Biographies of Board Members and Advisory Council Members

Gezahegn Mekonnen Demissie is an Ethiopian journalist and filmmaker, one of the founding members of PEN Ethiopia, and Executive Director of Bridge Entertainment. He currently lives in Toronto, Canada, where he publishes the community journal, and radio show/podcast, New Perspective አዲስ ቅኝት. He came to Canada in 2015 and has continued to develop projects about Ethiopia and the immigrant experience in exile. Tizita is his first short documentary for CBC Short Docs, which was produced in collaboration with Canadian production companies Primitive Entertainment and Rhombus Media. In 2019 he received the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada Award for providing exceptional journalism to the Ethiopian Community, and in 2021 he and his media New Perspective አዲስቅኝት received a community Champion award from Arif Varani, MP for Parkdale in High Park, Toronto.

Peter Donolo has served as a senior advisor to leaders in all three orders of government, including as the longest serving Director of Communications for a Canadian Prime Minister (The Rt Hon Jean Chretien). He is the former Vice Chair of Hill+ Knowlton Strategies Canada and was a partner at the Strategic Counsel. In both those positions, he provided strategic communications advice to CEOs and senior executives of some of Canada’s largest companies as well as to public agencies and government departments and ministries. He has also served as Senior Vice President of Air Canada, and as SVP of the 2015 Pan Am Games, Chief of Staff for the Leader of the Official Opposition (Michael Ignatieff) and Canadian Consul General in Milan, Italy. Peter is currently vice chair of the boards of directors of three separate not-for-profits: Journalists for Human Rights; CIVIX, Canada’s premier school-based civic engagement program for youth; and the Canadian International Council. He is also a member of the Boards of Directors Of PEN Canada and Transparency International Canada. He is a former director of the Toronto Board of Trade and Pathways to Education Canada. He lives in Toronto, with his wife Mary Cruden. They have three children.

Anouchka Freybe is a visual arts researcher and creative non-fiction writer based in Toronto, Canada. She has an academic background in Art History and Literature and is an active supporter of various arts initiatives across Canada. She is a current Foundation Board member of Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, and a former board member of artist-run centre Gallery TPW. Freybe has a BFA from Bishop’s University and an MA from York University; has received Art History awards, and internships at the Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy, and Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen Germany. She worked in education and exhibition research at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She is currently writing and sketching a series of stories tied to esoteric dream lives, identity construction, and barricades.

Kathy Koch is Vice President of Development & Communications at The WoodGreen Foundation where she builds awareness of Toronto’s unmet needs and facilitates major gifts. In her time at WoodGreen she has redesigned their corporate engagement strategy, created a Young Leaders Council for the next generation of philanthropists, helped to lead WoodGreen’s successful $20M Campaign which was the most ambitious campaign in WoodGreen’s 85-year history, and launched their $25M UNMET Needs Campaign with significant pro bono media support. Kathy’s experience marries sales and fundraising, and she has worked in for-profit, social enterprise, and not-for-profit organizations. She lives in Toronto with her family and hopes to contribute to a freer and more equitable world for generations to come.

Elaine Kierans is a lawyer whose career has included both the private practice of law and government service. Ms. Kierans was a lawyer in the Toronto office of McCarthy Tetrault, specializing in restructuring and insolvency law. She subsequently served as vice chair and a director of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario and chair and CEO of the Canadian Artists and Producers Professional Relationship Tribunal, a federal labour relations tribunal focussed on the Canadian arts community. She holds degrees in business, common law and civil law, all from McGill University. She is a member of the Law Society of Ontario. She has served on the boards of directors of both publicly traded and private not-for-profit organizations. She is currently a member of Casey House Hospital Foundation committee, is a director of The Koffler Center of the Arts and Canadian Stage . She has an ICD.D designation from the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto and the Institute of Corporate Directors. She is fluent in English and French.

Carolyn Poirier is the Americas Region Corporate Controller at Arup, an international engineering and design firm. She received her Honours Bachelor of Commerce with a minor in Economics from McMaster University. At McMaster, she was a member of the Varsity swim team and was honored on the Academic All Canadian Honour Roll for achieving excellence in academics and sport. Prior to joining Arup in 2009, Carolyn obtained her CPA, CA designation while working at Ernst & Young LLP in the audit and assurance practice. Carolyn is a trusted advisor to leadership and provides effective management in all areas of the business including tax, compliance, financial reporting, budgeting and analytics, and internal controls.

