What makes a magazine unputdownable? It arguably starts with what makes us pick one up: a bright, moving and eye-catching cover.
On May 1st we announced the nominees for the 41st National Magazine Awards, and we are excited to welcome Canada’s best writers, artists, editors, art directors, and more to the gala on June 1st. [Tickets]
Here’s a close-up look at the nominees for Cover Grand Prix.
Going North
Cottage Life
Michelle Kelly, editor
Kim Zagar, art director
LGBT+
esse arts + opinions
Sylvette Babin, editor
Studio Feed, art direction
40 Years of Style
FASHION magazine
Noreen Flanagan, editor
Brittany Eccles, art director
Your. Best. Summer. Ever.
FASHION magazine
Noreen Flanagan, editor
Brittany Eccles, art director
Summer 2017, Men’s Edition
Globe Style Advisor
Andrew Sardone, editor
Benjamin MacDonald, art director
Issue 64
Maisonneuve
Andrea Bennett, editor
Monika Waber, art director
Truth First
New Trail
Lisa Cook, editor
Marcey Andrews, art director
Love Your Body
NOW Magazine
Michelle da Silva, editor
Michelle Wong, art director
Tim Hortons Meets the Machine
Report on Business
Duncan Hood, editor
Domenic Macri, art director
Escaping America
The Walrus
Jessica Johnson, editor
Paul Kim, art director
The winner of the Cover Grand Prix will be announced on June 1st at the 41st NMA Gala in Toronto. Tickets are on sale now.
Check out all the nominees for the 41st National Magazine Awards.
Follow us on Twitter @MagAwards for all the nominations news and an awesome live feed on the night of the gala. #NMA18.
Amira Elghawaby is an award-winning journalist and human rights advocate. Along with frequent appearances on Canadian and international news networks, Amira has written and produced stories and commentary for CBC Radio, the Ottawa Citizen, the Toronto Star, the Literary Review of Canada, and the Globe and Mail. Amira spent five years promoting the civil liberties of Canadian Muslims as human rights officer and later, as director of communications, at the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM) between 2012 to the fall of 2017. Amira obtained an honours degree in Journalism and Law from Carleton University in 2001.
Andrew Braithwaite is a BC-born magazine journalist who covers food, wine, architecture and design from his current base in San Francisco. He’s a contributing editor of Azure, and has won multiple NMAs for his work on enRoute’s “Canada’s Best New Restaurants.”
Anna Ling Kaye has published internationally and been short-listed for the Journey Prize. She is a former editor at PRISM international and Ricepaper magazines, and recently guest-edited issue #143 of The New Quarterly magazine. Anna sits on the board of Project Bookmark Canada, and is co-founder of Hapa-palooza Festival, a celebration of mixed heritage and identity.
Arnaud Granata dirige le média spécialisé Infopresse qui couvre le monde du marketing, de la publicité et des médias au Québec. Infopresse produit et diffuse une large gamme de contenus (conférences, magazines, formations, concours, sites web) destinés aux professionnels de l’industrie. Arnaud est également auteur. Son dernier livre, Le pouvoir de l’échec a été publié en septembre 2016. Il est le concepteur et producteur au contenu de l’émission Dans les médias etest le concepteur et le journaliste de la série documentaire 30 secondes pour changer le monde à Télé-Québec. Il anime débats, tables rondes et entrevues et il commente aussi l’actualité des marques et des médias à l’émission Medium Large. On le voit régulièrement à la télé pour parler pub, consommation, médias et tendances.
Bänoo Zan is a poet, translator, teacher, editor and poetry curator, with more than 160 published poems and poetry-related pieces as well as three books. Song of Phoenix: Life and Works of Sylvia Plath, was reprinted in Iran in 2010. Songs of Exile, her first poetry collection, was released in 2016 in Canada by Guernica Editions. It was shortlisted for Gerald Lampert Memorial Award by the League of Canadian Poets in 2017. Letters to My Father, her second poetry book, was published in 2017 by Piquant Press in Canada. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Toronto’s most diverse poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012). It is a brave space that bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, poetic styles, voices and visions.
