The Porcupine's Quill

Stefan Berg revives the wordless graphic novel in his portrait of the ‘first man of jazz’. Very little is known of Buddy Bolden. His music was never recorded and there is only one existing photograph, yet he is considered to be the first bandleader to play the improvised music that has since become known as jazz.

2008—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

Borderline is a skewed coming-of-age story of a normal boy in a crazy world -- a fast-paced world of high-tech gismos, global air travel and antibiotics, a world in which high schools have replaced cafeterias with fast food counters and the scourges of autism, asthma, allergies, diabetes and obesity are the norm.

2008—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

2008—Independent Publisher (IPPY) awards,
Runner-up

A posthumous collection of uncommon plainsong from the poet Richard Outram, with drawings by Thoreau MacDonald.

2008—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

The Mad Hatter of the contemporary Canadian graphic arts, wood engraver George A. Walker considers the passage of time as it unfolds from the pages of his personal dream diary.

2008—Independent Publisher (IPPY) awards,
Runner-up

[ Lipogram: a composition from which the writer rejects all words that contain a certain letter or letters. ]

JonArno Lawson, addict of wordplay and lover of children’s poetry, has created a collection of lipograms written for children. The idea behind A Voweller’s Bestiary is a simple one: an alphabet book based on vowel combinations, rather than on initial letters. This is vowel language applied to the animal kingdom.

2008—IPPY Moonbeam Award,
Shortlisted

2009—ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year,
Shortlisted

2009—The Lion and the Unicorn Award,
Winner

‘P. K. Page shares with her 17th-century predecessors, such as John Donne, a refusal to separate head and heart. What you hear in her work is the sound of intelligence brought crisply into focus.’

2003—Griffin Prize for Poetry (Canada),
Shortlisted

2003—Globe Top 100,
Commended

2008—New England Book Festival,
Commended

First-time novelist Mary-Lou Zeitoun’s 13 wryly evokes an unavoidable time and place in everyone’s life -- the teenage years -- without rendering the experience into saccharine nostalgia. Zeitoun’s imitation of the adolescent voice is dead-on, without falling into repetitious teenspeak.

2008—New England Book Festival,
Winner

The nature of truth in art, and most particularly in fiction, is reconsidered in the guile of a conspiratorial domestic with attitude, fallen arches and an aversion to household appliances which complements perfectly her inability to consider orthotics or the ministrations of a podiatrist.

2008—ReLit Awards, Short Fiction,
Shortlisted

Abandoned by his wife (for spirituality and yoga, she says), a retired teacher surviving a hard winter on memory and jokes finds that life still has surprises in store for him. Including an attractive former student and an empty old church that he’s turned into a theatre. As Ingrid Ruthig of Canadian Notes & Queries wrote, ‘Smuggling Donkeys lacks nothing in largeness of thought or spirit’.

2008—ReLit Awards, Short Fiction,
Long-listed