Vancouver Noir

About the Contributors

Carleigh Baker is a Cree-Métis/Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays and The Journey Prize Anthology. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings, was published in 2017.

Kristi Charish is a scientist and writer from Vancouver. She is the author of Owl and the Japanese Circus, about a modern-day “Indiana Jane” who reluctantly navigates the hidden supernatural world; and The Voodoo Killings, about a voodoo practitioner living in Seattle with the ghost of a deceased grunge rocker. Kristi writes about what she loves — adventure-heavy stories featuring strong, savvy female protagonists, pop culture, with the occasional RPG fantasy game thrown in the mix.

Don English’s stories and essays have appeared in Medium, Poetry Is Dead, and the Vancouver Courier. Born and raised in Vancouver, he has spent his life under dark clouds and on rain-slicked streets.

R.M. Greenaway lives in Nelson, British Columbia. Cold Girl, the first in her BC Blues crime series, won the 2014 Unhanged Arthur Ellis Award (Best Unpublished), and went on to be released by Dundurn Press in March 2016. Undertow followed in 2017, Creep in 2018, and Flights & Falls is up next. The series, a character-driven police procedural set in North Vancouver, is ongoing.

Dietrich Kalteis is the award-winning author of Ride the Lightning, The Deadbeat Club, Triggerfish, House of Blazes, and Zero Avenue. Nearly fifty of his short stories have been published internationally, and he lives with his family in West Vancouver.

Sheena Kamal holds an HBA in political science from the University of Toronto, and was awarded a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around the issue of homelessness. Kamal has also worked as a crime and investigative journalism researcher for the film and television industry — academic knowledge and experience that inspired her debut novel, The Lost Ones. She lives in Vancouver.

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and Hexen Sabbath. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Hard Sentences: Crime Fiction Inspired by Alcatraz, Long Island Noir, and many fantasy, horror, and literary venues. He coedited the Locus Award — nominated Japanese mystery/science-fiction anthology Hanzai Japan with Masumi Washington, and the hybrid cocktail recipe/flash fiction anthology Mixed Up with Molly Tanzer.

Linda L. Richards is the award-winning author of fifteen books, including three series of novels featuring strong female protagonists. She is the former publisher of Self-Counsel Press and the founder and publisher of January Magazine. Richards divides her time between Vancouver, Phoenix, and Paso Robles, California.

Nathan Ripley is the pseudonym of Naben Ruthnum. Ripley’s first novel, Find You in the Dark, was published in March 2018. Ruthnum writes fiction and criticism, and Ripley is almost finished with his next thriller.

Robin Spano lives in Lions Bay, British Columbia, with her husband and daughter. She writes the Clare Vengel mystery series, serves on the board of the Lions Bay Arts Council, and spends as much time outdoors as possible. She’s a member of the Green Party and a peaceful activist against climate change.

Timothy Taylor is a Vancouver writer whose first novel was Stanley Park. He’s since published a collection of short fiction, Silent Cruise, and two other novels: Story House and The Blue Light Project, which won the CBC Bookie Award. His latest book, Foodville, is a memoir about his life as a food critic, and his newest novel is The Rule of Stephens.

Yasuko Thanh is the author of the novel Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, which won the 2016 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; and the collection Floating Like the Dead, winner of the Journey Prize. In 2013 the CBC hailed her as a “writer to watch.” Her work has been translated into three languages. She lives in Victoria with her two children and plays in a punk band in her spare time.

Sam Wiebe is the author of the Vancouver crime novels Last of the Independents, Invisible Dead, and Cut You Down. His work has won an Arthur Ellis Award and the Kobo Emerging Writers Prize, and he was the 2016 Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence. His short fiction has appeared in ThugLit, Spinetingler, and subTerrain, among other places.

S.G. Wong, an Arthur Ellis Award finalist and Whistler Independent Book Award nominee, writes the Lola Starke series and Crescent City short stories: hard-boiled detective tales set in an alternate-history 1930s-era “Chinese LA,” replete with ghosts and magic. She speaks four languages, usually only curses in one of them, and can often be found staring out the window in between frenzied bouts of typing.