Canadian Writing Comes to You -- Live!

The Reading Series has been bringing cutting-edge Canadian writers to St. Jerome's University since 1984.

Each year we strive to offer a range in our slate of visiting writers: well-established and up-and-coming, from the local area and from sea to sea, working in verse and prose and beyond. Experimental and traditional, serious and playful, beautiful and stark, cynical and celebratory -- come and sample the wealth and variety that is Canadian literature today.

These readings are special opportunities to get inside the book -- to hear writers read their own words, and speak about their own writing. Every reading includes an open question and answer session.

All readings are free and open to the public. And there's free parking!

St. Jerome's is located at 290 Westmount Road North, Waterloo, Ontario.

From its beginnings through 2018-19, the Reading Series has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and St. Jerome's University. It now continues to be funded by St. Jerome's.

14 September 2010

2010-2011 Schedule

We've got a great line-up for the Series this year. Hope to see you there!

The Reading Series at St. Jerome's
2010-2011
Richard Cumyn
Thursday, October 14th, 4:30 pm, STJ 2017

Richard is widely published in Canada, his work often appearing in The New Quarterly, Fiddlehead, and Prairie Fire. With two of his earlier collections of short fiction shortlisted for the ReLit Award, his latest collection of short fiction The Young in their Country, to be released this Fall, is a finalist for the inaugural Enfield & Wizenty Fiction Prize.

Christian Bök
Tuesday, October 26th, 4:30 pm, Siegfried Hall

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence.

Janice Kulyk Keefer
Thursday, November 18th, 4:30 pm, STJ2017

Janice Kulyk Keefer is the author of over a dozen works of poetry, prose, and literary criticism. With work previously shortlisted for GG awards, her most recent novel The Ladies Lending Library, which explores the various familial and group tensions experienced by a community of Ukranian-Canadian families, won the Kobzar prize.

Gregory Scofield
Tuesday, February 15th, 4:30 pm

Gregory Scofield is a leading Canadian poet whose work blends oral modes of storytelling with song and the Cree language (harbourpublishing.com). His much read Thunder through my Veins (1999), a poetic memoir, is described as a “heartbreaking” story of “self-discovery, acceptance, and the power of art to heal” (harpercollins.ca). His latest collection of poetry kipocihkân: Poems New & Selected was released in 2009.

Guy Gavriel Kay
Tuesday, March 29th (tentative), 4:30 pm

In 1984, Kay's first novel, The Summer Tree was published to considerable acclaim. In 1990 Viking Canada’s edition of his novel Tigana reached the national bestseller list, and his next book A Song for Arbonne debuted at #1 nationally. Kay has been a bestseller with each novel since. His most recent novel Under Heaven was released in 2010.

Roy Miki
Tuesday, April 5th, 4:30 pm

Roy Miki is the author of numerous publications, including Surrender (Mercury Press 2001) which received the GG’s Award for Poetry and Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (Raincoast 2004) and. He is currently completing “Mannequin Rising,” a book-length series of poems and photo collages that probe the internal effects of commodity culture (forthcoming spring 2011 from New Star Books).

The locations of the latter readings will be posted when available. Check back soon!