Grain’s Fall Issue Launch Celebration will take place during the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild AGM and Conference, Saturday, October 25th at 7:00pm CST in-person at The Park Town Hotel in Saskatoon, SK (924 Spadina Cres E) and it will also be livestreamed. This event is fully accessible and FREE and open to the public. No registration required. Reception to follow readings.
JOIN US TO CELEBRATE 200 ISSUES OF GRAIN! Featured readers include present and past Grain contributors, Lisa Bird-Wilson, Arnolda Dufour Bowes, Warsha Mushtaq, Cooper Skjeie, Leona Theis, and Iryn Tushabe. We hope to see you there!
To watch the livestream, register for your Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_i6-c4GzJT_-ZLdxxeFC5Ng
Order your copy of Grain's 200th issue HERE.
Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Saskatchewan Métis and Cree writer whose most recent book, Probably Ruby, is published internationally and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award, for the Amazon First Novel Award, and won Saskatchewan Book of the Year. Lisa is working on a memoir for Knopf Canada about her journey as an Indigenous adoptee and her search for family and identity. She is currently serving as the first Indigenous CEO of SK Arts, and lives in Treaty 6 Territory in Saskatoon.
Arnolda Dufour Bowes is an award-winning Cree-Métis author and multi-disciplinary artist from Saskatchewan. She had an art exhibit and a short film featured in three galleries this past year. Her debut novel for young readers, Maggie-Lou, Firefox, blazed onto the scene with a star review from Kirkus Reviews. And Maggie Lou Meets Her Match hits shelves in August 2025—this series is currently being developed into an animation. Arnolda is a Playwright Resident at the Gordon Tootoosis Nīkānīwin Theatre with a play in production for 2026. She’s passionate about pushing the boundaries in her creative knowledge and has both a feature film and a short film in development.
Warsha Mushtaq is a writer and artist pursuing a BA (Honours) in History at the University of Saskatchewan. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, Grain, and Arc, and was shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Seasons Award for Poetry. She was awarded the Sharon Drummond Memorial Scholarship to attend the Sage Hill Summer Writing Workshop. Her writing interests focus on issues of borders, migration, and displacement. She was raised on unceded Treaty 6 Territory.
Cooper Skjeie is a writer and teacher from Treaty 6 and Métis Territory, where he was born to a German-Norwegian father and a Métis mother. He recently completed his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and an excerpt from his thesis project—a novel set in his hometown of Saskatoon—is forthcoming in The Ex-Puritan. Winner of the 2023 Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry and a 2023 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Poetry in English, Skjeie’s debut poetry collection, Scattered Oblations, will be published by McClelland & Stewart in Spring 2027.
Leona Theis lives on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatoon, where she writes lyric essays, novels, and short stories. Her novel If Sylvie Had Nine Lives (Freehand), won a High Plains Book Award, the Saskatchewan Fiction Award, and the John V Hicks Award, and was shortlisted for the Glengarry Award. Her essays have won the CBC Literary Prize and the Prairie Fire Nonfiction Award and been nominated for a number of others. She is a keen cyclist, cross-country skier, hiker, and paddler. She tries to dance a little every day.
Iryn Tushabe is a Ugandan-Canadian writer and journalist. Most recently her nonfiction has appeared in The Walrus and in the trace press anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation. Her short fiction has twice been included in The Journey Prize Stories: The Best of Canada’s New Writers. She was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021, and a 2023 winner of the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Tushabe’s work won the City of Regina Writing Award in 2020 and 2024. Everything is Fine Here (House of Anansi, 2025) is her debut novel.
