Earlier this spring, Fredericton's Broken Jaw Press released Jo-Anne Elder's first book of fiction, Postcards from Ex-Lovers.

Jo-Anne was a finalist for the 2003 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for Tales from Dog Island: St. Pierre & Miquelon (Killick), a novel by Françoise Enguehard.

Postcards from Ex-Lovers won the Writers' Federation of New Brunswick's inaugural David Adams Richards Prize. This is a collection of flash fiction from the lives of women who need to move on. These stories pull apart the clichés passed between lovers, catch bits of gossip from cafés across the street from a historical monument, and replay old refrains.

Offering an edgy but not-quite-jaded look at relationships at the turn of the new century, Jo-Anne gives postcard stories a woman’s voice and introduces a new form — business card fiction.

Jo-Anne is translator of Moncton Mantra (Guernica), a novel by Gérald Leblanc; translator, with Fred Cogswell, of Conversations (Goose Lane) and Climates (Goose Lane) by Herménégilde Chiasson; and translator and editor, with Fred Cogswell, of Unfinished Dreams: Contemporary Poetry of Acadie (Goose Lane). She is also editor, with Colin O’Connell, of Voices and Echoes: Canadian Women’s Spirituality (Wilfrid Laurier University Press).

Jo-Anne is Vice-President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, editor of the periodical ellipse: textes littéraires canadienes en traduction / Canadian writing in translation, and co-ordinator of the annual Side by Side Festival Côte à Côte in Fredericton.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, to Scottish-Canadian parents from Sault Ste. Marie and Bathurst, New Brunswick, Jo-Anne grew up in Burlington, Ontario. She studied French at Trent in Peterborough and in Aix-en-Provence, France, and completed her MA and PhD in Comparative Canadian Literature at the Université de Sherbrooke.

Jo-Anne currently lives in Fredericton, where she spreads her energy across a large family, community work, writing postcard stories, editing and publishing fiction and poetry, doing research, and translating Acadian, Québec and Franco-Ontarian literature as well as books and texts on Acadian history, culture and art.

You can catch Jo-Anne on Friday June 17^th at 7:30 p.m. reading from Postcards from Ex-Lovers at Mother Tongue Books in Ottawa, Ontario.