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.
2024 Festival Team
Calyca Greenwald (Communications Specialist) Calyca is a NAIT fourth-year BBA student specializing in Marketing. As part of her post-secondary experience, she leads a student-run organization called Enactus NAIT as the club President. Calyca brings 5+ years of marketing and communications experience and is thrilled to work on this festival!
Brianne Jang (Front of House/Volunteer Coordinator) Brianne was born in Edmonton, Alberta and has been involved in the arts since she was young. After graduating from the Theatre Arts Program at Grant MacEwan University, Brianne has worked on-stage and behind-the-scenes for the past decade, finding her true passion for bringing art to audiences in all forms. She is the Managing Director of SkirtsAfire Festival, co-founder of Poiema Productions, and is also the co-founder of the photography company, BB Collective. She is thrilled to be joining the LitFest team!
Mila Bongco-Philipzig (Guest Curator 2024) Mila is a writer, visual artist, and community organizer. She has published five bi-lingual (Filipino-English) children’s books and also translated two children’s books from Filipino to German which were included in the largest book fair in the world, the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2022. Mila also has poetry, short stories, and essays published in various magazines, anthologies, and podcasts in the Philippines, Canada, and Germany.
In 2021, Mila was an Edmonton Arts Council’s Featured Artist for Asian Heritage Month, and the first featured reader for Edmonton Public Library’s Multilingual Storytime. She is currently the coordinator for WGA’s Horizon Writers mentorship programme for BIPOC writers, and serves as lead for the People of Colour Committee in Stantec. In addition to writing or painting, Mila organizes cultural community events, runs long-distance, and is an active advocate for inclusion, human rights, and social justice.
Alberta Book Fair Society Board of Directors
Katherine Gibson (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.
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.
Christine Taylor (Acting Secretary) 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 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.
Catalina Morales Velez 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.
Mishma Mukith is a thinker, feeler, (aspiring) writer, and community builder. She is a Canadian-born and Bengali-raised settler living and creating in Treaty 6 land. Mishma wears many hats- she is a community engagement educator, a non-profit co-founder (Converse and Cook), and importantly, she is a daughter, sister, friend, and partner to some very magical people.
In the wee hours of the night, you can find Mishma working on a novel that she will eventually finish writing.
Tim Querengesser 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