Lori Sterling  is currently senior counsel at Bennett Jones LLP  and an experienced board director.  Lori has over 30 years experience  in both federal and provincial governments. At the federal level, she was Canada’s Deputy Minister of Labour and Associate Deputy Minister, Employment, Skills Development Canada and previous to that, she was the Associate Deputy Minister of Justice for Canada.  At the provincial level, she was the  Deputy Minister for Indigenous Affairs. Lori has  extensive constitutional law litigation expertise with a specialization in freedom of expression. She received the United Nations Public Service Award for Building Aboriginal Relations in 2013 and  was named a Hill Times Top 100 Most Influential Powerful & Influential People in Government & Politics in 2018.

Ms. Teillet’s popular history, The North-West is Our Mother: The Story of Louis Riel’s People, the Métis Nation was one of the Globe & Mail’s top 100 books of 2019 and won the Carol Shield’s and Manitoba Day awards. She is the author of Métis Law in Canada and has written for academic journals, the Globe & Mail and Macleans. Jean is a treaty negotiator and a women’s rights and Indigenous rights litigator. She has appeared at the Supreme Court of Canada twelve times. A frequent public speaker, she has three honorary doctorates and is an honorary lifetime member of the Association of Ontario Midwives. Ms. Teillet was a professional dancer, actress, and producer, and her visual artworks are held in public and private collections in Canada and the United States. Ms. Teillet is the great-grandniece of Louis Riel.

A veteran of Canada’s book industry, Bruce Walsh is former Publisher of House of Anansi Press, founding Director of University of Regina Press, Vice President of Marketing for Margaret Atwood’s Longpen, and Director of Marketing and Publicity at McClelland & Stewart. 

He resigned in protest from his first job in publishing after Oxford University Press censored the book, Gay Ideas. He became an activist with CensorStop and the Canadian Committee Against Customs Censorship, was on the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Period Council, and served two terms on the PEN Canada Board. He was also a Mentor to PhD students through the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation, was a long time board member of the environmental group, Canopy, and was President of GayLine, a crisis hotline and Quebec’s oldest LGBT organization. Much of what he knows he learned as a volunteer, including very satisfying work in a homeless shelter and community radio. He is currently helping to program the Lunenburg Literary Festival, is on the board of the Port Medway Readers’ Festival, and is Vice Chair of the Disabilities Committee for the South Shore Libraries. 

KAREN WALTON is a Canadian screen and television writer best known for penning the original feminist horror film, GINGER SNAPS (2000).  She has written for a number of internationally celebrated TV series, such as ORPHAN BLACK and QUEER AS FOLK.  In 2007, she founded the popular online community, “inkcanada”;  a free, public-facing space for and by Canadian screenwriters of all stripes.  A recipient of the Canadian Screen Academy’s prestigious Margaret Collier Award, Karen’s body of work champions equity, inclusion, and challenging troublesome conventions both on camera and off. She is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre and holds a BA Honours in Drama from the University of Alberta. Born and raised in Nova Scotia, Karen spent her teens and twenties on the prairies, before making Toronto her home in 1994. She is a member of the Writers Guild of Canada and Women In Film and Television – Toronto.

Grace Westcott is a long-time supporter of PEN Canada.  She acted as Executive Director of PEN Canada from 2016 to 2017 after serving on the board of PEN as Vice President and earlier on the Canadian Issues Committee. She was also a member of PEN International’s Lawyer’s Committee.  She is the principal of Westcott Law, where she carries on a commercial law practice focusing on copyright, media, and the cultural industries, with an emphasis on publishing.  Prior to starting her own law practice, Grace was a partner at Cassels Brock & Blackwell, LLP.  As a writer, Grace has written for the Globe & Mail, the Literary Review of Canada, and has been featured on Arts & Letters Daily.  Grace is currently a governor of the University of Toronto, vice-chair of the UTSC Campus Council, a member of the Quadrangle Society of Massey College, and chair of the Toronto Legacy Project (Toronto’s “Blue Plaques” program, in partnership with Heritage Toronto).  Grace previously served on the boards of The Canadian Centre for Diversity, Soundstreams Canada, and MusicFest Canada, and was co-founder and Executive Director of the Digital Media at the Crossroads (DM@X) Conference. She graduated with honours from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and subsequently earned a Masters of Laws from Columbia Law School in the City of New York, focusing on freedom of expression, intellectual property, and legal philosophy.

