ABOUT EMILY P-W

Toronto author Emily Pohl-Weary grew up and still lives in the city's west end. Parkdale, a formerly elegant but now down and out neighbourhood, seeps into everything she writes.

She's currently writing a four-issue girl pirate comic (illustrated by Willow Dawson). Her young adult mystery novel, Strange Times at Western High, was published by Annick Press in the fall of 2006.

A slim collection of her poetry, Iron-On Constellations, was published in late 2005. In the fall of 2004, her first novel was released. A Girl Like Sugar is about a girl who's haunted by her dead rock star boyfriend. A critic called it "a candy kiss hiding barbed wire... as fun as eating a Ferrero Rocher."

Earlier that same year, she toured across North America with contributors to her female superhero anthology, Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks. The book has been dubbed "a bible of pop culture femininity."

In 2002, she co-authored the Hugo Award-winning biography about her grandmother's life, Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril. It was also a finalist for the Toronto Book Award.

Emily's been editing the funky art/lit hybrid Kiss Machine magazine since 2000. She likes to think of it as a community on paper. She's a former editor of Broken Pencil, and her writing has appeared in several Canadian (and a few American) magazines.

More often than not, you can find her at home, sipping tea in front of her computer. Usually, she's working. But sometimes she plays video games, goes to the library, the Y, or to a movie. Oh, and she gets her hyphenated last name from her parents, Ann Pohl and Walter Weary, not from her husband Jesse Hirsh.

Click here for a few printable pics of Emily and her publications.