Every submission Geist receives is read with care by members of our Reading Collective—a community of volunteers who give their time to reading new work and sharing their insights with the editors. We’re delighted to introduce you to a few more of these readers. Whether your favourite piece from a recent issue was a poem, essay, short story or comic, it was likely first championed by one of them.

Saakshi Patel is a Mumbai-born poet and educator who lives in Vancouver, BC. She holds an MA in Poetry with Distinction from Queen’s University Belfast, a BA in English Literature and Language from the University of British Columbia, and is currently working on a poetry collection about migration and loneliness at The Writer’s Studio.

J.R. Patterson was born in Manitoba in 1989 and began writing in 2020. In 2022, his work was included in The Best British Travel Writing of the 21st Century. In 2024, he was nominated for a Canadian National Magazine Award, and in 2026, he was named the prairie correspondent for the Walrus.

Maryanna Gabriel is the author of Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is (Pottersfield Press, 2023). She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Dalhousie University, is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio, and holds a certificate in creative nonfiction from the University of Toronto. An artist, she also holds a certificate in fine art techniques from Emily Carr University of Art & Design, and works from the Southern Gulf Islands, BC.

A big thank you to all our Reading Collective members past and present.