About the 2015 Winners
Jeffrey Howe
email: mercilessidioms@gmail.com
Jeff Howe lives and works in the scenic Black Creek Bottoms area near St. Louis, Missouri. His short fiction appears in the anthology Moon Shot: Murder and Mayhem at the Edge of Space, at Untreed Reads.com, in the quarterly anthology The First Line, and at Smashwords. He ruminates at his blog, Merciless Idioms (http://jeffreyhowe.wordpress.com). Jeff’s novels are represented by Evan Gregory of the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.
Jeffrey Allen Russel
email: jeffreyrussel@gmail.com
Jeffrey Allen Russel, a Toronto-born author and photographer, Jeffrey’s passion for storytelling developed during his travels around the world. On one such journey to investigate his ancestral roots in Scotland, he discovered familial ties to a bloody period in history now known as the Highland Clearances–the ethnic cleansing of the Gaelic people.
A singer-songwriter in the 1970s, Jeffrey embarked on a writing career after spending 25 years as a real estate broker. As a writer, he has found a passion he never experienced in the world of business.
Lynda Lemberg
Lynda Lemberg is a retired secondary school teacher who has spent most of her adult life as an activist in the anti-racism, social justice, union, peace and international solidarity movements, including the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. A long-time grassroots leader in OSSTF (Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation), Lynda was the first recipient of OSSTF’s James Forester Human Rights Award. After retiring from teaching and counseling, Lynda worked as an acting coach and assistant to the director of festival-winning high school theater productions.
As a screenplay writer, Lynda has channeled her creative energy and passion for social justice into co-writing Grace, a multi-award winning, multi-nominated screenplay.