Participating Writers
Anum Asi is a writer from Karachi. Her fiction can be found in Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, the Aleph Review, Necessary Fiction, Litro Online, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Cornell University, Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity, VONA/Voices, the Toronto Arts Council, and Monson Arts, among others, and won the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction.
After studying Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Cornell University. She was an Assistant Editor at EPOCH and serves as a co-Fiction Editor at Lakeer Magazine. She has an abiding interest and years of experience in curriculum development, teacher training, and student mentorship programs, and has taught fiction, poetry, and memoir at Habib University as an Assistant Professor, at Cornell University as a Fellowship Lecturer, and at the University of Toronto. She lives in Toronto.
Elroy Pinto is a filmmaker, writer and curator who works in documentary, fiction and experimental film. The religious riots of the 90s in Bombay left an indelible mark on his psyche. He wondered if moving images and sound could bring people together and create compassion for one another. His films transform performative, musical and visual lineages derived from pre-colonial south asian art forms into contemporary adaptations.
Born in India and based in Toronto, his work has been included in exhibitions and screenings at Chatterjee and Lal, Oaxaca X, SiGns film festival, Mediterranean Film Festival of Cannes, South Asian Film Festival of Montreal, Indian Documentary Film Festival Bhubaneswar and the Independent Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. He has trained under the new wave filmmaker Kumar Shahani and senior vocalist Neela Bhagwat. His writing on the Epic form in cinema has appeared in the Mumbai University Philosophy Journal, Doctoral Horizons and Rupkatha Journal. Since 2023, he has curated films at Nirmik, Mumbai’s only working-class Dalit Ambedkarite artist-led center located between two of the largest slums in Mumbai.
In 2025, Elroy was awarded a Flaherty fellowship. His latest film is a documentary-fiction film funded by the India Foundation for the Arts, that adapts the 19th-century ballad “Governor and Koli” to explore indigeneity through personal family archives, community folk songs, and fictionalised inter-generational conversations. Elroy holds a Master’s in Global Cinemas from SOAS, University of London.
Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and graduate of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. He is a fellow of the Obsidian Foundation and the Undocupoets. Russell is the 2025 winner of PEN Canada’s New Voices Award. He has also won The Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023), the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry (2024), the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry (2025), the Missouri Review’s Poem of the Year (2025), and the Rumpus Poetry Prize (2025), judged by Kaveh Akbar. He was also shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2022 and 2023), the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023), and ARC’s Poem of The Year contest (2024 and 2025). His work has been published in PREE magazine, Frontier Poetry, The London Magazine,Magma, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod International, POETRY Magazine, and elsewhere. Some of his favourite poets include Derek Walcott, Safiya Sinclair, Ishion Hutchinson, Kwame Dawes, and Roger Reeves.
Hedaya Shamun (Abdullah) is a Palestinian writer, novelist, journalist, and feminist researcher from Rafah, Gaza Strip, holding a master’s degree in media studies and an IIE Scholar Fellowship since 2023. She is currently a Non-Fiction Writer in Residence and Visiting Journalist at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU).
With over 25 years of expertise in gender studies and women’s issues in Palestine, Hedaya has a rich literary portfolio. Her notable works include the novel “Love for You and War for Me,” the short story collection “The Soul Fingers Precede Me” (comprising two parts: “The Scent of Wounds” and “The Door of Silence”), and “Daughter of the Sea.” The novel LamashTo and the Jackal has been shortlisted in the Unpublished Works category of Arabic Canadian Literature Award. Second Edition 2026/2027.
Hedaya is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Journalists Union and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). She chairs the Board of Directors of the Community Media and Development Center in Gaza, serves as an editorial board member at the independent Arab media platform Seen 48, and is a member of the Universities in Exile Consortium (Canada/US), PEN for writers and journalists in exile, and Graduate Women International (GWI). She writes through her personal blogs, “Gaza in My Mind” or “Gaza Fe Khatery.”
Janielle Browne is a 29-year-old Vincentian writer and poet, who is passionate about her faith, mental health advocacy, creative arts, and education. After being awarded the University of the West Indies Open Scholarship, she attained a BA in Literatures in English with History (1st class Hons) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Distinction).
Her poetry and prose highlight injustice, gender, and racial issues as well as abuse, and have been published in IntersectAnu, ACalabash, and Canadian literary magazines— Kola (2021) and QWERTY (2025). Along with being shortlisted for the 2021 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Prize for Writers in the Caribbean, she won the 2019 St. Vincent and the Grenadines Independence Poetry Competition, 2021 H. Nigel Thomas Fiction prize, and the 2022 SVG Innovation Literary Competition. After teaching English at the Bishop’s College Kingstown Secondary School for four years, Janielle left for Canada where she became the two-time recipient of The Jim Polk/Carol Shields Prize Foundation Scholarship in Creative Writing and completed her MA in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto under the mentorship of Shyam Selvadurai. She is currently seeking literary agents and publishers for her manuscript As Thyself, which is an exercise in empathy that explores the challenges faced by Caribbean immigrants regarding spectatorship, and nuanced performances within the boundaries of diasporic identity.
Janielle’s other awards and titles include, but are not limited to, One Young World Ambassador, Viola Whitney Pratt Memorial OSOFT Scholarship in English 2023 recipient, Avie Bennett Emerging Writers Scholarship 2023 recipient, St. Vincent & the Grenadines Tuition Scholarship 2023 & 2024 recipient, and the Department of English Graduate Program Award 2024 recipient.
Jim Libiran is a filmmaker, writer, published and performance poet, broadcast journalist, and social entrepreneur, whose work spans multiple disciplines, including film direction, social advocacy, community engagement, and media innovation. His films, which blend socio-political themes with authentic storytelling, have earned him 15 international and local awards.
He has done documentaries and reportage on the eve of the wars in Iraq, the Taliban defeat and the Northern Alliance takeover in Afghanistan, the rebellions in Mindanao, and the EDSA DOS (People Power 2) uprising, as well as socio-cultural investigations on things uniquely Filipino.
Before television, he spent ten years working as a labor union activist and grassroots organizer. He was also a writer and editor for various print media companies such as Abante, Abante Tonite, Diyaryo Filipino, Daily Globe, and Manila Times.
Mosab Alnomairy is a poet, journalist, and curator, with two published poetry collections and a rich portfolio of articles. After leaving Syria in 2011, he lived in the UAE and Turkiye, where he worked as a journalist documenting human rights violations. He settled in Canada in 2019 and, ever since, has focused on healing and fostering a space for knowledge, cultural production, and community building. As the founder and executive director of Henna Platform, he leads an organization dedicated to advancing cultural, artistic, and intellectual dialogue throughout the Middle East and Canada.
Soraya Amiri is an Afghan journalist and human rights advocate with more than a decade of experience in journalism and media production. Before the fall of Kabul in August 2021, she served as a senior producer at TOLOnews, Afghanistan’s leading news channel.
Since arriving in Canada in January 2022, Soraya has continued her journalism through her work with The Walrus, following a fellowship with Journalists for Human Rights (JHR). Her reporting focuses on women’s rights, press freedom, and the impact of Taliban restrictions on Afghan women. She continues to publish in-depth stories on these issues.
Soraya is currently pursuing a master’s degree in journalism at the School of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University. She also holds a master’s degree in international relations and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Afghanistan.