Growing Room

About Room

Room is Canada’s oldest feminist literary journal, and has published fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, art, interviews, and book reviews since 1975. Published quarterly by the West Coast Feminist Literary Magazine Society, also known as the Growing Room Collective, Room showcases writing and art by people of all marginalized genders, including cis and trans women, trans men, nonbinary and two spirit people. We believe in publishing emerging writers alongside established authors, and because of this, approximately 90% of the work we publish comes from unsolicited submissions or contest entries.

Works that originally appeared in Room have been anthologized in The Journey Prize AnthologyBest Canadian PoetryBest Canadian Stories, and Best Canadian Essays, and have been nominated for National Magazine Awards.

Growing Room Event

The Growing Room Collective

The Growing Room Collective includes all staff and editorial board members of Room. We have a unique editorial model, and each issue of the magazine is edited by a different team from our editorial board. Check out our submissions page for more information.

If you would like to join the Growing Room Collective, please complete our application form. (Note we are not always recruiting, but we do keep applications on file for when we do.) 

Don’t want to read or edit, but still want to get involved? Join our pool of events volunteers! Register via our form.

Room Collective Members

Melissa Barrientos

Melissa Barrientos

Melissa Barrientos is a freelance editor, who enjoys spending her days editing manuscripts and helping self-publishing authors share their work with the world. She holds a HBA in English and Professional Writing & Communication from the University of Toronto and a certificate in Publishing from Ryerson University. Melissa is the co-founder of Archetype: A Literary Journal and volunteer for Editors Canada, gritLIT, and Room. When she is not editing or reading, she is writing about life back home in Lima, Peru.

Lena Belova

Lena Belova

Lena Belova is a writer and artist living on unceded Coast Salish territories. They hold a BA in Creative Writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University and are the former poetry editor and managing editor for pulpMAG. They have self-published two poetry chapbooks trichinella and happy to meet u. Writing across many forms and genres, their writing explores freedom and lack thereof.

Serena Lukas Bhandar

Serena Lukas Bhandar

Serena Lukas Bhandar is a Punjabi/Welsh/Irish transfemme writer, water witch, and workshop facilitator living as a settler on Lekwungen and WSANEC lands. Her Pushcart Prize-nominated writing has appeared in Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color and Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, among other places. She currently splits her time between providing inclusive sexuality education to middle-schoolers, supporting survivors of sexualized violence with the Anti-Violence Project, and mentoring trans, two-spirit, and non-binary youth through the Trans Tipping Point project.

Monica Calderon

Monica Calderon

Monica is from the Philippines and moved to Canada in 2008. After graduating from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila with a BFA, she worked in animation, publishing, training and graphic design. She has a business providing graphic and web design services to non-profit groups and small businesses. She is an avid runner and dabbles in photography. Check out her portfolio at monicadesigns.ca.

Claire Diamant

Claire Diamant

Claire Diamant is a writer, editor and actress from the unceded territory of the Lkwungen (Lekwungen) peoples, and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations. Despite having written obsessively for as long as she can remember, she still can’t spell simultaneously without voice-to-text. New Earth Bandits, a play she wrote and performed in, was runner-up for Best Storytelling at the Victoria Fringe Festival.

Ashton Diduck

Ashton Diduck

Ashton Diduck is a queer writer currently residing in Tiohtià:ke. He graduated from the Honours English and Creative Writing program at Concordia University in 2023. You can find previously published work in New Note Poetry, Eavesdrop Magazine, carte blanche, or forthcoming in Montreal Review of Books and The Capilano Review. @scumb0yyy on Instagram.

Meagan Dyer

Meagan Dyer (she/her) works in publishing in the roles of production editing and digital accessibility. She is also an occasional writer of short stories and essays, and holds a Bachelors of Arts from Vancouver Island University. She is a big champion of flexible style guides, open listening, and using her privilege to help break down barriers in the publishing industry. Her early years were spent in a small farming community on Treaty 7 territory (outside Calgary) before moving west to the beautiful and unceded Coast Salish territories. Today, she lives in what is now known as Vancouver with her partner and her Great Dane/bullmastiff, Gaston.