Benjamin Hertwig was the recipient of a National Magazine Award in 2017, and his debut collection of poems, Slow War, was a finalist for the 2017 Governor General’s Award. His essays have appeared in places like the New York Times, NPR, the Walrus, Maisonneuve, and the Sun Magazine.
Bill Whitelaw is executive vice-president, business information, for Glacier Media, a Canadian publishing and information services company. In this role, Whitelaw oversees a variety of long-serving B2B brands such as The Daily Oil Bulletin, Oilweek, The Northern Miner and Western Producer. Whitelaw’s career spans more than three decades in the Canadian media space, including stints as reporter, editor and publisher. He is a graduate of Loyalist College, Queen’s University and the University of Calgary.
Carolyn is an award-winning writer and communications specialist. Her feature articles have appeared in major national magazines including Toronto Life and
Brian Morgan, though he studied printmaking at art school, has worked as a graphic designer and an art director for the past 23 years, 17 of these in editorial design. He has worked for (or on) Maclean’s, Saturday Night, C, Dose, The Vancouver Review, and The Walrus. At this last publication, he was the art director for nine years. He also sat on the executive committee of the National Magazine Awards, as its secretary. He lives and works in Montreal.
Charles DesGroseilliers est directeur artistique dans le milieu éditorial depuis plus de 10 ans. Il a commencé par le magazine Commerce en 2007, avant de se voir confier la responsabilité de créer la grille ainsi qu’assumer la direction artistique des magazines Premium (2009), Les Affaires Plus (2010) et finalement le journal Les Affaires (2014). À travers les années, sa passion pour le design imprimé l’a amené à avoir à développer une expertise en vidéo, en illustration et en publicité.
Chelene Knight is a Vancouver born-and-raised graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU. In addition to being a workshop facilitator for teens, she is also a literary event organizer, host, and seasoned panelist. She has been published in various Canadian and American literary magazines, and her work is widely anthologized. Chelene is currently the Managing Editor at Room magazine, and the 2018 Programming Director for the Growing Room Festival. Braided Skin, her first book (Mother Tongue Publishing, March 2015), has given birth to numerous writing projects including her second book, memoir, Dear Current Occupant (BookThug, 2018). In 2016 Chelene worked with fiction mentor Jen Sookfong Lee to flesh out the first draft of a historical novel set Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley.
Christopher Wahl is a working photographer living in Toronto, Canada. He has shot assignments for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, TIME, LIFE, and most Canadian magazines ever since the 1990’s. Christopher has been nominated for 17 national magazine awards and has never won gold. His work is part of many private and public collections, notably in Canada the permanent collection of The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).
D. B. Scott (David) is president of Impresa Communications Limited of Cambridge, Ont., consultants to the magazine industry and the not-for-profit sector. He is the academic coordinator for magazine and web publishing at Ryerson University’s Chang School of Continuing Education. For 13 years he has published Canadian Magazines, a daily blog about the industry (www.canadianmags.blogspot.com ). He has been a frequent moderator and presenter at the MagNet industry conference, at Magazines Canada’s Business Media Summit, a frequent awards judge for the national and western awards as well as the International Regional Magazines Association (IRMA). He was president of the National Magazine Awards Foundation in 1991 and was presented with the Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement — the industry’s highest individual honour — in 2010 .
David Beers is founding editor of the independent news site The Tyee. Beers was senior editor at Mother Jones, the San Francisco Examiner and the Vancouver Sun. His writing has won National Magazine Awards in the U.S. and Canada. He is adjunct professor at UBC Graduate School of Journalism and SFU School of Communication.
Deanne Gage is a Toronto-based editor and writer who has specialized in personal finance issues since 1999. She’s the editor of FORUM magazine, and is a money columnist for The Toronto Star. A recipient of several journalism awards, Deanne’s work has appeared in MoneySense, Chatelaine, Morningstar.ca, Today’s Parent, CPA magazine, and leading business-to-business publications.
