Authors

Clint Burnham

Clint Burnham’s most recent book is a new novel from Arsenal Pulp Press, Smokeshow. Burnham is also the author of The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory, Fatal Femmes: the poetry of Lynne Crosbie, two collections of poetry, Be Labour Reading and Buddyland, and numerous chapbooks. A new book of poetry is forthcoming from Anvil Press in 2007. Clint has served on the editorial collective of Fuse magazine, was a contributing editor for Paragraph, and is currently on the editorial collective of Boo.

Bart Campbell

Bart Campbell's essays about the downtown eastside of Vancouver and his experiences there as a soup kitchen volunteer have appeared on CBC's Morningside, and in Next City, True Life, Canadian Forum, and frequently in The Vancouver Review. A “non-fictional” excerpt from Bart's historic novel about the 4,000 Relief Camp Strikers who occupied Vancouver in the spring of 1935 appeared in Canadian Geographic Magazine, spring 2001. Bart lives in Vancouver and works as a medical laboratory technologist.

Jim Christy

Always in search of original characters and experiences, Jim Christy is a literary vagabond with few peers. He was once described by George Woodcock as ‘one of the last unpurged North American anarchistic romantics’. His publisher has called him a hip Indiana Jones; one reviewer credited him with a ‘Gary Cooper-like presence’. His buddies have included hobos, jazz musicians, boxers, and non-academic writers such as Charles Bukowski, Peter Trower and Joe Ferone. “I never dismiss another’s story out of hand,” he writes, “no matter what it’s about or how outrageous it may seem.” Christy’s often wry reminiscences of his travels, trysts and trials are fueled by a hard-won pride. A gardener, a sculptor and a spoken word performer with a jazz/blues ensemble, Christy has been seen in film and television productions, usually in non-speaking roles as a thug or a gangster.

Born in Richmond, Virginia on July 14, 1945, Jim Christy grew up in South Philadelphia, a tough area featured in his autobiographical novel Streethearts, and also featured in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky movies. “Boxing was in the air,” he once recalled. “You knew people who had boxed; if Dickens had been around he would have written about boxing.” Christy later wrote about boxing as a business and a sub-culture, in Flesh & Blood. Christy began running away from home around age twelve, once getting as far as the outskirts of Buffalo. He befriended one of his closest friends and mentors, Floyd Wallace, a hobo, a former boxer and a former soldier of fortune, and learned to ride the freights at a young age. Christy came to Canada in October of 1968, to evade the Viet Nam war draft, and was active in co-founding two shortlived underground press publications in Toronto. His first book concerned draft resisters in Canada. Christy became a Canadian citizen as soon as possible. While researching Rough Road to the North, he became fascinated by the life of Charles Eugene Bedaux, and subsequently wrote a biography called The Price of Power. Other outsiders who have struck Christy as heroes include a veteran carnival performer named Marcel Horne, jazz musician Charlie Leeds, leftist Emma Goldman and explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton.

Jim Christy first came to Vancouver in December of 1981 to promote his novel Streethearts, and remained on the West Coast for many years, adopting Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast as his home base. An artist, gardener, prolific freelance journalist and an ex-regular on American Bandstand, Christy has evolved his own King of the Road outsiderism into a cool-headed series of ‘noir’ fiction featuring a tough-talking private detective in Vancouver named Gene Castle. The series opens in 1937 with Shanghai Alley and moves forward to 1939 in the second Gene Castle gumshoe mystery, Princess and Gore, a title drawn from two street names in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The third Castle mystery is Terminal Avenue, another title drawn from a street name. It features the bullet-eating detective searching for the kidnapped daughter of a Nazi resistance leader. Jim currently resides in Toronto.

Lincoln Clarkes

Lincoln Clarkes is an award-winning photographer (National Magazine Awards, Silver; Western Magazine Awards, Gold) who has worked in fashion while living in London and Paris, and photographed numerous celebrities, including Deborah Harry, Helmut Newton, Noam Chomsky, Lucinda Williams, and Oliver Stone. Mr. Clarkes has had solo shows in Vancouver, Toronto, and Victoria, and over a dozen group shows across the country. His photography has appeared in Details, People, The Globe & Mail, The National Post, The Vancouver Sun, Geist, Western Living, Saturday Night, High Times, subTerrain, and British Cosmo.

Ian Cockfield

Ian Cockfield is the assistant editor of Event magazine, and a former fiction editor of PRISM International. In his many travels, he's been a dedicated (though occasionally reluctant) user of public transit, from overloaded Indonesian passenger ferries, to suicidal Punjabi express busses and the ubiquitous tuk-tuks of Bangkok. He lives in Vancouver.

Tom Cone

Tom Cone is the author of numerous plays, operas, and librettos. While playwright-in-residence at the Stratford Festival, he premiered his play Stargazing and his adaptation of Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters. The musical adaptation of his play Herringbone has been produced in Chicago, New York, London, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Vancouver, and the Hartford Stage starring Joel Grey. Tom is currently working on a new full-length play, Love Lies Bleeding. He lives in Vancouver.

Jen Currin

Poems by Jen Currin have appeared in numerous North American journals, including: The Fiddlehead, Mudfish, The Massachusetts Review, Diner, subTerrain, The Mississippi Review, and Washington Square. In 2002, Mark Levine awarded her second place in River City's annual poetry contest. Her chapbook Ten Poems/Eleven Years was published by Breeds Like A Rumrunner (Vancouver, 2004). Her most recent collection, Hagiography, won Winnow Press's 2005 Open Book Award. A graduate of Bard College and Arizona State University's MFA program, Jen currently teaches creative writing at the Vancouver Film School and for Langara College's Continuing Education program. While at ASU, she served as both assistant editor and poetry editor of Hayden's Ferry Review from 1999-2002. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Jen currently lives in Vancouver, BC, where she is a member of the poetry collective vertigo west.

Salvatore Difalco

Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, the son of Italian immigrants, Difalco attended the University of Toronto, where he completed an M.A. in English. After several years of writing poetry, Difalco turned to short fiction in 2004. He has since released one chapbook of stories, Outside (Black Bile Press) and has had numerous stories published in journals and literary magazines. Difalco is married to poet and short story writer Alexandra Leggat. They currently reside in Niagara Falls with their dog, Monk.

Pamela Fairfield

In Pamela Fairfield's most recent collaboration with Richard Tetrault, she combines her roles as writer, artist and curator with her thirteen years of work in the community of the Downtown Eastside. She wishes to thank the residents of the Portland Hotel Society whose lives are an exemplary blend of beauty and strength and who together have been the muse that has inspired the writing of Painted Lives and Shifting Landscapes.

Jenn Farrell

Jenn Farrell is a two-time winner of the Vancouver Courier fiction contest, recipient of the 2002 Maclean-Hunter Endowment Prize for non-fiction, and a contributor to CBC radio. Her stories have previously appeared in Prism and subTerrain magazine. Also a prolific columnist, commentator, and reporter, Ms. Farrell has written for Alive, Canada's Healthy Living Guide, Raven's Eye, and West Coast Editor. Born and raised in the &lldquo;Golden Horseshoe” of Ontario, she now lives in Vancouver, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.

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