I'll read some from my first book, some from the chapbook that won this year's award, and some from the latest manuscript, with some enticing preamble.

Kate Marshall Flaherty has won several awards for her poetry, including Word Magazine Poetry Prize, Scarborough Arts Council, and the Canadian Church press Award; and was shortlisted for the Descant Best Canadian Poem Prize and Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She teaches yoga/meditation, leads retreats for young people, guides poetry-writing sweatshops, and works with poetry-in-motion with the Children's Peace Theatre. She was Programme Director for the Children's Peace Theatre for several years. She lives in Toronto with her husband and three children. Poetry is her lifeline.

Born and raised in Montreal, Ruth Panofsky currently lives in Toronto where she teaches Canadian Literature and Culture at Ryerson University. She has published two volumes of poetry: Lifeline (Guernica, 2001) and Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices (Inanna, 2007). She is also the author of several scholarly books, most recently The Force of Vocation: The Literary Career of Adele Wiseman (University of Manitoba Press, 2003). Panofsky has received awards from the Canada Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Ontario Arts Council.

Anne Gray was born in Mobile, Alabama, and studied at Auburn University and the University of North Carolina. She and her husband have lived for a number of years in Hamilton, Ontario.

Her adult fiction story Mrs. Danforth's Dream appeared in Green's Magazine, Autumn, 1993. Pool of Light appeared in Acclaim (an English magazine which publishes stories short-listed fro the Ian St James award) in June 1995.

Her first children's story, Uncle Cory's Smile appeared in the anthology Secrets published by Tundra Books in 2005, and her first (young adult fantasy) novel, Rites of the Healer, was published in September 2006 by Sumach Press.

Glen's first novel is called Correction Road, recently published by Oberon Press.

Glen Dresser was born in 1977 and grew up on a farm near the small prairie town of Carbon, Alberta. He later studied journalism and technical writing at Mount Royal College. With his wife, he runs a gallery and bookstore in Calgary that specializes in illustration and design. He has written everything from greeting cards to books on exhibitions, but Correction Road is his first novel.

A correction road is a line along which the vast grid of prairie roads is reset, and the distortion caused by the curvature of the earth is corrected. It is a place of conflict between man and nature. Hugh, an officer with the Alberta Rat Patrol, spends the autumn of 1979 along the roads on the Saskatchewan border, while the people around him try to deal with the traps that have been created in their lives by relationships, obligations and memories. Joan wants to build a future with Hugh, but is increasingly drawn to an enigmatic curator who visits her liquor store; Walt closes down his museum and allows his drinking to pull him back into his memories. Correction Road is a novel about the borders of our lives, the artificial borders we build and the natural borders we destroy.