Rahat Kurd was a finalist in the 2014 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize and named Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category of the 2013 Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Awards. Her essays have appeared in The Walrus and Maisonneuve magazines. She is a poet and a prose writer at work on a memoir about the making of Muslim culture in North America. Her work has been nominated for National Magazine Awards in the categories of Poetry and Personal Journalism (2011) and shortlisted for a CBC Literary Award (2007). She is the author of Reading Rights: A Woman’s Guide to the Law in Canada (Quarry Press, 1999).
Sumayya Syed is a poet, translator, and graduate student of sociology living in Kashmir. Her poems have appeared in The Puritan, KashmirLit, and The Shoreline Review.