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Diane Elizabeth Dawber, B.A., M.Ed. (Queen's University) was born in Belleville, ON. She is a poet, author, educator, researcher, and health advocate. She taught from 1965-1990, mostly at the elementary level but also as Consultant for the Arts K-12 for the Lennox-Adding School Board and as first Writing Adjunct Professor for the Artist in Community Program at Faculty of Education, Queen’s University, Kington. She was disabled with chronic illness in 1990.

Dawber has written two poetry collections for adults and five poetry collections for younger readers. She has given many school visits and workshops, an open-mic series in Kingston, and an anthology of Kingston poets came out of these works. Many poems have been anthologized. She won the Banff Centre Pilot Project in Writing, 1980 as well as the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario Writers Award, 1982, 1987 and 1991.

The study group she started for disabled teachers and nurses in 1996 met monthly for 20 years and morphed into an incorporated non-profit -- Health Pursuits Group later named Health Pursuits Reading and Research: MEND -- from 2010 until dissolution in 2022. Their research helped hundreds of people with difficult issues and won a large Ontario Trillium Award in 2012. Three non-fiction books came out of this work.

Selected works include "Cankerville"(Borealis, 1984), "Oatmeal Mittens" (Borealis,1987), "Writers on Writing" (Grolier, 1989), "My Underwear's Inside Out" (Quarry Press, 1991), "How Do You Wrestle a Goldfish?" (Borealis Press, 1997), "Lifting the Bull: Back Pain, Fibromyalgia and Environmental Illness" (Quarry Press, 1999), and "The Nutrient Scent Test (Health Pursuits Reading and Research: MEND, 2017).

Diane has two sons with her first husband Christopher (1943-2012), two grandsons, and a whole step-family of daughter, and two granddaughters from her second husband Bernard Gates (1935-2023).

Mary Alice Downie (born February 12, 1934) is an American-born Canadian writer.

The daughter of Canadian parents, she was born Mary Alice Dawe Hunter in Alton, Illinois and was educated at Trinity College at the University of Toronto. She married John Downie in 1959. She was a reporter for Marketing from 1955 to 1956; from 1956 to 1957, she was an editorial assistant for the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Downie was publicity manager for the Oxford University Press in Toronto from 1958 to 1959. She subsequently worked as a freelance writer. In 1959, Downie and her husband moved to Pittsburgh; they moved to Kingston, Ontario in 1962. From 1973 to 1979, Downie was book review editor for the Kingston Whig-Standard.

She has also contributed to The Horn Book Magazine, OWL, Chickadee, The Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen and the Montreal Gazette.

Margaret Sparling Mills (1940-) is an author and reviewer who published under the name Sparling Mills.

Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist and critic.