Hugh Greer was born and raised in Burnaby, British Columbia. After graduating from Burnaby Central Secondary School, he completed his Bachelor of Education degree at the University of British Columbia. He began his teaching career with the Vancouver School District in 1973. After nine years of classroom teaching, during which time he completed his Master of Education Degree in Counselling Psychology, he became a high school counsellor. Eleven years later he was promoted to the position of high school vice principal. After 35 years working in education, Hugh retired in 2009. Hugh now lives in Ladner, BC with his wife Wendy. He has two adult daughters and three young grandsons. He enjoys travelling the world, watching English Premier League Football and driving his 1969 MGB. After marking the writing of others for most of his career, at age 71, Hugh decided to venture into the realm of writing his own work. 11,000 Days at School is Hugh’s first published work.
Lysa Collins is an environmentalist, world traveler, poet and supporter of the Jane Goodall Institute and the African Wildlife Foundation. She currently lives in British Columbia. She writes haiku and other short forms of poetry, which appear both in English and in translation, locally, nationally, and internationally, in a variety of print and online publications.
Raised in B.C.’s Nicola Valley, John Graham Gillis is a Vancouver cardiologist and historian. His mother, Gertrude, was a younger sister of Wallace Chambers.
Lael Whitehead is a musician and writer who lives on Mayne Island, BC. Lael peforms and records with Jaiya (www.jaiya.ca), Banquo Folk Ensemble (www.banquo.ca) and the DanceHall Players. She has also recently published her first novel for children, Kaya Stormchild. Lael and her husband, architect Richard Iredale, raised their three daughters without formal schooling. Lael is a former editor of BC’s Home Education News magazine. She has published numerous articles on alternative education, including one recent collection in Wendy Priesnitz’s Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier.
Ann Pearson grew up in Suffolk, England, did an Honours degree in French at the University of London before moving to Vancouver where she completed a Ph. D in French literature. Subsequently, she taught French for a number of years before joining the Arts One programme at the University of British Columbia. When she is not at her desk, she is happiest in muddy jeans and wild hair tending her garden, or pursuing Stendhal and other characters down the byways of Europe in the company of her historian partner, Allan.
She is currently working on a second Napoleonic era novel, set in Cornwall this time.
Joseph S. Werlin (1900 – 1964) was the first PhD candidate at the University of Chicago approved for a proposed thesis on the origins of the Russian Revolution. In January 1928, he set out from Galveston, Texas, to study in Berlin and Moscow. His travel diary shows his curiosity to understand foreign ways and cultures, foretelling an unanticipated career turn.
At age 10, Joe’s immigrant parents moved their family from Philadelphia to Pearland, Texas. After a brief stint at Annapolis, he entered Rice Institute in the fall of 1920, completing a B.A. in European History. He earned an M.A. from University of Chicago in 1926, and a PhD., in 1931. The Great Depression, anti-Soviet fears, and anti-Semitism combined to dash opportunities in his chosen area of study. In 1934, he was offered a teaching appointment in Sociology on the first faculty of the University of Houston, where he remained until his death.
Joella Werlin was born and raised in Houston. Her Texas upbringing and outlook was differentiated from her peer group’s by summer travels with her professor father and journalist mother to Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba, where her father led international studies programs. She attended University of Texas/ Austin for one year before transferring to Connecticut College (New London), where she received a BA in European History. She holds a graduate Diploma in Anthropology from the University of Oxford. After marriage and living for several years on the East Coast, her family — with two young children, Adam Zivin and Joselyn Zivin — relocated to Portland, Oregon.
For 15 years, she served as Director of Public Affairs and Community Relations for the Portland ABC-TV affiliate. She later became a professional Personal Historian, helping individuals, families, and family-owned businesses preserve a permanent record of their life and career stories. Now retired, living in Seattle, Washington, “A Texas Greenhorn,” emerges from that most valued career experience.
A graduate of Vancouver College, Canadian author Anton Von Stefan spent his childhood growing up in Vancouver and Richmond, British Columbia. After working for forty-two years at the Pacific Grain Terminal on Vancouver’s waterfront, the author became a full-time writer. In his spare time, he briefly worked for the Herald and Times, a West Side newspaper and the City Drive News, an East End newspaper which unfortunately folded in late 2002.
For ten years, he organized murder mystery weekends at Mayne Island’s Springwater Lodge for Vancouver’s Pacific Ski Club. At precisely midnight on the first night the author would read one of his completed ghost stories. Since then, he has held author’s readings at Cole’s Books in Langford, Western Sky Books in Port Coquitlam and at his home in Delta, British Columbia, in North Sydney on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia; and twice in the author’s birth city of Vienna at Shakespeare and Company.
The author is currently in negotiations to bring A Very Strange Christmas! to the world stage and is working on his third book, The Curse of Count Louie Vincenti. You can read about the author and his work at: www.antonvonstefan.com
Gloria Allan began writing as a cub reporter in Toronto. Gloria married, raised five children and indulged her love of bridge, golf and travel. Never forgetting her love of writing, over the past several years she has written a novel and several short stories. While browsing in an antiquarian bookstore in London, England, she discovered a small book about Sisi, the beautiful and tragic Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Hungary. She immersed herself in Sisi’s story, researching and gathering material for her second novel, A Walk on Broken Glass. She lived in Montreal and now resides in West Vancouver.
Peter Marcus was born in Toronto on July 31, 1945. He moved to Vancouver in 1966. For many years he worked in health care, retiring in 2002. He was active in the Hospital Employees’ Union and in leftist politics. In his retirement he remains active, particularly with the Communist Party of Canada. His poetry attempts to reflect his socialist leanings.
Brigid Mylod is a dedicated practitioner and teacher of Ashtanga Yoga. For more than 12 years she has been using it and creating stories to develop children’s language skills in early education classrooms.
