2024 Awards Jury
Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based, independent magazine editor, writer, documentary filmmaker and author. Voice of Rebellion – How Mozhdah Jamalzadah Brought Hope to Afghanistan is her first book.
Her freelance work over the past few years has focused on gender and human rights in conflict or post-conflict zones around the globe. Staley's international reportage includes covering female genital mutilation (FGM) in Kenya and witchcraft and illegal logging in Papua New Guinea as well as stories from El Salvador, Haiti, Colombia, Cambodia, South Africa, Afghanistan and New Zealand.
Roberta is the winner of a number of awards in the areas of film, writing and editing including: Best Feature Article: Magazine, Long Format, 2019 - Associated Church Press, the A.C. Forrest Memorial Award 2019 - Canadian Church Press, Best Foreign Documentary, 2018 - Artemis Women in Action Film Festival and Best Canadian Documentary, 2017 - Female Eye Film Festival. She has also won three Western Magazine Awards Foundation awards and garnered awards for editing, including six years in a row for Trade Magazine of the Year in Western Canada.
Roberta has an MA in Liberal Studies From Simon Fraser University. Her latest documentary, “Elephant Warriors,” about female conservation rangers in Kenya, can be seen on the film festival circuit in 2024. Previously Roberta edited the financial publication Enterprise as well as a science magazine, the Canadian Chemical News. Roberta teaches magazine writing at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC.
Angela Mombourquette
Angela Mombourquette is an award-winning freelance writer and columnist, and the author of 25 Years of 22 Minutes: An Unauthorized Oral History of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. She is a former associate editor at Saltscapes magazine, and former editor of Atlantic Books Today. Her writing has appeared in Walrus, the United Church Observer, the Chronicle Herald, Halifax Magazine and many other publications.
Angela has worked as a professional writer and editor for more than a decade; she writes for numerous magazines and newspapers (both local and national). In 2012, she won the George Cadogan Memorial Outstanding Columnist Award at the Canadian Community Newspaper Awards. Angela has a master's degree in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and is also a part-time journalism instructor there.
Angela's winning submission was for her article "Island Access" which was published in the May 2018 edition of the United Church Observer (now Broadview Magazine). The article is about how abortion rights advocates in P.E.I. ultimately won a decades-long battle to bring abortions back to the province.
@angmombo
Chris Benjamin is a Halifax freelance writer who has worked in Indonesia, Toronto and Ghana. In Ghana he worked as a full-time journalist writing about the financially challenged nation's efforts to improve healthcare, justice, transportation, education and housing.
His first novel, Drive-by Saviours was short-listed for both Canada Reads and a ReLit Award and won the H.R. Percy Prize. His first non-fiction book, Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada (Nimbus, 2011) won the APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award and was a finalist for the Evelyn Richardson Non-fiction Prize.
The winning chapter titled Creation Story is from his book The Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, published by Nimbus Publishing in 2014. It is the story of how the only residential school in Atlantic Canada came to be. Despite testimony from the churches and state, for the Truth & Reconciliation Commission regarding previous efforts to eradicate indigenous culture via the residential school system, the institutional histories of individual schools tend to remain shadowed.
Chris now writes news features for magazines and narrative research reports for NGOs. He has written for The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and many other magazines.
chrisbenjaminwriting.com
@benjaminwrites
Our 2023 Jury
Deborah Campbell
deborahcampbell.ca
Roberta Staley
robertastaley.com
Chris Cannon
@cannonwriter