Jo SiMalaya Alcampo is an interdisciplinary artist who explores cultural/body memory and the healing of intergenerational soul wounds through community storytelling, installation-based art, and electroacoustic soundscapes. Jo has developed community arts projects with queer youth, consumer/survivors of the mental health system, and migrant domestic workers.
Althea Balmes is a multidisciplinary visual storyteller interested in playful collaborative creative expressions through illustration and video and is an artist-educator rooted in community work. She uses her strong connection to her Filipino culture and her place as a woman of colour in the diaspora to inform her art practice and her work.
Christine Balmes is a musician and community worker. She has worked as a Tagalog language instructor and is currently working as a settlement worker helping newcomer families and youth settle and thrive in Canada. Her research on Filipino Canadian arts and artists was published in the book Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility by the University of Toronto Press in 2012.
Sam Bradd is a graphic facilitator and illustrator and a member of the Graphic History Collective. He listens and draws to help groups increase engagement, solve problems, and lead. He’s collaborated with health researchers, sustainability visionaries, Indigenous leaders, labour unions, and groups who share his passion for innovative visuals. He’s unionized with Unifor’s Freelance Union and lives on unceded Coast Salish Territories.
Paul Buhle, a labour historian of 1960s vintage, published Radical America Komiks in 1969 and, after an explicable lapse of 35 years, has produced, since 2005, a number of non-fiction comics including Wobbles!, Che, and Bohemians.
Nicole Marie Burton is an artist, comics creator, and the founder of Ad Astra Comix. After 10 years of political activism, Nicole rekindled her love for comic books, focusing on the study, promotion, and creation of comics that address social justice issues, from marginalized history to gender and sexuality. She lives in Toronto with her imaginary cat.
David Camfield teaches Labour Studies and Sociology at the University of Manitoba and is the author of Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement. During the Days of Action he was a CUPE activist.
Sean Carleton is a member of the Graphic History Collective and a co-author of May Day: A Graphic History of Protest and several of the comics in this collection. As a historian, he has written about comics and critical pedagogy for both academic and popular audiences, and his primary academic research examines the history of education, colonialism, and capitalism in Canada.
Conely de Leon is a Doctoral Candidate in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University, 2013 Research Fellow at the Center for Women’s Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and proud member of GABRIELA-Ontario. Her doctoral research is about transnational Filipin@ care networks in Canada, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. She is also examining arts-based activism among caregivers as part of the SSHRC-funded Poverty and Precarious Employment in Southern Ontario (PEPSO) project.
Robin Folvik is a member of the Graphic History Collective and a co-author of May Day: A Graphic History of Protest and several comics in this collection. She has a strong background in history and women’s studies, with a focus on feminist histories, and British Columbia’s working people, labour struggles, and social movements. Robin has a passion for translating academic knowledge to reach a broader public, and has worked on films, curriculum development, walking tours, and public history installations through her position as Research Director at BC Labour Heritage Centre, where she has worked since 2008.
Ethan Heitner is a cartoonist and member of the editorial collective of World War 3 Illustrated, the radical comics magazine (http://www.ww3.nyc/). More of his work can be seen on his blog, freedomfunnies.wordpress.com.
Greg Kealey is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New Brunswick. His historical work has focussed on Canadian working-class history and state repression of labour and the left. Major works include Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism (1980); Dreaming of What Might be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, with Bryan Palmer (1982); Workers and Canadian History (1995); and Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America, with Reg Whitaker and Andy Parnaby (2012). He was the founding editor of Labour/le Travail and is the editor of the University of Toronto Press Canadian Social History Series and the Athabasca University Press series Working Canadians (with Alvin Finkel).
Orion Keresztesi is an artist and activist inspired by the history of working people’s struggles –how they have shaped the world we live in and help us to do the same today. He is a proud member of CUPE 1281 and currently serving as the Communications Officer on the local’s executive.
Kwentong Bayan is a collective of two Filipina Canadian artists, Althea Balmes and Jo SiMalaya Alcampo. They are developing a comic book, Kwentong Bayan: Labour of Love, in collaboration with Filipina migrant workers who work under Canada’s Caregiver/Live-in Caregiver Program. Kwentong Bayan can be literally translated as “community stories.”
