Brenda Niskala has been employed as the Executive Director for the Saskatchewan Publishers Group for seventeen years and has also tried her hand at being a crisis counselor, a legal aid lawyer in the north, a writer in residence and a branch representative for ACTRA. In 1998, she taught two consecutive classes for Common Weal Community Arts through the Street Workers Advocacy Program. The classes evolved into a writing and support group, The Survivors, which she mentored until 2006. A modified version of the group still meets. She has served on editorial boards for Grain, Briarpatch, and NeWest Review magazines, as well as Coteau Books, and volunteer boards including the executive of the League of Canadian Poets, the Canadian Reprography Collective (Access), and the Minister's Advisory Committee for the Status of the Artist in Saskatchewan (1993). She has taught Creative Writing for the University of Regina Extension Department (Youth and Seniors), the Festival of Words (Youth) and Sage Hill Writing Experience (Youth) and presented hundreds of readings and workshops in schools and libraries throughout the province over the last twenty years. In 1998 Brenda toured across Canada, from Fredericton to Nanaimo, with four other poets. In 2003 she represented Canada at the Lahti International Poetry Festival in Finland. Brenda Niskala's novella Of All the Ways to Die (Quattro) was published 2009; her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals. Her poetry has been published in chapbooks, the co-authored Open 24 Hours, and collected in Ambergris Moon. For the Love of Strangers (Coteau Books 2010) is her first book of short fiction.

Brenda Niskala is a Primary Writer for the Connect Publication