| Ali Bryan is an award-winning novelist and creative nonfiction writer. Her most recent novel for teens, Takedown, was released in May 2024. Bryan has served as the Author in Residence at the Banff Centre, the Calgary Public Library and as the Edna Staebler Laurier University digital Writer-in-Residence. She has a BComm in Marketing from Saint Mary’s University and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing from Humber College. In 2022, she was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal. Born and raised in Halifax, she lives in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies.
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TakedownWritten by Ali Bryan
Published by DCB
Sixteen-year-old star wrestler Rowan Harper’s biggest fan is her father.But he has ALS, and his symptoms are getting worse. Saving his life will cost more money than the family has, but Rowan finds a solution. Will she risk her chances at a scholarship by competing in a lucrative, but illegal, underground MMA fight?Takedown is a high-intensity coming-of-age story about family illness and competitive combat, with lots of heart, hope, and headlocks.
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| Matteo L. Cerilli (he/him) is a transmasc author specializing in speculative fiction for all ages. His writing aims to erase the barrier between liberation movements and the people they’re for, by opening doorways to Big Ideas like queer justice, neurodivergent liberation, youth equity, and community care. His activism work includes setting up gender care for trans students at York University, helping to found the Students for Queer Liberation—Toronto, and organizing with the No Pride in Policing Coalition. He currently lives in Toronto, within walking distance of so many people and places that he loves.
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LockjawWritten by Matteo CerilliPublished by Tundra BooksChuck Warren died tragically at the old abandoned mill, but Paz Espino knows it was no accident — there’s a monster under the town, and she’s determined to kill it before anyone else gets hurt. She’ll need the help of her crew — inseparable friends, bound by a childhood pact stronger than diamonds, distance or death — to hunt it down. But she’s up against a greater force of evil than she ever could have imagined.With shifting timeframes and multiple perspectives, Lockjaw is a small-town ghost story, where monsters living and dead haunt the streets, the homes and the minds of the inhabitants. For readers of Wilder Girls and The Haunted, this trans YA horror book by an incredible debut author will grab you and never let you go.
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| Linda Cheng was born in Taiwan and spent her childhood moving between cultures and continents. She received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and worked as an art director across South Carolina and Georgia where she developed a deep love for sweet tea, grits, and Southern Gothic stories. She currently resides in Vancouver, Canada with her family.
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Gorgeous Gruesome Faces
Written by Linda ChengPublished by MacMillan PressTwo years have passed since Sunny Lee lost her best friend Mina in a mysterious death. With their other BFF, Candie, the trio had been the hottest up-and-coming teen pop group, until it all suddenly ended. And Sunny can’t help but wonder if Candie had something to do with it.Now, Sunny is still seeking answers. When she discovers that Candie is attending a new K-pop workshop, Sunny follows, hoping to uncover the reason why Mina died… and why she died so violently. Sunny and Candie’s reunion is haunted by more than Mina’s death as the old spark between them returns, even stronger than before. But there’s no time for romance when the lines between nightmare and reality start to blur, leaving their competitors’ bodies bizarrely maimed and mutilated. To survive, Sunny must expose the dark secrets surrounding Candie and the workshop’s twisted promise for fame.
Stitched with cutting commentary on the ugly side of stardom and impossible beauty standards, Linda Cheng’s mind-bending, feminist thriller will have readers screaming and swooning for more.
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| Stephanie is a writer based out of Toronto, Canada. Some of her graphic novels include ParaNorthern, Oh My Gods, and The Racc Pack. She’s an avid reader, gamer, movie watcher, and pun connoisseur.
Mel is a Miami born, Chicago based, Latinx comic creator and illustrator. They work largely with digital media and have a BA in illustration from Columbia College Chicago. Mel loves drawing minorities and art that their younger self needed while growing up, including hispanic main characters, non-binary characters, and bodies of all shapes. Their work is largely inspired by LGBT, POC, and fem experiences, and is focused in graphic storytelling with themes that help highlight minority lifestyles. It is Mel's goal to ensure that their illustrations help people who are not often represented feel a little less alone and a lot more love.