Mark Leier is a historian at Simon Fraser University and author of Bakunin: The Creative Passion and three books on labour and left history. The second edition of Rebel Life: The Life and Times of Robert Gosden, Revolutinary, Mystic, Labour Spy was published by New Star Books in 2013.
David Lester is guitarist in the rock duo Mecca Normal. Along with Mecca Normal band mate Jean Smith, they give a presentation/lecture called How Art & Music Can Change the World. He is the author of The Gruesome Acts of Capitalism and artist / writer of the graphic novel The Listener. His poster “Malachi” was part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York City at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is art director of BC BookWorld.
Andrée Lévesque is a feminist historian who has published widely in labour history and in women’s history. In 2005 she published the proceeding of a colloque on Madeleine Parent, under the title Madeleine Parent Activist (Sumac Press).
Zenee May Maceda is a community organizer and labour activist based in Toronto. She has recently obtained her Master’s degree at the University of Toronto and is currently a National Representative for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.
Dale McCartney is a researcher and instructor in the Morgan Centre for Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University. He was previously the editor of Seven Oaks Magazine and has been on picket lines with both Teamster’s local 213 and more recently the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU) at SFU, of which he is still a proud member. He is currently working on a Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, examining neoliberal restructuring of education in BC.
Doug Nesbitt is an organizer for SEIU Local 2 and an editor at RankandFile.ca. He is writing a history of the Ontario Days of Action for his PhD in History at Queen’s University.
Bryan Palmer, a Canada Research Chair at Trent University, is the author of 13 books and five edited collections. His published works have been translated into Korean, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Greek. Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 (2013) is his latest book. In the fall of 2015, the Historical Materialism book series will publish a two-volume collection of his essays, Marxism and Historical Practice. A forthcoming study, co-authored by anti-poverty activist Gaetan Heroux, will appear in 2016, titled ‘Bread I Want, Bread I Will Have’: Economic Crises, Resistance, and the Long History of Toronto’s Poor and Out-of-Work, 1830–2015.
Andrew Parnaby is an associate professor of history at Cape Breton University.
Joan Sangster teaches in Gender and Women’s Studies and the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies at Trent University. Her scholarship has addressed themes concerning working women, the labour movement, the Canadian Left, the criminalization of women and girls, Aboriginal women and the law, and feminist historiography. Her most recent book on women and labour is Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada (University of Toronto Press).
Kara Sievewright is a writer, artist, and designer who creates comics, zines, websites, prints, and more. She lives on Haida Gwaii, which have been claimed by Canada for the past 150 years but have been the home of the Haida for over 12,000 years, where she is working on a graphic novel.
Julia Smith is a member of the Graphic History Collective and co-author of several of the comics in this collection. As a historian, she has written about women, work, and union organizing, particularly in the service, office, and retail sectors.
Ron Verzuh is a writer, labour historian, videographer, and trade unionist who is currently completing his PhD in history at Simon Fraser University. Before retiring in 2008, he was national director of communications at the Canadian Union of Public Employees. In the 1960s, he worked as a labourer at the Trail smelter and was a member of the International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter workers when it merged with the United Steel Workers in 1967. He is the author of three books, one on the history of the pioneer labour press in Canada, several booklets, and many articles. His recent film documentary, Joe Hill’s Secret Canadian Hideout, won the award for best historical documentary at the Oregon Independent Film Festival and was an official selection at the Workers’ Unite Film Festival in New York City. His latest documentary is called Remembering Salt, the story of how a blacklisted movie brought the Cold War to small town Canada.
Tania Willard (Secwepemc Nation) works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production, often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Indigenous and other cultures. Willard has worked as an artist in residence with Gallery Gachet in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, the Banff Centre’s visual arts residency, fiction, and Trading Post and was a curator in residence with grunt gallery. Collections of Willard’s work include the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Kamloops Art Gallery, and Thompson Rivers University. Willard’s recent curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, presented at Vancouver Art Gallery in 2011 and touring until 2014. Willard is currently the Aboriginal Curator in Residence at the Kamloops Art Gallery.