Masthead
Editors
Jaclyn Desforges
Managing Editor
Jaclyn Desforges is the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower, winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC's picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. Selected for the New York Times-featured Lunar Codex Project, Danger Flower is now archived on the moon. Jaclyn is also the author of the picture book Why Are You So Quiet? and has received Canada Council for the Arts support for both her forthcoming short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine's Quill, 2026), and her novel-in-progress, Eyelash Person. A Bread Loaf alumna and RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner, Jaclyn teaches creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario with her partner and daughter.
Dana Hansen
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
Dana Hansen (she/her) is a professor of English literature, language, and communications at Humber College in Toronto, a writer and book reviewer with work in a number of publications, a librarian-in-training, and the founding publisher and editor-in-chief of Hamilton Review of Books. An eclectic reader with a particular affinity for essays, nonfiction, and first novels, she feels privileged to have the opportunity to work with such a dedicated team at HRB working to highlight the outstanding and diverse work of writers in Hamilton and beyond. She lives in Waterdown with her family.
Advisory Board
Noelle Allen
Noelle Allen is the owner and publisher of Wolsak and Wynn, where she has worked for twenty years. She purchased the press from Marja Jacobs, who began the press with Heather Cadsby in 1982 as a poetry-only publishing company and promised that poetry would always be at the heart of the W&W publishing program. Noelle had worked in book retail, in marketing and publicity and in academic publishing before joining the press. She has also served on many boards and committees within the industry, including as the chair of the Literary Press Group, the co-chair of gritLIT: Hamilton’s Readers’ and Writers’ Festival and as the chair of the Literary Advisory Committee for the Hamilton Arts Council. Currently she is also working with Supercrawl, Hamilton’s Music and Arts Festival, to organize the literary programming.
James Cairns
I’m a professor of Law & Society at Wilfrid Laurier University. My academic writing focuses on political culture, social movements, and theories of democracy (for example, in my books The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope, (UTP); and The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century (with Alan Sears, UTP). I’m currently working on a book of essays around the theme of crisis. I love reading fiction with a political bent (Gary Barwin’s Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted; Elif Batuman’s Either/Or), and nonfiction that reads like a novel (Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother; Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger). I live in Paris, Ontario, where I’m on the board of the Riverside Reading Series.
vinh nguyen
Vinh Nguyen is an educator and writer. He is the author of The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse and Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. Vinh edits for nonfiction for The New Quarterly.
Jessica Rose
I’m a writer, editor, arts organizer and digital storyteller with a passion for the written word. A graduate of Carleton University’s School of Journalism, my writing has appeared in THIS Magazine, Hamilton Magazine, Quill and Quire, the Humber Literary Review, among many others. I’m the Marketing Manager at gritLIT: Hamilton’s Readers and Writers Festival and a digital marketer for a number of arts organizations and other not-for-profits. With a background in educational publishing, I am passionate about highly engaging, accessible children’s literature. My first book will be released with Orca Press in 2024. I’m proud to bring my love of books, especially non-fiction, to the Hamilton Review of Books.
Podcast host
Alex Kerner
Alex Kerner is the host and producer of the Review's podcast. He is an avid reader and reviewer of books. You can find some of this bookish thoughts on his blog, Instagram and Goodreads. He also contributes reviews for Spring Magazine. Alex lives in Hamilton with his family and professionally is a lawyer in the area of labour law.
Website Manager
Jennifer Rawlinson
Jennifer’s love of stories began with ghosts. She carried this passion for exploring personal and cultural anxieties via stories through her Professional Writing program at York University and Publishing program at Toronto Metropolitan University. After landing in Hamilton, Jennifer interned with Wolsak and Wynn where she continues to work as Production Coordinator and Co-editor for the speculative fiction imprint, Poplar Press. She also works with gritLIT: Hamilton’s Readers and Writers Festival as Festival Assistant. In her free time, Jennifer can be found writing her own spooky stories and investigating things that go bump in the night.
