The Alexander Drive Project
by Sandy Kowalik
September 2026 | $29.95 | Non-fiction
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Post-war bungalows, also known as “victory houses,” were built across Canada to house returning veterans and their families. The Alexander Drive Project by PEI artist and author Sandy Kowalik tells the story of one such neighbourhood built in 1948 in Charlottetown.
The Alexander Drive Project began in the garden. As Kowalik dug, she found bits of china, bottle caps, coins, marbles, glass, and a few action figure arms. Using these materials, she created annual assemblages called “What the Garden Couldn’t Swallow.” These backyard discoveries led Kowalik to research both the origins of the objects and her neighbourhood.
This social history chronicles how the street has evolved over the last 75 years, touching upon themes of affordable housing, supportive neighbourhoods, mental health, addiction, violence, changing demographics, gender roles, and the impact of climate change. Kowalik blends archival research, resident interviews, and photographs, along with her series of garden assemblages to create a portrait of how the neighbourhood came to be and of the people who call(ed) it home.
Sandy Kowalik is a Fine Art honours graduate of the Ontario College of Art, working primarily in sculpture and assemblage. A native of Hamilton, Ontario, she has made her permanent home in Charlottetown, PEI, since 1986. Kowalik’s work can be found in the Canada Council Art Bank, the Prince Edward Island Art Bank, the Confederation Centre of the Arts Gallery’s permanent collection, and private collections worldwide.
Another Landscape
by Judy Gaudet
March 2026 | $18.95 | Poetry
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In her third poetry collection, Judy Gaudet “brings us heart-deep and eye-level with Prince Edward Island’s fields, woods, and shores,” says Deirdre Kessler, former PEI Poet Laureate.
Another Landscape speaks to the ordinary wonders of a life shared with her partner and their dog, where “Nothing is needed. Everything is here between us.” Though the poems grow out of this one life on the Island, Gaudet takes the long view of time. She sees at once the molecules of the red sandstone cliffs and her own, that have held together for greatly different timespans. The poems gather small but notable moments of Island life and insist we look closer, for “this is life, as long as we have it.”
Judy Gaudet is a Prince Edward Island poet and painter whose books include Conversation with Crows (Oberon, 2014) and Her Teeth Are Stones (Acorn, 2005). She is the editor of 150+: Canada’s History in Poetry (Acorn, 2018).
Turning the Tide: Climate Change, Social Change & Islandness
Edited by Jean Mitchell, Laurie Brinklow, Anouk Mertens & Eric Mijts
February 2026 | $34.95 | Essays
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This collection of essays from islanders around the globe offers a complex understanding of the intersections of climate change and social change on islands. How are the effects of climate change and catastrophic weather experienced and narrated by islanders? What stories need to be told? How do local, traditional, and Indigenous knowledge practices facilitate the capacity to improvise, innovate, and adapt to volatile weather events? How do social relations on climate-stressed islands continue to flourish? How do governance structures and issues of sovereignty support and/or inhibit climate and social justice? This interdisciplinary approach foregrounds island storytellers as they convey worldviews, knowledge, and cultural values, beliefs, and emotions that are often missing from climate change discourses.
The Geography of Home: Poems for a Lost Time
by Edward MacDonald
Fall 2025 | $24.95 | Island History, Island Poetry
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In The Geography of Home, MacDonald traces the rural Prince Edward Island that he grew up in from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, a landscape on the cusp of far-reaching change. The depiction of an era offered here is a mixed-media portrait, combining prose and poetry, history and memory. MacDonald writes that while history attempts to trace changes over time, “memories are the little, coloured stones that we collect to assemble a mosaic of our lived past.”
The Belfast Riot of 1847
by Callum Beck
Spring 2025 | $29.95 | Island History
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On March 1, 1847, Prince Edward Island experienced the second-worst election riot in Canadian history. About 200 Scottish Protestants and 300 Irish Catholics got into a brawl, resulting in at least three men dead and up to 100 others injured. This event set the stage for the hardening of the sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics on Prince Edward Island for the next 125 years. The Belfast Riot of 1847 examines the social and political conditions that led to the riot, introduces us to the major players on both sides, provides a detailed account of its unfolding, and takes a nuanced look at who was to blame.
Finding Home at the Harbour
by Barbara Palmer Rousseau
Fall 2024 | $22.95 | Illustrated essays
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A frequent summer visitor to PEI, Barbara Palmer Rousseau experienced its true beauty when she moved from Ontario to the Island. At her cottage in St. Peters Harbour on the north-east shore, she learned the seasonal rhythms of spring peepers and barefoot beach walks, fall hurricanes and winter freeze-up. Her creativity returned as she began to sketch her fox family neighbours, the nearby dunes, and the sand-locked lighthouse. Weaving natural history with her own story and illustrations, Rousseau highlights the resilience of this island and its inhabitants to ongoing environmental change. Her essays reflect on the fluid nature of the shore and tell a story of adaptation and hope.
A Skeptic in Springtime
by Brent MacLaine
April 2024 | $18.95 | Poetry
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A Skeptic in Springtime wrestles with uncertainty and aging, hurricanes, gravity, and particle theory. Amid all the unknowns, “Still, the white-throated sparrow cries I’m here, here, here, here.” Although rooted in the PEI landscape where he grew up, MacLaine ranges farther afield to Assyrian myth in “Killing a Lassamu,” to the Song Dynasty in “Su Dongpo Makes Ink,” and to art in “Claude Monet in the Waiting Room.” The book closes with an elegy to the late John Smith, a close friend and the former poet laureate of PEI. Combining keen observation of the natural world and the human condition, the poems in this collection contain, as Smith wrote, “a universe which has leapt from nothing into something.”