SOFIA MISENHEIMER
Reporting from Ottawa
Sofia Misenheimer is an award-winning journalist, currently digital editor at the Ottawa Citizen. She writes cultural features connecting readers to where they live through human-interest stories and the best food and travel destinations.
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Some favourites: inside a magic mushroom biotech lab, how trade policy is punishing Canadian booksellers, why you saw fewer fireflies last summer and a visit to Montreal's oldest costume store.
Sofia also produces Out of Office, a weekly arts and culture newsletter dedicated to unearthing the capital's best-kept secrets and local creative communities. Subscribe here for local finds as they're published.​​
Recent news & features
Check out more of my published work below.
The return of the seance and what it says about how we mourn
April 2026
Western societies have, for roughly a century, gotten progressively worse at grief. We have shortened mourning periods, moved death out of the home and into hospitals. We no longer wear black for a year; we are expected to be functional within days, if we are expected to mourn publicly at all.
March 2026
Why new independent booksellers in Ottawa are betting on niche
Before Amna Hakim signed the lease on Love Lyla Books, she was an online retailer. For years, she sold a curated collection of books by Muslim authors through her website. Then last summer she hosted a pop-up at the Stakt shipping container in the ByWard Market and what she thought she knew about her customer base changed.
January 2026
Ottawa's most successful used bookstores run on donations
On a Saturday morning in Nepean, shoppers leave the James Bartleman Archives and Library Materials Centre with tote bags tugging at their shoulders, loaded with paperbacks priced lower than a cup of coffee. Across town in Stittsville, donated titles pile up at Re-Read Used Books and vanish by day’s end.
