Brenda Niskala
Co-Executive Director

Brenda is a poet, fiction writer and an arts administrator. Brenda is one of the Co-Executive Directors for the Saskatchewan Publishers Group, and is active with the Saskatchewan Arts Alliance, the Saskatchewan Cultural Industries Development Council, the Survivors writing group, her own writing group(s), and an untold amount of other activities in the community and abroad.

In previous lives, she’s been employed as a crisis counselor, bush plane lawyer, writer-in-residence and a branch representative for ACTRA.

In 1998 she toured across Canada, from Fredericton to Nanaimo, with four other poets and their co-authored collection, Open 24 Hours (1997, Broken Jaw Press). Her book of poetry, Ambergris Moon (Thistledown Press), came out in 1983. Brenda’s work has been published in several anthologies: Lodestone (Fifth House), Sky High (Coteau), Dancing Visions (Thistledown), Heading Out (Coteau), Bridges 4 (Prentice-Hall), What is Already Known (Thistledown), in chapbooks, and in numerous magazines. Brenda has recently released a novella, Of All The Ways to Die (Quattro Books), and a collection of short fiction, For the Love of Strangers (Coteau Books), which was selected as one of the Canada Bookshelf books on CBC Radio in 2011. Brenda is currently working on a book about pirates, or physics, or pirate physicists. It’s very complicated.

She has served on the editorial boards of Grain, Briarpatch, and NeWest Review magazines, as well as Coteau Books, the executive of the League of Canadian Poets and the Saskatchewan Writers Guild. Brenda represented writers on the Canadian Reprography Collective (CanCopy), the Minister’s Advisory Committee for the Status of the Artist in Saskatchewan, the Film/Video Professional Development Co-ordinating Committee and the Regina Arts Commission. She taught Creative Writing for the University of Regina Extension Department, and Sage Hill Writing Experience and presented hundreds of readings and workshops in schools and libraries throughout the province over the last twenty years. She was the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Electronic Writer in Residence in 1994 and 1995, but hardly beeps at all anymore. Sometimes Brenda seems to be best at hoarding all the pens and pencils in the office.

Jillian Bell
Co-Executive Director

Jillian graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a degree in English. She returned to the U of S in to complete an advanced certification in Linguistics. Jillian has worked as a farm hand, a ranch hand, a nurse’s aid, a technical writer, writing and developing software and hardware documentation, as a freelance editor, a music teacher, an English tutor, a proofreader, a freelance writer, a freelance web designer and editor, and for several non-profit organisations before taking on the SPG role in 2001. She has done a little bit of very many different kinds of things.

Jillian was the host of the “Bookchick” radio programme on 91.3FM since the station’s first broadcast day in November of 2001 until June of 2010, with a brief sojourn in 2004 to hatch a podling. Jillian lives in Lumsden, just north of Regina, and when she is not at the SPG office, she is busy managing a football team, her squiggly family, her writing, the ever-growing stack of books to read, an only slightly debilitating obsession with role-playing games, and a very naughty garden. Jillian worked on the board of the Saskatchewan Book Awards for seven years and has been an active board member of Radius Communications/91.3FM CJTR, Wascana Daycare Co-operative, and the Flatland Regional Association of Gamers. An interesting but little-known fact about “the Bookchick” is that she wishes she had a vestigial tail.

In the seventh grade, Jillian won a writing contest and attended a writing workshop held at the local high school. One of the presenters at that workshop was none other than Brenda Niskala.

Captain Daniel Parr
Programs and Services Pirate

Daniel is a graduate of the University of Regina, and he arrived on the doorstep of the Saskatchewan Publishers Group Office in a three-piece black suit, with a book in his pocket. How could we say no?
Since 2008, Daniel has been an indispensible addition to the SPG team. He began his Internship doing research for the Saskatchewan Book Archive Database, and he conducted a Programs Survey for SPG members. After working with Daniel, it became obvious that he was such a welcome addition to the SPG team that we could not bear to let him go. Thus was SPG blessed with the new Programs and Services Pirate. Er. Officer. His experience working at Chapters/Indigo shows in the changing rotation of books on permanent display at the SPG office, and at book displays. As the manager of SPG’s Weekly Book Picks Program, Daniel makes sure our reviewers’ eyes are crossed and commas aren’t spliced, and he makes sure all the latest books published in the province are reviewed and submitted to teachers, librarians, weekly newspapers, other media, and to the people who sign up to receive book reviews each month. One more thing – Captain Dan is the editor of SaskF@cts, SPG’s bi-weekly membership newsletter, so if you have good news in publishing, send it his way!

Whether it is at book tables at one of SPG’s many displays throughout the province (or across Canada), at the office answering publishers’ questions, or making sure the sPG’s Inventory Database is up to date, Daniel is an enthusiastic, professional, approachable fellow.

Once, Daniel commandeered a ship in full-blown mutiny through the turgid waters off the Rock of Gibraltar. Tragically, the spoils were lost after a night of playing ‘knuckles’ to settle the question of where to moor.