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.

15 December 2018

Richard Cumyn reads 1 February!


For our first reading for Winter term, we're delighted to welcome Richard Cumyn.
The opening act will be Yutong Wu.
Please join us Friday 1 February at 4:30pm in SJ1 3027.

Photo credit: Andrew Hamilton
RICHARD CUMYN was born in Ottawa and educated at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Widely published as a short-story writer, essayist and book reviewer, he has been the fiction editor of The Antigonish Review, taught at the Maritime Writers Workshop in Fredericton and been Writer-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. He lives in Edmonton.

23 October 2018

Jael Richardson reads 16 November!

We're delighted to welcome Jael Richardson for our November reading.

The opening act will be Anoja Parameswaran.

Please join us Friday 16 November at 4:30pm in SJ1 3027.

Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. The memoir received a CBC Bookie Award and earned Richardson an Acclaim Award and a My People Award as an Emerging Artist and was adapted into a children’s book in 2016. Her essay “Conception” is part of Room Magazine’s first Women of Colour edition, and excerpts from her first play, my upside down black face, are published in the anthology T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto’s Black Storytellers.

19 September 2018

Julie Cameron Gray reads 19 October!

We're excited to kick off our 2018-19 series with poet and fiction writer Julie Cameron Gray.

The opening act will be Krystyna Oakman.

Please join us on Friday 19 October at 4:30pm in SJ1 3027.

photo by Guy Crawford


Julie Cameron Gray is originally from Sudbury, Ontario. She is the author of two poetry collections—Lady Crawford (Palimpsest Press, 2016) and Tangle (Tightrope Books, 2013)—and has previously published in The FiddleheadEVENTPrairie FireCarousel, and Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books, 2011). Lady Crawford was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award in 2017.