Ellen Chang-Richardson

Ellen Chang-Richardson

Ellen Chang-Richardson is an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent living on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg. The author/co-author of six poetry chapbooks, their writing has appeared in journals and anthologies across Turtle Island including Augur, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Ex-Puritan, third coast magazine and Watch Your Head. They are an editorial member of Room magazine, a poetry editor for long con magazine, the co-founder of Riverbed Reading Series and a member of the poetry collective VII. Blood Belies (Wolsak & Wynn) is their debut collection.

Candace Fertile

Candace Fertile

Candace Fertile has a PhD in English literature from the University of Alberta. She teaches English at Camosun College in Victoria, B.C. and writes book reviews for several Canadian publications. She joined the collective in 2004.

Ruchika Gothoskar

Ruchika Gothoskar

Ruchika Gothoskar is an editor, writer, reader, researcher, and settler, currently living and learning on the territory of the Anishinabek, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Ojibway/Chippewa peoples, in Ontario. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University, and a Master of Arts in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies from York University. Ruchika is interested in anti-carceral responses to harm, reading more stories by authors of colour, and one day living by the ocean.

Sadie Graham

Sadie Graham

Sadie is a writer of essays, reviews, and fiction and a web editor at SAD Magazine. Her work has been published by EVENT Magazine, Room Magazine, Electric Literature, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Toronto Star, Vice, Buzzfeed, The Drift, and more.

Kendra Heinz

Kendra Heinz

Kendra Heinz is a Montreal-based reader, writer, editor, and former lawyer. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Carleton University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Calgary. Kendra is an editor at a children’s book publisher and spends much of her free time working one-on-one with emerging writers to edit and evaluate short stories and manuscripts. In addition to her role at Room, Kendra is a member of Editors Canada, a volunteer with The Malahat Review, and reading a new book or graphic novel every few days.

Anna Shah Hoque

Anna Shah Hoque

Anna Shah Hoque is a diasporic South Asian-Persian curator, SSHRC doctoral candidate, and adjunct professor at Concordia University and McGill University. She is based in Tiohtiá:ke|Montreal. Her research examines the relationship between contemporary visual arts and archive-making among Indigenous and South Asian artists and curators in “Canada.” She has contributed to publications such as Esse and the Canadian Journal of Communication, with forthcoming publications in C Magazine, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Amherst College Press.

Aris Keshav

Aris Keshav

Aris Keshav is a poet and teacher living in Tio’tia:ke (Montréal) and studying English at Concordia University. Their writing has appeared in CV2, The New Quarterly, Canadian Notes & Queries, and elsewhere. Their debut chapbook TAUNTING AUGUST was published in 2022 by Ethel Zine and Micro-Press. You can find their collage poetry on Instagram at @ambiance.queer.

Raheela Khan

Raheela Khan

Raheela Khan is an independent Business Advisory Consultant currently based in Vancouver leading community awareness programs on the importance of cultural confidence, integration, diversity, and avoidance of self-exclusion. Raheela is an alumnus of Oxford and Yale University, and a Yale World Fellow. She currently sits on several boards including the National Board of Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada, The Power of Play, and Birth Mark, and ROOM Magazine.

Micah Killjoy

Micah Killjoy was born and raised on coastal Salish land. They are a writer, editor, and BFA student at the University of British Columbia. They enjoy urban exploration, daydreaming, doggo walks, and solarpunk aesthetics.

Holly Lam

Holly Lam

Holly Lam is a Chinese/Scottish/Irish settler living on the territories of the Lekwungen people. She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria and her fiction has been published in carte blanchePlenitude, and Grain. Holly currently works in theatre administration and loves storytelling for its ability to create compassion, representation, and change. When not reading and writing, she listens to podcasts, absorbs moderately useless knowledge about queer celebrity news and TV shows, and cares for her many house plants.