Derek Finkle founded Canadian Writers Group in 2009. After graduating from Princeton University, Derek became Toronto Life magazine’s first editorial intern in 1993. He went on to be a regular contributor to Saturday Night magazine and The Globe and Mail, among other publications, before publishing his first book, No Claim to Mercy, in 1998, which won the Crime Writers’ Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction and was named a Notable Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail. From 2002 to 2007, he was the editor of Toro magazine, which garnered more than 60 National Magazine Award nominations, including Finkle’s gold for investigative reporting in 2005.![DominiqueRitter_6194_cropped[2].jpg](https://magazineawards.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/dominiqueritter_6194_cropped2.jpg?resize=228%2C228)
Dr. Priscilla Settee is Swampy Cree member of Cumberland House First Nations and a Professor of Indigenous Studies and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. She has won recognition nationally and internationally as an award-winning professor and as a global educator/activist. She is the author of two books Pimatisiwin, Global Indigenous Knowledge Systems(2013) that looks at global Indigenous Knowledge Systems and The Strength of Women, Ahkameyimohk(2011) that examines the role of Indigenous women’s stories in establishing truth, reconciliation and social change. Dr. Settee is working on her third book on Indigenous Food Sovereignty. She is a kohkum(grandmother) to Nya Lily and Lola Rose.
Gary Ross is a former editor-in- chief of Saturday Night and Vancouver magazines and has been honoured with half a dozen National Magazine Awards, and has edited scores of award-winning articles by other writers. His books include the No. 1 nonfiction bestseller Stung: The Incredible Obsession of Brian Molony (which became the feature film Owning Mahowny, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman). His popular presentation, The Ross Rules, trains people in organizations to communicate more effectively.
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James Hewes was a Publisher and Head of International at BBC Magazines. Part of the team that sold the business to private equity in November 2011, he was then Publishing Director for Top Gear, Good Food, Easy Cook and Lonely Planet Magazine and a Director of BBC Haymarket Exhibitions. He spent four years in Dubai, running Gulf News Publishing. Responsible for more than 30 product areas, he launched the group’s first consumer title in Arabic – wheels Arabic. Appointed President & CEO of FIPP in September 2017, he joined from The Art Newspaper, having been Interim CEO since December 2016.
Janet Eger is a board director with the Writers’ Trust, a charitable organization that seeks to advance, nurture, and celebrate Canadian voices through the country’s writers and writing. She spent a decade with Indigo, Canada’s largest book retailer, as the Vice President of Public Affairs and Communications, and as a board director with the Indigo Love of Reading Foundation. Prior to joining Indigo, Janet spent six years at Holt Renfrew where she oversaw Advertising and Public Relations, and five years at Canadian Pacific/Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, where she gained global communications experience while supporting 40 hotels in six countries. She has also worked in broadcast media. Born and raised in Calgary, now based in Toronto, Janet is an avid skier, traveller, and book lover.
Jonny Hughes is a group art director for the London based travel media agency Ink. He has been working in content magazine publishing for the past 20 years across the fashion, retail, food and travel sectors and has won several awards for design and art direction. He lives in Southeast London with his wife and two children and is obsessed with photography and table tennis.
Joyce Byrne is Group Publisher at RedPoint Media, where she oversees Avenue Calgary and other titles. Joyce has been the president of the Alberta Magazine Publishers Association since 2014, and has also served as president of the NMAF and as a director of Magazines Canada. Before relocating to Canada’s sunniest city she was Vice President at Venture Publishing in Edmonton, but is originally from Toronto, where she began her magazine career at This Magazine, and has served 15 years as Taddle Creek’s proofreader.
Julie Cailliau est rédactrice en chef du Groupe Les Affaires, qui publie le journal Les Affaires, le site lesaffaires.com, le magazine Les Affaires Plus et l’infolettre exclusive aux abonnés, le Bulletin privilège. Julie a fait ses débuts de journaliste en France, et elle poursuit cette passion au Québec depuis plus de 15 ans. Le fil conducteur de sa carrière est le goût d’apprendre et de communiquer ses découvertes.
