Showcase
TJ Dawe
TJ Dawe was born and raised in Vancouver, BC. In the 90s he earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree in Theatre from the University of Victoria. He toured the Canadian Fringe Circuit while still a student, and did his first solo show shortly thereafter. He’s been writing, performing and touring ever since. Directing and dramaturging came into the picture somewhere along the way. Later came podcasting and blogging. He is an award winning (and published) writer/performer/director, whose solo credits include Totem Figures , The Slipknot and Tired Cliches, and whose credits as a collaborator include Toothpaste & Cigars (in development as the film The F Word), 52 Pick-up, The Power of Ignorance, Dishpig and The One Man Star Wars Trilogy.
Michelle Loughery
An artist, organizer, and educator, Michelle Loughery has worked in the field of community public art for 18 years and has created over 100 large-scale murals, working with intergenerational groups, teens, elders, and children. Loughery draws on her rich experiences in rural Canada to portray a wide variety of historic scenes in her murals. She carries the name of the small coal mining town of Michel, B.C., in which she was born and raised. Her rare talent in creating large-scale art is an enduring public reminder of Canada's diverse peoples, heroes and rich cultural heritage. In addition to accepting commissions for public, corporate and private murals, Michelle offers a unique community art program in conjunction with public art mural assignments. This totally original program enlists young artist and art students in the community as apprentices, and trains them in the techniques of large format art.
Garry Thomas Morse
Garry Thomas Morse has had two books of poetry published by LINEbooks, Transversals for Orpheus (2006) and Streams (2007), one collection of fiction, Death in Vancouver (2009), published by Talonbooks, and two books of poetry published by Talonbooks, After Jack (2010) and Discovery Passages (2011), the first collection of poetry about the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) First Nations, and a finalist for the 2011 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry.
Grounded in the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Desnos, Ezra Pound, Jack Spicer, Rainer Maria Rilke and his Native oral traditions, his work has been featured in a variety of publications, including Branch Magazine, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, CV2, dANDelion, EVENT Magazine, filling Station, memewar, Poetry is Dead, Prism International, subTerrain, The Vancouver Review and West Coast Line. Morse is the recipient of the 2008 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist and has twice been selected as runner-up for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.
Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus, his second book of fiction, concerning surrealist and speculative genres, is forthcoming from Talonbooks this Fall (2012).