Writers - Surnames S

Maïca Sanconie

Maïca Sanconie , Ph D., is a writer and a literary translator from English and Italian into French. A freshly retired associate lecturer at Avignon University, where she co-directed the Master in Literary Translation, she co-organized several conferences on painting and on translation, such as : "A Visual Arts Encounter: African Americans and Europe", Université de Paris III (1994) ; "Literary Translation as Creation" (Avignon Université, 2015) ; "Towards an Anthropology of Translation? Divergences and convergences in cultures and heritages" (Avignon Université, 2017). She also wrote numerous articles on translation, notably for the journals Meta (University of Montréal) and Palimpsestes (Université de Paris-Sorbonne Nouvelle). As a writer, she has published short stories in various journals as well as three novels with Quidam Editeur. She is currently writing a novel related to Jean Giono, and is in the process of publishing an epic poem inspired by a Renaissance painting.

Flora Schildknecht

Flora K. Schildknecht is the author of the short story collection Megafauna (2018), and she is Editor of the literarily journal The Louisville Review. Her short fiction has appeared in various journals and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her essays have appeared in The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts, The Harold Pinter Review, and others. She received an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and a PhD in Comparative Humanities from the University of Louisville. Currently, she teaches fiction and nonfiction at Bellarmine University and teaches courses in global arts and literature at U. Louisville. Her love of travel has taken her to Singapore, Japan, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Argentina, Mexico, Ireland, Great Britain, and to Scandinavia and much of Europe. She lives in Louisville, KY, with her husband and their son.

Carmelinda Scian

Carmelinda Scian is a prize winning author who has been published in Litro, Belletrist, Prairie Fire, Accenti, the Fiddlehead, the San Antonio Review, Magnolia, the Antigonish Review, the Hong Kong Review, CaMel, Grain and other literary journals. “Yellow Watch” was nominated for the 2018 Journey Prize. Her first novel, Yellow Watch, The Journey of a Portuguese Woman, published by Mawenzi House Publishers in Toronto, was launched in 2022 and is completing her next short-story collection. “River Crossings” has been included in Best Canadian Short Stories, Biblioasis, 2023. Her work has been anthologized, the last story, “The Petals of Yellow Roses” in Pure Slush, Australia, 2024, and she has been a participant in various readings and conferences. She emigrated from Portugal and lives in Toronto.

Katie Singer

Dr. Katie Singer most recently published a personal essay on her religious journey, “En Route to Damascus,” in Taint Taint Taint Magazine. She has been awarded the Nancy Zafris Short-Story Fellowship at Porches Writing Retreat in Norwood Virginia where she continued work on a collection of linked stories about women "of a certain age." Singer has a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. An independent scholar, Singer’s latest book is How We Got To Newark: Stories Of The Great Migration. Incredible stories based on oral histories of the Great Migration. She has another book under contract, as co-author on a memoir of a previously incarcerated friend. She is a board member of the Society for the Study of the Short Story.

Tracey Slaughter

Tracey Slaughter is a short story writer, poet and personal essayist from Aotearoa New Zealand, whose recent works include The Girls in the Red House are Singing (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2024), Devil's Trumpet (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2021), Conventional Weapons (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2019) and deleted scenes for lovers (Te Herenga Waka Press, 2016). Her work has received numerous international awards including The Moth Short Story Prize 2024, The Calibre Essay Prize 2024, The Manchester Poetry Prize 2023, The Fish Short Story Prize 2020, the Bridport Prize 2014, and two BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. In 2020 her novella if there is no shelter was runner-up in the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award and was published in the UK by Ad Hoc Press, and in 2018 she came second in The Moth Short Story Prize, was a finalist in the Mslexia Fiction Prize, and came second in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She won the Landfall Essay Prize 2015 and was the recipient of the Louis Johnson New Writer's Bursary in 2010. She teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato where she edits the journals Mayhem and Poetry Aotearoa. She has collaborated on a libretto with poet Nida Fiazi, and is currently working with Liam Hinton on a screenplay adaptation of her novella The Longest Drink in Town.

Anna Solding

Anna Solding is a writer, editor and publisher. She is the founder and managing director of MidnightSun Publishing, an Australian publishing company, and the co-founder and co-director of The Australian Short Story Festival. MidnightSun’s books have won both national and international awards and received high praise from reviewers for their innovative style and content. Anna is passionate about supporting writers, unearthing new Australian talent and she loves how far and wide her literary interests have taken her. Her ‘novel constellation’ The Hum of Concrete was published in 2012.