Neil Bissoondath is the award-­‐winning author of five novels, two short-­‐story collections, and a book-length essay on multiculturalism and is currently a professor of creative writing at Université Laval. He has worked as a host and interviewer on Markings: An Anthology of Ideas and on a documentary series examining issues of justice and development around the world. He has also been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa, Concordia University, and the University of Toronto Summer Writing Program. In 2010, he was awarded the Prix Olivier­‐Le-Jeune and named to the Ordre national du Québec with the rank of “Chevalier.”

Randy Boyagoda, a former president of PEN Canada, is a professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he is also Vice-Dean, Undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He is a novelist, critic, and essayist.

Kristin Cochrane is the CEO of Penguin Random House Canada. Prior to her appointment, Kristin served as President and Publisher of Penguin Random House Canada, directly overseeing all publishing imprints and activities in Canada. Kristin first joined the company in 2005 as Doubleday Canada’s Associate Publisher, rising eventually to Publisher of the Doubleday/McClelland & Stewart Publishing Group, which also included Tundra and Appetite. Under Kristin’s leadership, Penguin Random House Canada authors have won the world’s most prestigious awards, including the Booker Prize, four of the past five Scotiabank Giller Prizes, and the Nobel Prize in Literature twice. Kristin herself has appeared on Toronto Life’s “50 Most Influential” list five times and was profiled in the book Canada 150 Women. Kristin has long served as an Adjunct Professor and an Advisory Board Member on Simon Fraser University’s publishing program. She graduated from Queen’s University with a BA in History.

Valerie is a graduate of the Ivey School of Business. Formerly serving as an officer with the boards of Kingsway College School and the Young Presidents Organization, and as a Marketing Director for Mattel-Fisher-Price, Valerie Connor is a short fiction writer.  Her work has been featured in Parents Canada Magazine and long-listed for the Writer’s Union Contest for Developing Writers, as well as in various online literary magazines.  She lives in Toronto with her husband and three children.

Novelist and artist Douglas Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. He is also a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

David Cronenberg has established his reputation as an authentic auteur through his uniquely personal body of work as both a director and writer. Beginning with his nascent career in underground filmmaking, Cronenberg has developed a dramatic oeuvre of outstanding depth and breadth and consequently has been lauded as one of the world’s most influential filmmakers. Recognition of Cronenberg’s contribution to art and culture has included the Order of Canada and France’s Légion d’Honneur.

Ronald J. Deibert is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab undertakes interdisciplinary research at the intersection of global security, ICTs, and human rights. Deibert is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet (Random House: 2013), and RESET: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi, 2020) as part of the CBC Massey Lecture series. In 2013, he was appointed to the Order of Ontario and awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal, for being “among the first to recognize and take measures to mitigate growing threats to communications rights, openness and security worldwide.”

Suzanne DePoe is a literary, theatrical, film and television agent, owner of her own independent agency – Creative Technique Inc. – representing producers, writers, directors and cinematographers in Canadian film and television, writers and directors in Canadian theatre and authors of non-fiction and fiction books. A member of the Talent Agents and Managers Association of Canada, Toronto Women in Film & Television, and Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, Ms. DePoe has had a hand in many seminal events in the development of theatrical and film and television industries in Canada over the last decades.

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. The start of his journalism career coincided with the start of the war on terror, and over the following decade he reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and many other locations around the world. His work earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other publications. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, GQ, NPR, Esquire and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 novels that changed our world.

Charlie Foran is the author of eleven books, including five novels. A past president of PEN Canada, he is a senior fellow at Massey College and an adjunct professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.  He is currently Executive Director of the Writers’ Trust of Canada.

Kevin Hanson is the President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster Canada. He joined the company as President in 2005 and in 2013 also named the company’s first Canadian publisher. He is responsible for all of the publishing, sales, marketing, financial, and operations activities of Simon & Schuster Canada, which is also the exclusive distributor in Canada of the book and audio products of both Simon & Schuster and Simon & Schuster UK, as well as for Simon & Schuster’s roster of US distribution clients.

Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. In addition to many scholarly articles, his writing has appeared in more than 40 mainstream publications, among them Harper’s, the New York Times, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Star. His recent books include the companion essay collections Unruly Voices (2012) and Measure Yourself Against the Earth (2015); Fail Better: Why Baseball Matters (2017); and Wish I Were Here: Boredom and the Interface (2019), which won the 2020 Erving Goffman Award for Scholarship in Media Ecology. His pamphlet On Risk appeared in 2020; a new volume, The Ethics of Architecture, was released in early 2021 from Oxford University Press.

