Kerrie Penney is blessed to live and create on the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, in what is now known as southern Alberta. Her words have appeared in The New Quarterly, Funny Pearls UK, the YYC Poet Laureate project This Might Help, blue buffalo, The Short Edition short story dispenser and The Globe and Mail. Her first chapbook My Garden Alphabet was released in 2022. She wrote and directed the documentary Cat Call: The Other C Word, penned and narrated a short film for Burning Man’s Ursa Mater installation, and attended the Banff Centre Literary Arts Residency in 2018 and 2019.
When Kimberlee Jones isn’t arguing about the beauty of the Oxford comma, she writes poetry and advertising copy and takes photographs she can paint much, much later. She’s a PR pro living in Calgary, AB, happily serving her grumpy grey cat yet another flavour of food. Her work appears in Wondershift, the 2021 AWCS 40th Anniversary Anthology. Two of the poems in the Uncommon Grounds Anthology have also appeared in her recent Chapbook The Night Sky Cries. Look for her new anthology The Fates, due out May 30, 2024.
Laurie Anne Fuhr is a poet and musician based in Calgary, Alberta. Her first collection night flying was published by Frontenac House in 2018. Her work has also appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies such as Leonard Cohen: You’re Our Man (Foundation for Public Poetry, Montreal), Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets (Broken Jaw Press 2000), Bywords, Peter F. Yacht Club, THIS Magazine, and Nod Magazine. She is a poetry instructor with Alexandra Writers Centre Society in Calgary.
LINDA HATFIELD is a retired teacher who finds solace in writing poetry. She is also penning a CNF/Memoir about family. Her poems have been published in the ARTA magazine, the YYC POP online exhibit, the WCWF Anthology in 2021 and in Uncommon Grounds, the EPC anthology published during the pandemic. Most recently, Linda was both First Runner Up and Honourable Mention in the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, in The New Quarterly in 2023. When not engaged with the written word, Linda loves to travel, garden, and create with paint. She lives in Calgary with her husband, Rick Smith. Lindahatfield55@icloud.com
Sharon Christie wrote her first poem at 16 and was hooked. She is coming to the end of her first career in mental health and writing about health; joyfully able to spend more time with her first love. She has eclectic interests and believes that all knowledge has value
Alumni
Crystal Andrushko is a writer and poet in Calgary, Canada where she met the incredible women who subsequently formed the Espresso Poetry Collective. She’s equal parts spicy, sweet, and salty.
A mother, a wife, and a psychologist, Yulit Price played with poetry as a girl growing up and still continues to play with words. She is a collector of life stories, and is forever humbled by the humanity she encounters both in her professional and personal life. Inspired by the Espresso Poetry Collective in Calgary, her poetry touches the therapeutic, humanistic, and socio-political threads woven into her everyday living.
Espresso Poetry Collective 