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Pillow Talk
Written by Stephanie Cooke Illustrated by Mel Valentine VargasPublished by Harper CollinsWhen college freshman Grace Mendes reluctantly attends her first pillow fight match, she falls in love with the surprisingly gritty sport.Despite her usually shy, introverted, and reserved nature, Grace decides to try out for the Pillow Fight Federation (PFF), a locally famous league of fighters with larger-than-life personas like Pain Eyre, Miss Fortune, and champion Kat Atonic. They may battle with pillows, but there is nothing soft about these fighters. The first and only rule to pillow fighting is that the pillow needs to be the first point of contact; after that, everything else goes.Grace struggles with deep-seated body image issues, so she is especially shocked when she makes the competitive league and is welcomed into the fold of close knit, confident fighters. As her first official fight performing as newly crafted alter-ego/ring persona Cinderhella looms on the horizon, the real battle taking place is between Grace and her growing insecurities. What if people laugh or make fun of her? Why did she think she could pillow fight in the first place when she doesn’t look like your “typical” athlete?Turns out, no one is laughing when Cinderhella dominates her first match in the ring. And as her alter-ego rises through the ranks of the PFF, gaining traction and online fame (and online trolls), can Grace use the spotlight to become an icon for not just others, but most importantly, for herself?Pillow Talk is an inclusive, high-octane, outrageously fun graphic novel that aims a punch at the impossibly high standards set for women in sports (and otherwise) and champions the power of finding a team that will, quite literally, fight for you. A knock-out! |
| Victoria Koops never stopped playing make-believe and often writes while wearing a tiara. Her books are full of epic adventure and swoony romance, and navigate social issues through the power of fandom and geek culture. WHO WE ARE IN REAL LIFE is her debut novel.Victoria is a member in good standing of the Estevan Writer’s Group, Saskatchewan Writers Guild, and Writers’ Union of Canada. In the summers of 2016 and 2021, she attended the Sage Hill Writing Experience and completed a mentorship with Canadian author, Merilyn Simonds in 2020. So far, this writing thing has been a wild adventure, and she’s just getting started!
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Who We Are in Real Life
Written by Victoria KoopsPublished by Groundwood Books
IRL, Darcy has just moved to the small prairie town of Unity Creek with her two moms. It feels like she left everything good behind in the city. She misses her tabletop gaming friends and her boyfriend — and is horrified by the homophobia her family faces in their new home. Then she meets kind, quiet Art, who invites her to join his Dungeons & Dragons game.Art is mostly happy fading into the background at school and only really coming alive during his friends’ weekly D&D game — until meeting Darcy pulls his life off-course in wonderful and alarming ways. Suddenly he has something worth fighting for. But what if that something puts him in conflict with his father, an influential and conservative figure in their town? Can Art stand up against his father’s efforts to prevent Darcy and her friends from starting a queer-straight alliance at school?Meanwhile, in game, Darcy’s and Art’s D&D characters join forces to fight corruption as they grow closer in the homebrew world of Durgeon’s Keep — as fantasy and reality collide.
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| Carrie Mac has read millions of books, and has sat happily at the feat of a legion of storytellers. She is equally fascinated by disaster and grace. car wrecks, hurricanes, plagues, and genocides on the one hand, small and stunning everyday miracles on the other. She sometimes wishes she were a pirate. She'd often wished she'd run away and joined the circus when she had the chance. She spends a great deal of time in the company of her imagination, and when she isn't, she's wide eyed and awed by this planet and the people running amok all over it.
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Zombie Apocalypse Running Club
Written by Carrie MacPublished by Crown BooksEira and Soren are queer twins living with their survivalist parents when a plague starts spreading that turns people into zombie-like monsters. They disagree with their parents about a lot, but they can’t deny that their way of life keeps them safe while much of the world perishes–for now. When it becomes clear that their safety won’t last, the twins decide to strike out on their own.They don’t get far before encountering the one remaining person in the closest town: their friend Racer, a gold medal-winning Special Olympics champion. Racer is appalled at the twins’ slow speed and tells them that their survivalist skills aren’t worth anything if they can’t outrun the monsters. He sets them on a training regimen that comes in handy when they embark on the bigger journey ahead of them.On their trek they find friends, enemies, and even love. But with zombies on their heels at every turn, will they ever be able to slow down?
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| A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. When she isn't off on yet another inadvisable adventure, she can be found in London, where she spends her free time drawing strange creatures and trying to keep her plants from dying.
