Executive Director
Ellen Kartz Ellen holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and a professional writing certificate from Mount Royal University. As an active writer and freelance editor throughout her career, Ellen worked with and for the Edmonton Poetry Festival for many years as a volunteer coordinator, event planner, founding member, and board member. She was the Communications and Partnerships Coordinator for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta from 2015-2023. In 2018, she self-produced a one-person stage show and poetry/nonfiction chapbook, both titled The Tenderness of Stone, about a trek she made in 2016 through Nepal’s Khumbu Valley to Mount Everest Base Camp. In 2020, Ellen founded a small poetry chapbook press, Armistice Press, and launched a quartet of chapbooks by emerging queer Edmonton authors. Ellen performed a second stage show, If I Was Fearless, in November 2024, and launched a poetry chapbook, Gravity, through Agatha Press in the same month.
Alberta Book Fair Society Board of Directors 2025-26
Christine Taylor (President) is an American storytelling consultant, diversity expert, and writer who also carries a Dutch passport. An expert on story structure, she has partnered with academics, entrepreneurs, and international women to help them tell stories that communicate complex ideas to new audiences. A serial immigrant who grew up in the US, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland, Christine now lives in Edmonton. She’s nurturing ambitions to write and publish more, starting with an article on her deep dive into Asian literature in WGA’s WestWord.
Nermeen Youssef (Vice President)writes from right to left and from left to right. Her multilingual writing has appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, lesson plans, on city buses and on many, many scrunched up napkins. As a cinema enthusiast, Nermeen founded the Egyptian Film Festival in Edmonton and serves as a board member with the Broad View International Film Festival. After completing a PhD in Pharmacology at the University of Alberta, she leaned on her pharmacy background to help improve health policy in Alberta working as a public servant in the provincial government. She remains grateful to her strikingly contrasting home cities, Cairo and Edmonton, for giving her the eyes and ears of an expatriate.
Danielle Paradis (Treasurer) is an Indigenous (Métis) magazine writer, journalist, editor, educator, and podcaster who lives in Treaty 6 (Edmonton, Alberta). She has written for both local and international audiences. You can read (or hear) her work at Canadaland, Chatelaine, Toronto Star (Edmonton), Gig City, BUSTLE, Canadian True Crime Podcast, and The Sprawl. Danielle covers politics, arts and culture, and Indigenous Issues. Danielle loves a good FOIP story and studied investigative journalism, story-based inquiry method, at the Centre for Investigative Journalism out of the UK. She teaches journalism, focusing on advanced reporting and reporting on diverse communities at MacEwan University and Humber College. She also works for a non-profit, Indigenous Friends Association, that focuses on connecting traditional knowledge and digital technology for Indigenous youth. She also has a background as a literary editor for Other Voices, and in-depth media experience on both television and radio.
Tim Querengesser (Secretary) Tim is a writer, editor, and city advocate. Tim is the managing editor of Taproot Edmonton. His writing has appeared in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, and The Globe and Mail.
Tim Querengesser’s photo is by Jen Rush
Catalina Morales Velez (Member at Large) is a creative non-fiction writer who lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. A native of Colombia, she depicts in her work common places, situations and scenarios filled with magical elements and high-consciousness encounters.
Despite being all rooted in words, her creations come to life in other mediums like drawing, the 9th art–comics, and stop-motion, among others.
Catalina’s work has been featured in Colombia, Canada, and U.S.A. magazines, including Entrepreneur Magazine, Life As A Human Magazine, The Polyglot Magazine, and Revista Cronopio. She is a member of the Writer’s Guild of Alberta, has recently started serving as an editorial board member of The Polyglot Magazine and continuously supports literary initiatives worldwide.
Virginia Clevette (Member at Large)
Bio coming soon!
Katherine Gibson (Past President) received her MLIS from McGill University in Montreal before working at the Richmond Public Library in British Columbia, Canada. After a year and half there she took up teaching English in Japan and finally settled down at the Edmonton Public Library in 2010. Katherine leads Capital City Press, EPL’s initiative to support local writers.