Karen Christensen is Editor in Chief of Rotman Management magazine, published by the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. She and her team have won two silver national Magazine Awards: Art Direction for an Entire Issue (2009) and Best Single Issue (2014). She holds a BA in English from McGill University and attended Simon Fraser University’s Publishing Program.
Kim Jernigan spent her working life as a tutor in the Writing Centre at The University of Waterloo where she also taught courses in literature, composition, and public speaking. On the side, she volunteered in the editorial ranks of The New Quarterly, a Canadian literary magazine, winning the Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement from the National Magazine Awards on her retirement in 2014. She continues to keep a hand in as a contest adjudicator at The New Quarterly and a contributing editor at Canadian Notes and Queries.
Kim Shiffman, a veteran of the Canadian magazine industry, has been at Today’s Parent and todaysparent.com since 2015, and is currently deputy editor. Previously, Kim served as managing editor at Connected Rogers and Allergic Living, and prior to that, she was senior online editor at Travelzoo and senior editor at Profit. Kim graduated from the University of Toronto and received a post-graduate diploma from Centennial College. She’s married and the mom of two boys.
Kristy Woudstra is currently the Managing Editor of The UC Observer magazine. Her 20-year career has included working for The Huffington Post, Today’s Parent, Outdoor Canada, MoneySense as well as international development organizations. She has traveled the world to cover stories in countries like Niger, Uganda, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico and her writing has appeared in many Canadian publications including The Walrus, Canadian Living, Geez and This. Needless to say, she doesn’t exactly have a niche — she just likes a good story.
MaryAnn Camilleri, Founder, The Magenta Foundation, Co- Producer, Edition Toronto Established in 2004, The Magenta Foundation is Canada’s pioneering charitable arts-publishing house. Magenta was created to advocate for and showcase the work of artists in an international context, through circulated exhibitions and publications. Magenta has continued to evolve by finding new and innovative ways to connect artists to the global arts world and is always expanding its publishing departments, to bring the most notable artists forward. Under the Magenta umbrella, there is something for everyone to enjoy and be inspired by. Projects mounted by Magenta are supported with international coverage by the industry’s most renowned media outlets and critical reviews in all traditional media formats.
Matthew Inman is the creative director for Spinning Top. Matthew has 25 years experience in the graphic design industry. His career started at International Publishers, Hearst UK and he went on to work as Group Art Director for the prestigious Blue Door Media and Seven publishing companies with a client base that included Next, Fortnum & Mason, BlackRock, Savills and Virgin Holidays. He was an integral part of successful pitches for Canada Poste and the Dove brand in Canada.
Melissa Geurts is a New York-based creative director. Currently, Melissa is the Creative Director at Hearst’s Good Housekeeping magazine, the largest women’s lifestyle magazine reaching an audience of 38+ million readers monthly. Beginning in 2014, Melissa worked alongside Editor-in-Chief, Jane Francisco, to reinvent the 130-year-old brand to create a chic, modern and fresh redesign. At the magazine, Melissa is responsible for the creative direction of the monthly magazine including editorial conceptualization and design execution. Prior to her role at Good Housekeeping, Melissa was the Design Director at Chatelaine, Canada’s largest woman’s magazine and designer at Style at Home. She made the move to NYC in 2014 and is currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Follow along at @melissageurts
Natalie Turvey is Executive Director of The Canadian Journalism Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that promotes and celebrates excellence in journalism, and brings media literacy to greater public through education, research, and one of the industry’s most prestigious annual awards programs. Natalie serves on numerous industry advisory groups and judging committees for journalism organizations, awards and fellowships. Natalie is an experienced media relations, communications, and not-for-profit management professional with more than 15 years of international experience. She has an MBA from the European University in Brussels, Belgium.
Nicolas Boissy aime le design. Le design d’identité, d’emballage, de l’espace et d’édition attirent particulièrement sa curiosité. Après plus de dix années passées chez orangetango, il est maintenant designer graphique indépendant depuis deux ans. Son travail a été reconnu dans le cadre de divers concours nationaux et internationaux comme AIGA, uVU, Applied Arts, Cannes et Grafika. Son éthique de travail, sa rigueur intellectuelle et son aptitude à voir tous les détails d’un projet en font un atout précieux auprès des collègues et clients.