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Where the Dark Stands StillWritten by A.B. Poranek
Published by Margaret K. McElderry BooksLiska knows that magic is monstrous, and its practitioners are monsters. She has done everything possible to suppress her own magic, to disastrous consequences. Desperate to be free of it, Liska flees her small village and delves into the dangerous, demon-inhabited spirit-wood to steal a mythical fern flower. If she plucks it, she can use its one wish to banish her powers. Everyone who has sought the fern flower has fallen prey to unknown horrors, so when Liska is caught by the demon warden of the wood—called The Leszy—a bargain seems better than death: one year of servitude in exchange for the fern flower and its wish.Whisked away to The Leszy’s crumbling manor, Liska soon makes an unsettling discovery: she is not the first person to strike this bargain, and all her predecessors have mysteriously vanished. If Liska wants to survive the year and return home, she must unravel her taciturn host’s spool of secrets and face the ghosts—figurative and literal—of his past. Because something wakes in the woods, something deadly and without mercy. It frightens even The Leszy…and cannot be defeated unless Liska embraces the monster she’s always feared becoming.
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| Ishi Robinson was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. A Canadian citizen, she has lived in Bern, Toronto, Rome, London and now lives in Berlin with her Czech husband. Her first published work was a short story in Jamaica’s national newspaper when she was eleven years old. At seventeen, she sent a letter to her father from Switzerland that he thought was so funny he sent it to the other national newspaper, which snagged her a weekly column on teenage life in Kingston. She also previously wrote a weekly column on life as an expat in Rome for a now defunct online magazine. She got back into fiction writing in Berlin, from where she has published short stories in several online publications and one anthology. SWEETNESS IN THE SKIN is her first novel.
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Sweetness in the SkinWritten by Ishi RobinsonPublished by HarperCollins
Pumkin Patterson is a thirteen-year-old girl living in a tiny two-room house in Kingston, Jamaica, with her grandmother (who wants to improve the family’s social standing), her Aunt Sophie (who dreams of a new life in Paris for her and Pumkin), and her mother Paulette (who’s rarely home).When Sophie is offered the chance to move to France for work, she seizes the opportunity, and promises to send for her niece in one year’s time. All Pumkin has to do is pass her French entrance exam so she can attend school there. But when Pumkin’s grandmother dies, she’s left alone with her volatile mother, and as soon as her estranged father turns up—as lazy and conniving as ever—the household’s fortunes take a turn for the worse.Pumkin must somehow find a way to raise the money for her French exam, so she can free herself from her household and reunite with her beloved aunt in France. In a moment of ingenuity, she turns her passion for baking into a true business. Making batches of sweet potato pudding, coconut drops and chocolate cakes, Pumkin develops a booming trade—but when her school and her mother find out what she’s up to, everything she’s worked so hard for may slip through her fingers. . . .Sweetness in the Skin is a funny and heartbreaking story about a young girl figuring out who she is, what she is capable of—and where she truly belongs.
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| Jen Storm (she/her/hers) is an Ojibwe writer from Couchiching First Nation in Northwestern Ontario. She lives and raises her family, which includes her son, River and stepson Axel, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Jen completed Deadly Loyalties, her first novel, at age fourteen and has continued writing ever since.
Ryan Howe is a prairie Canadian cartoonist and graphic designer who fell in love with comics’ unique storytelling language at some point earlier than he can remember, and has been hooked ever since. He’s been collaborating with other comics creators since 2003, providing art for a wide variety of projects and genres on both the web and in print. Ryan’s recently tried his hand at writing as well as drawing, the ‘Daisy Blackwood: Pilot for Hire’ series being the rip roarin’ result.
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Little MoonsWritten by Jen Storm
Illustrated by Ryan Howe, Nickolej Villiger, and Alice RL
Published by Highwater Press
In this moving graphic novel, thirteen-year-old Reanna grieves the loss of her older sister. Can she find comfort through her family’s Ojibwe traditions? It’s been a year since Reanna’s sister, Chelsea, went missing on her way home from school. Without any idea of what happened, Reanna and her family struggle to find closure.Driven from her home by memories, Reanna’s mom moves to the big city. Left behind on the reserve, Reanna and her little brother go to live with their dad. Reanna is hurt and angry that her mom has run away. She feels lonely and abandoned…but she is not alone. Lights turn on in empty rooms, and objects move without being touched.There are little moons everywhere.
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| Sarah Suk (pronounced like soup with a K) lives in Vancouver, Canada, where she writes stories and admires mountains. She is the author of young adult novels Meet Me at Blue Hour, The Space between Here & Now, and Made in Korea, as well as the co-writer of John Cho’s middle grade novel Troublemaker. When she’s not writing, you can find her hanging out by the water, taking film photos, or eating a bowl of bingsu. You can visit Sarah online at sarahsuk.com.
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