Emily Urquhart knows how to keep busy. She has worked as a freelance writer for two decades and her narrative nonfiction and book reviews have appeared in Guernica, Longreads, The Walrus, The Rumpus, The Literary Review of Canada and The Toronto Star among other publications. She is a five-time National Magazine Award nominee, a Digital Magazine Award nominee, and won an Alberta Magazine Award. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and has taught courses on creative writing, literary nonfiction, research practices, and various genres of folklore, mentored student, staff and faculty writers.

She has a doctorate in folklore, and has drawn on that background in her writing, including Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes, which was nominated for the Kobo First Book Award, a British Columbia Book Prize, and the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Emily’s next book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, about creativity and aging, was listed as a top book of by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. This love of art lead her to the role of writer-on-site for a serial collaboration of twelve artists called A Hole in the Ground

Her third and most recent book, a collection of essays is Ordinary Wonder Tales, was again listed as a top book by the Globe and Mail and The Telegram. The Toronto Star calls it “a book of both deep thought and intense feeling, Ordinary Wonder Tales is, literally, a collection of wonders, and a truly beautiful account of a life lived in the nexus of the temporal and the eternal. It’s a treasure.” Emily lives in Kitchener with her husband, an ecology professor at the University of Waterloo, and two amazing kids.

Emily’s appearance is supported by Author Patrons the Reiders’ Book Club.

Appearing in 20. Folklore, Fable, and Fantastical Females