Leslie Vryenhoek is a writer, editor and communications consultant whose poetry, fiction and memoir have appeared in magazines and journals across Canada. Her work has won the Eden Mills Literary Festival competition, the Cahoots Fiction contest and the Dalton Camp Award, and placed in the Sheldon Currie Fiction Contest (The Antigonish Review) and This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Leslie moved to Canada in 1984, and lived in Manitoba for two decades before hauling her life to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her debut book of short stories, Scrabble Lessons, will be published in 2009 by Oolichan Books.