Join us in Celebrating Resilience through this fine selection of short stories, poems and personal narratives. Resilience is the ability to bend and flex like a tree in a violent storm, to persevere like a flower pushing through the pavement of a parking lot and in the words of a Japanese proverb to "fall seven times and stand up eight."

We have all faced life's difficulties. Like you, our writers have overcome adversity, loss, disappointment, misfortune, heartache and the first global pandemic in over a century. There is inspiration in their words of resilience—expressed often with humour, sometimes with sorrow and always with resolve.

The launch of this anthology marks the first year for the Northumberland Festival of the Arts, an expansion of the 2017 and 2019 Spirit of the Hills Festival of the Arts. Hill Spirits V reflects this expansion with literary contributions from writers across five counties in Eastern Ontario: Northumberland, Durham, Peterborough, Hastings and Prince Edward.