Elana Rabinovitch received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal and continued her postgraduate studies at Carleton University’s School of Journalism. Elana worked in broadcast journalism as a writer, reporter, and producer at CBC Television News, CBC National News and CBC Television’s The Journal. After a decade working in the music business at Sony Music Canada and PolyGram, Elana took over the running of the Scotiabank Giller Prize.Elana lives in Toronto with her son, Luca. She is President of Propaganda Ink, a marketing and media relations company, and serves on the board of World Literacy Canada.

Devyani Saltzman is a Canadian writer, curator, and journalist. She is the author of Shooting Water. She is the Founding Curator, Literary Programming, at Luminato, Toronto’s Festival of Arts and Creativity and the 2014-18 Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Centre. In 2018 she was appointed Director of Programming at the AGO with a mandate to create a cultural hub in the city of Toronto, programming across all disciplines. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Atlantic and Tehelka, India’s weekly of arts and investigative journalism amongst other publications. She sits on the advisory committee for Project Bookmark Canada and has been a juror for the National Magazine Awards, Canada Council for the Arts and The Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

After studying law at Oxford University as a Manitoba Rhodes Scholar, Philip Slayton clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa. For thirteen years, he pursued an academic career, teaching at McGill University and becoming dean of law at the University of Western Ontario. Philip then went into legal practice with a major Canadian law firm in Toronto. He retired from the practice of law in 2000. Since leaving legal practice Philip Slayton has written eight books, most recently Nothing Left to Lose: An Impolite Report on the State of Freedom in Canada. He has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow; President of the Canadian Rhodes Scholars Foundation; Co-Chairman of the Canadian Campaign for Oxford; a Governor of Sheridan College; and president of PEN Canada. In 1998, Oxford University named him a “Distinguished Friend” of the University. 

Richard Stursberg is a Canadian Media Executive. He has been head of all English services at the CBC, Executive Director of Telefilm Canada, Chairman of the Canadian Television Fund, President of Starchoice and Cancom (now Shaw Direct), President of the Canadian Cable Television Association and Assistant Deputy Minister of Culture and Broadcasting for the Government of Canada. He is currently President of Aljess, a boutique consulting firm. He is the author of The Tower of Babble (2012), named one of the best books of the year by the Globe and Mail.

Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe journalist and speaker. She was a journalist at the Toronto Star for over 20 years, was nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism, and has been part of teams that won two National Newspaper Awards for Project of the Year.  She is now a columnist at The Globe & Mail. Her two books, Seven Fallen Feathers, and All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward are national bestsellers. The former winning the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nation Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. It was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction. The latter was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and a finalist for the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. Talaga was the 2017/18 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and the 2018 CBC Massey Lecturer. She is the head of Makwa Creative Inc., a production company focused on amplifying Indigenous voices through the media. She holds an honorary doctorate from Lakehead University.

Michael Wernick retired in 2019 after a 38-year career as one of the key leaders of Canada’s world-class federal public service, which culminated in his appointment in 2016 as the 23rd Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to Cabinet. As Clerk he helped the Prime Minister and his new government implement its agenda and as head of the public service drove a renewal agenda, tabling four annual reports on the state of Canada’s public service. With 28 years as an executive in the federal public service, including 17 years in the community of Deputy Ministers, and three as Clerk, Michael is one of Canada’s most experienced and influential public sector leaders. He appeared frequently at Parliamentary Committees, participated in dozens of intergovernmental and international meetings, and spoke at many conferences. Michael worked closely with three Prime Ministers and seven Ministers and attended close to 300 meetings of Cabinet and its committees. He was the key public servant at Privy Council Office in three transitions of Prime Minister. As a Senior Strategic Advisor to MNP Inc and a Fellow and Adjunct Professor of the Carleton University School of Public Policy and Administration, Michael now provides advisory services and mentorship to emerging leaders and to new generations of students.

Kenneth Whyte is owner and publisher of Sutherland House Books. He was editor of Saturday Night, editor of the National Post, editor, and publisher of Maclean’s, president of Rogers Publishing, president of Next Issue Canada, and Senior VP at Rogers Communications. Mr. Whyte is a senior fellow of the CD Howe Institute, Senior Fellow at Massey College, and honorary lifetime alumnus of McGill. He has been chair of the Donner Canada Foundation, a director of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and governor of The Aurea Foundation.  Mr. Whyte’s The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst was a Washington Post and L.A. Times book of the year. Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Sack of Detroit will be published by Knopf in 2021.