Maria Pia Spadafora

A native of Calabria, Maria Pia Spadafora is a teacher, a freelance translator and a creative writer. She holds an MA in Modern Languages and Literature from the University of Calabria. She translated from English into Italian short stories and poems by several Italian-Canadian writers, such as Delia De Santis, Darlene Madott, and Sonia Di Placido. In April 2020, she translated from Spanish to Italian the story of the short film nominated for Premio Goya 2020, Laura Zamora's El árbol de las almas perdidas, published on Amazon kindle. Maria Pia is currently the Vice-President of the AICW. She lives and works in Milan.

Tim Struthers

J.R. (TIM) STRUTHERS is highly respected throughout Canada and internationally by scholars and creative writers for his work as a bibliographer, an interviewer, a literary critic, an editor and publisher of Red Kite Press. To date he has edited some thirty volumes of theory, criticism, autobiography, short stories and poetry over a period, it amuses him to say, of six different decades. Among these titles, published by Guernica Editions in 2020, are Alice Munro Country and Alice Munro Everlasting. Tim has been publishing on Canadian literature for some fifty years, beginning, in 1975, with the first two scholarly articles world-wide on Alice Munro and including, in the past decade, a dozen or more articles on Munro. Recently he contributed a substantial commentary on Munro’s 1986 story collection The Progress of Love to Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books: A Suite in Four Voices (2024), co-authored by Tim, Ailsa Cox, Corinne Bigot, and Catherine Sheldrick Ross and published by Edinburgh University Press. He has conducted some forty interviews with Canadian writers, including two published interviews with Munro, and has been described by W.J. Keith, FRSC, as “probably the best literary interviewer in Canada.” Recognized for the delight he has taken in all of his publishing activities, and for the enthusiasm he has imparted as a university teacher, Tim organized and hosted the largest celebration in history of Canadian literature and culture: the epic five-and-a-half-day and five-evening A Visionary Tradition: Canadian Literature and Culture at the Turn of the Millennium conference, held in Guelph from 10 to 15 November 1999.

On 31 August 2022 Tim brought to a close a fifty-year university teaching career, including some thirty-seven years full-time at the University of Guelph commencing appropriately for a Canadianist on Canada Day, 1 July 1985. Tim lives in Guelph with his bride of nearly fifty years, poet and short story writer and scholar Marianne Micros, inspired and delighted by the company of their two daughters, Eleni and Joy, and their four grandchildren, Matteo, Rowan, Asher, and Reed.

Kuan Sun

A Singaporean native of Beijing, Kuan Sun holds a Master of Arts from Nanjing University. Kuan Sun is a member of the Singapore Literature and Art Association, the Singapore Writers' Association, the European Chinese Literature PEN, and a permanent member of the Southeast Asian Chinese Poet Association, among others. Her literary career commenced in 2018. Since 2019, she published the autobiographical prose anthology The Best Is Meeting You, the poetry collection Over the Rivers and Sea, The Moon and Tulips, the non-fiction narrative A City under the Bleak Moon, and the fiction short story collections Love of Ice, Love of Fire, and The Singapore Lizard. A Variety of Tulips is a unique album showcasing both Kuan Sun's poetry and reproductions of her oil paintings.

Kuan Sun's poetic prowess has garnered numerous accolades. In 2019, she was awarded first place in the Three-line Poetry Competition. Her non-fiction story ‘Side by Side’ earned the ‘Outstanding Award’ distinction in the 4th Fangxiu Literature Award in 2021. In 2022, she claimed the first prize in the 4th Xinxingling International Chinese Poetry Competition. Her achievement was further solidified in 2023 with the 19th Dianchi Literature Award for the Best Southeast Asian Chinese Literature. Her poetry collection The Moon and Tulips was selected for the Annual Poetry Collection Award of the 6th Boao International Poetry Festival in the same year.

In January 2023, Kuan Sun held her inaugural solo oil painting exhibition at the Singapore Black Earth Museum.

Kuan Sun’s contact information

Address: Block 2C, Boon Tiong Road, #19-09, Singapore 166002

Tel: +65-90294305

Email: kuansun68@gmail.com

17th International Conference on the Short Story in English