I truly believe that collaboration is the lifeblood of a creative practice. It's not always easy: as artists, authors and poets, we tend to have pretty strong opinions about how a thing should not only look, but live in the world. When it works, though, it's magic. I know that I have learned so much through my relationship with every collaborator, and I wouldn't trade that for a letterpress-furnished studio cabin in the woods.
Below you can read about all of the people who bring Penrose Press to life. These are the creatives whose livelihoods you are directly supporting when you purchase a book from our shop.
Kit Ingram (first published as Cory Ingram) is an award-winning queer writer based in London. His recent poetry earned short-listings for the Bridport Prize, and his fiction a long-listing for the Grindstone Literary Novel Prize, among others.
In his spare time, you’ll find him playing with his golden retriever, Hugo, or cycling across English Heritage country with a smile on his face.
Jessica Magonet is a poet who lives on Unceded Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, BC). She is the author of the poetry chapbook at this confluence (Loft on Eighth, 2016). Her work has appeared in the Bombay Gin Literary Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020).
Jessica Magonet
(she/her)
Poet of Epilogue
.
Wendy McGrath is a Métis writer who has published four novels and two books of poetry.
McGrath works in multiple genres—fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and spoken word. Her
most recent book, Broke City, is the final novel in her prairie-gothic Santa Rosa Trilogy. This
acclaimed trilogy chronicles the struggles of a working-class family and is told through the eyes
of a child narrator. McGrath is also a printmaker and creator of artist’s books.
Wendy McGrath
(she/her)
Poet of Averbury
.
Ola Bjelica is the pen name of a scholar living in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal who took up poetry in response to pandemic isolation and overwhelm in 2021. The Solitudes will be her first published work.
She spends her free time running (from her problems) and reading (about other people’s).
Kim McCollum’s work explores relationships between digital and analog, old and new, hand and machine. As technology advances and our world shifts towards the digital, society is losing the tacit and material knowledge formed by making things by hand. McCollum’s work explores how ancient craft practices and contemporary technology are inextricably linked.
Evelyn Elgie is a queer white settler-Canadian who recently finished her MA from UBC's Social Justice Institute. Her poetic, academic, and artistic practice grapples with difficult questions around decolonization, responsibility, land, and water, trying to unlearn settler perspectives and think through different possibilities for living and loving. She moves across the country with the seasons, spending her summers planting trees in northern Ontario and her winters immersed in queer theory, art, and equity work in Vancouver.
Jasmine Gui is an interdisciplinary artist and arts programmer whose work explores intersectional histories, counter-archivals, invisible labours, translations, traversals, and grief. Her work has been featured in publications such as GUTS, Inheritance, The Spectatorial, Panorama Journal, Softblow, ricepaper, and Hart House Review. Her first chapbook boke, was published with words(on)pages. She is the mother of two bunnies and an emerging tea sommelier who also unapologetically loves bubble tea.
Kate Finegan is a fiction writer whose work is supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. She is editor-in-chief ofLongleaf Reviewand novel/novella editor for Split/Lip Press. She was runner-up forThe Puritan’s Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for a story featuring chickens which, according to judge Heather O’Neill, “have the personality and depth of Dickensian characters.” She grew up mostly in Tennessee and recently moved from Toronto to Saskatchewan with her spouse and two cats.
Customer name
(she/her)
Author of The Size of Texas
www.katefinegan.ink
Rebecca is a Toronto based poet and recent graduate from York University's Creative Writing program. Heavily influenced by Mexican icons such Frida Khalo and Ocatvio Paz, Rebecca aims to analyze, reconcile and interrogate the relationship of her education and her cultural identity. When she isn't writing Rebecca is arranging flowers, interning, cuddling her kittens and working events around the city.
Joyce is a sculptor and poet. Her art focuses on mood and testimony. As her chronic pain reminds her constantly of the universal existential crisis and her hope for spiritual satisfaction, she explores the tension between the two: what it means to be broken and what it means to desire to become whole. Her art cannot be disconnected from her body or story. She delights in inviting others to wear her sculptures and tell their own story and start a conversation about how the art around us symbolizes what we are going through.