Annick MacAskill

Annick MacAskill

Annick MacAskill’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad, including Room, Plenitude, Prism, Canadian Notes & Queries, Arc, The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Poetry, and The Stinging Fly. Her debut collection, No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the Atlantic Book Awards’ J.M. Abraham Poetry Award. Her second collection is due to be published by Gaspereau in the spring of 2020. She currently lives and writes in Kjipuktuk (Halifax) on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.

Nara Monteiro

Nara Monteiro

Nara Monteiro (they/she) is a Brazilian-Canadian writer, editor, and nerd who crunches numbers, sends snail mail, and hosts events as Room Magazine’s Publisher. After hours, find them working on a Master of Publishing from Simon Fraser University and flexing their editorial muscles. After-after hours, they spend their time devouring books and running off to the mountains.

Nara was born in São Paulo, Brazil on Purí, Tekohá (Guarani), and Mbya land. They were raised under Treaty 13 in Toronto on traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat peoples. Today Nara lives in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) lands.

Rose Morris

Rose Morris

Rose Morris has been a member of Room’s editorial collective since 2013. She holds a Masters degree in literature from the University of Victoria. In addition to her role at Room, Rose is a content writer for a marketing agency, a volunteer for The Malahat Review, and occasionally a poet.

Crystal Peng

Crystal Peng

Crystal Peng lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. She reads for EX/POST and edits for Flat Ink. When not writing, she spends her time propagating succulents, listening to the Goldberg Variations, or in a wikipedia rabbithole about oysters.

Tara Preissl

Tara Preissl

Tara Preissl is Scottish, Austrian, Hungarian, Stó:lō, and has ancestral roots in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation. She is a member of Leq’á:mel First Nation, but was raised in an urban environment on the unceded lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəjˀəm, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She is a writer and editor with pieces featured in SAD Mag and Understorey Magazine and is currently a member of the Indigenous Brilliance Collective. Currently, she resides in Wet’suwet’en territory.

Gitanjali Divisha Bal

Gitanjali Divisha Bal

Gitanjali Divisha Bal is a writer and editor living in Tkaronto. She’s currently working on her thesis novella. Her work can be found in Kiwi Collective, Potted Purple and Room.

Ellie Sawatzky

Ellie Sawatzky

Ellie Sawatzky is a poet and fiction writer from Kenora, Ontario. Her debut poetry collection, None of This Belongs to Me (Nightwood Editions), a selection of which was shortlisted for the 2019 Bronwen Wallace Award, was released in October 2021. A past winner of CV2’s Foster Poetry Prize and runner up for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize, her work has been published widely in literary magazines across North America. She works as an editor for FriesenPress and curates the Instagram account @impromptuprompts, a hub for prompts and literary inspiration. Ellie lives in Vancouver with her partner and a cat named Camus.

Geffen Semach

Geffen Semach

Geffen Semach, originally from Vancouver, now lives in Toronto where she works at Penguin Random House Canada. For the last few years, she was living in London, England, where she worked as a Literary Agent’s Assistant at Aitken Alexander. Geffen has also worked at Profile Books and in foreign rights at Andrew Nurnberg Associates in London. She has been an online editor, a creative copywriter at a marketing agency, as well as held an editorial assistant position with The Nabokov Online Journal. Geffen completed the Columbia Publishing Course at Oxford University in 2017.

Jane Shi

Jane Shi

Jane Shi is a queer Chinese settler living on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her writing can be found in Poetry Is Dead, LooseLeaf Magazine, Canthius, and PRISM International, among others. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated. You can find her online at @pipagaopoetry

Sylvia Symons

Sylvia Symons

Sylvia Symons is a poet and essayist who grew up in Lheidli T’enneh territory in North-central B.C. She currently lives with her family in Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver) and teaches ESL at a community college. Her writing appears in Best Canadian Poetry 2016, EVENT, Geist, Room, Prairie Fire, CV2, The Sustenance Anthology (Anvil Press), Thimbleberry, and Arc Poetry Magazine. 

