersea Park, two collections of poetry, Civil and Civic, and Here is my street, this tree I planted, and a collection of short stories set in Australia, Verandah People, which was runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. He is a winner of the K.M. Hunter Artists’ Award in Literature.

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April is Poetry Month and to mark it local poets read from their work or choose a favourite poem to read for us.

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