Penny is the former Publisher and VP of Cottage Life Media. She was editor of Cottage Life magazine for 15 years before moving into the Publisher’s office in 2016. Under her leadership, the magazine won hundreds of national and international magazine awards. She has taught in Ryerson University’s Magazine and Web Publishing program and is past president of the International Regional Magazine Association and a former director of Canada’s National Magazine Awards Foundation. In 2017, she was presented with the NMA’s Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement. This year, Penny left Cottage Life to start a new chapter pursuing projects that stretch both her creative and her management skills.
Poet and playwright, Daniel David Moses, a trailblazing First Nations writer, hails from Six Nations Grand River. His most recent poetry collections are River Range (a CD with original music by David Deleary) and ‘A Small Essay on the Largeness of Light’ and Other Poems (2012). His plays include Coyote City (a 1991 Governor General’s nominee) and Almighty Voice and His Wife, now included in The Norton Anthology of Drama, 2nd Edition, Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century to the Present.
Rafi Ghanaghounian is the Executive Director of Keep Six Contemporary Art, a not for profit arts organization dedicated to representing, supporting and promoting the arts nationally and internationally through public events and exhibitions as well as educational programs that attract and engage artists, organizations and the cultural community. Ghanaghounian is an accomplished Curator, gallery operator and promoter with over fifteen years of experience developing, implementing and promoting exhibition and events for individuals and groups in private galleries and public institutions.
Randy Velocci started out as a photojournalist working for magazines, newspapers and on occasion corporate clients for 10 years based in Toronto. When it was time for a career change, he accepted the assistant photo editor position at Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail. For the last 20 years he has been assigning and editing photography assignments from around the world. Stories include news, sports, lifestyle, business and a variety of other topics and issues. As much as he loves assigning he finds the reward is the final edit on what gets published and shared with our readers. Randy has had the pleasure of working with a great many talented photographers and always enjoys seeing how their work impacts people and changes peoples perception on important issues we face in the world today.
Rita Leistner is a photographer known for “The Tree Planters,” Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq, The Edward Curtis Project and Looking for Marshall McLuhan in Afghanistan. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, published widely and are in collections including the Canadian War Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum. She was a finalist for the 2017 Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at Harvard University, has won three Canadian National Magazine Awards Gold Medals and is a nominee for a 2018 World Press Photo Digital Storytelling Award. Rita has an MA in comparative literature, has planted over 500,000 trees in Canada and is represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery.
Stephen Kimber is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster, and the author of nine books, including one novel and eight nonfiction books. He is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax and co-founder of the King’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction program.
Stephen Trumper Is a journalism instructor at Ryerson University and the back-page columnist for Abilities magazine. A former recipient of the Foundation award for outstanding achievement, Stephen has worked as an editor for the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Harrowsmith and Financial Post Business magazine.
Susan de Cartier has been managing artists and developing talent since 1990. Forming Starfish Entertainment in 1995, the company has been involved in the creation and release of more than 50 albums. The company’s roster of clients includes Blue Rodeo, Jim Cuddy, The Sadies, Oh Susanna, Skydiggers and Harrow Fair. Over the course of her career, Susan has guided Blue Rodeo on to become one of the most successful bands in Canadian history garnering 12 Junos and selling over four million albums worldwide to date. Starfish also manages The Woodshed Recording Studio. Susan sits on the Board of Directors for the Ontario Media Development Corporation (OMDC) and the Music Managers Forum.
Tanja-Tiziana is Visual Artist & Pro Photographer based in Toronto, Canada. They specialize in editorial photography and stills for film & television. Past roles include Managing Editor of BlogTO, Managing Photographer of Yonge Street Magazine, and most recently, Staff Photographer at Toronto’s only independent weekly, Now Magazine. In 2016, they published their first photo book, a decade-long documentary series titled, “Buzzing Lights: The Fading Neon Landscape of North America.”