Rachel Thompson

Rachel Thompson

Rachel Thompson is a poet and memoirist, former Managing Editor at Room, and current editorial collective member. She is a settler-Canadian, born on Treaty 1 territory and raised on Treaty 2 territory in Manitoba. She has also lived on the traditional territories of the Kanien’kehá:ka, and the Anishinabeg peoples in Montreal, Quebec, and on the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh lands in Vancouver, B.C. She teaches writing courses at rachelthompson.co. Find her on Twitter: @rachelthompson and Instagram: @rachelthompsonauthor.

Shristi Uprety

Shristi Uprety

Shristi Uprety (she/her) is a Nepali writer from Kathmandu, living and working on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples in Vancouver BC. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia, and she is the managing editor of ROOM Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @_ShristiUprety.

Délani Valin

Délani Valin

Délani Valin is a Cree-Métis writer living on Snuneymuxw traditional territory. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Vancouver Island University. Her poetry has been awarded The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, subTerrain’s Lush Triumphant Award, and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2018. She has read for Room’s Indigenous Brilliance series, and her work has also appeared in Exile Editions’ Those Who Make Us, Adbusters, and Soliloquies Anthology, among others.

Eleni Vlahiotis

Eleni Vlahiotis

Eleni Vlahiotis is a Vancouver-based writer, editor, and critic. She works as an editor for The Conversation Canada and is a freelance reviewer of fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Master of Journalism from UBC and is pursuing a Master in Gender Studies at Simon Fraser University. In her spare time, she enjoys reading and writing fantasy and speculative fiction that pushes the boundaries of their respective genres. Find her @elenitrena and at elenivlahiotis.com.

Natalie Wee

Natalie Wee

Natalie Wee is a queer creator whose work is deeply informed by grassroots communities. She wrote two poetry collections, Our Bodies & Other Fine Machines (San Press, 2021) and Beast At Every Threshold (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). Born in Singapore to Malaysian parents, Natalie is currently a settler in Tkaronto.

Kailee Wakeman

Kailee Wakeman

Kailee Wakeman (she/her) is a Prairie-raised non-profit leader based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). She holds degrees in studio arts, literature, and education, and would love to collect more. Kailee is an editor and co-founder of the digital arts & literature quarterly, long con magazine. She is also a printmaker, painter, textile artist, gardener, and wants to play all the sports all the time.

Administration

Managing Editor
Shristi Uprety
managingeditor [at] roommagazine [dot] com
submissions [at] roommagazine [dot] com

Publisher
Nara Monteiro
circulation [at] roommagazine [dot] com
publisher [at] roommagazine [dot] com
outreach [at] roommagazine [dot] com

Marketing and Communications Lead
Natalie Wee
marketing [at] roommagazine [dot] com

Book Reviews Editor
Micah Killjoy
reviews [at] roommagazine [dot] com

Contest Coordinator
Ruchika Gothoskar
contests [at] roommagazine [dot] com

Website Manager
Monica Calderon
monica[at]roommagazine[dot]com

Indigenous Brilliance Collective
indigenousbrilliance [at] roommagazine [dot] com

 

 

Editorial Board

Melissa Barrientos, Lena Belova, Serena Lukas Bhandar, Claire Diamant, Ashton Diduck, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Candace Fertile, Ruchika Gothoskar, Sadie Graham, Michelle Ha, Kendra Heinz, Aris Keshav, Micah Killjoy, Holly Lam, Hope Lauterbach, Annick MacAskill, Nara Monteiro, Rose Morris, Crystal Peng, Tara Preissl, Rebecca Russell, Ivy Sarker, Ellie Sawatzky, Geffen Semach, Jane Shi, Sylvia Symons, Rachel Thompson, Shristi Uprety, Délani Valin, Eleni Vlahiotis, Kailee Wakeman

Board of Directors

Meagan Dyer, Anna Shah Hoque, Jane Hope, Raheela Khan, Rose Morris

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