The New Quarterly: Wild Writers Festival

Our literary friends here at St Jerome's, The New Quarterly, are hosting their second annual Wild Writers Festival on 8-10 November. Sign up at tnq.ca/wildwriters for fantastic free readings and panel discussions, or get tickets for the Writer's Craft classes, evening events, and CanLit Brunch.

M. NourbeSe Philip reads 24 October!

The second, vibrant event in our Literartistry series is a reading by NourbeSe Philip. The opening act will be Rupinder (Rupi) Saini.

Please join us on 24 October at 4:30pm in STJ 3027. 

M. NourbeSe Philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and former lawyer who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. She is a Guggenheim Fellow (USA) and the recipient of many awards including the Casa de las Americas prize (Cuba). Among her best known published works are She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, and Harriet’s Daughter, a young adult novel. Philip’s most recent work, Zong!, is a genre-breaking poem, which engages with the law, history and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade. Her play, Coups and Calypsos, which was produced in London and Toronto, was a Dora Award finalist in 1999.

Christian Campbell reads 3 October!

Join us for the dynamic first event in our Literartistry series. Christian Campbell will be reading for us on Thursday 3 October at 4:30pm in STJ 3027. Brianna Mantynen will be the opening act.

Photo credit: Toni McCrae

Christian Campbell is a Trini-Bahamian poet, scholar and cultural critic.  He has lived in the Caribbean, the US, the UK and Canada and this movement also deeply informs his work.  His first book, Running the Dusk (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), won the 2010 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize (UK), a Lannan Fellowship (US) and was a finalist for the Cave Canem Prize (US), the Forward Prize for the Best First Book (UK) and the inaugural Guyana Prize for Literature (Caribbean).  He is the second Caribbean poet to be shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the first poet of colour to win the Aldeburgh Prize, the oldest prize for a first book of poetry in the UK.  Running the Dusk was also named one of the best books of 2010 by the Caribbean Review of Books, Horizon Review and Poetry International.  Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa calls Running the Dusk “the gutsy work of a long-distance runner who possesses the wit and endurance, the staying power of authentic genius.”    

Campbell’s poetry and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies such as Callaloo, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature and elsewhere.  His work has been translated into Spanish in the anthology Poetas del Caribe Ingles.  He has received awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Arvon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center, the University of Birmingham and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  In 2012, he delivered the fifteenth annual Derek Walcott Lecture for Nobel Laureate Week in St. Lucia (the youngest chosen; former lecturers include Wole Soyinka and Rex Nettleford), was a keynote speaker and poet at “The Power of Caribbean Poetry—Word and Sound” Conference at the University of Cambridge and also was an invited poet at Poetry Parnassus, the international poetry festival at the Cultural Olympiad of the recent Olympic Games.  Campbell, who studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received a PhD at Duke, is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto where he is working on a book on black diaspora poetics. 

Announcing our 2013-14 Series: Literartistry!

The theme of this year's Reading Series at St Jerome's is LITERARTISTRY, to showcase literature's dance with other artistic media. We feature writers whose work is often multi-modal, incorporating aspects of the graphic arts, of experimentation with sound, and of dramatic performance.

Here's our exciting lineup for 2013-14:

Christian Campbell -- Thursday 3 October, 4:30pm, STJ 3027

M. NourbeSe Philip -- Thursday 24 October, 4:30pm, STJ 3027

Ann Shin -- Thursday 7 November, 4:30pm, STJ 3027 -- our thanks to Brick Books for their support

Steve McCaffery -- Thursday 28 November, 8pm, STJ 3014

Gabe Foreman -- Friday 24 January, 8pm, STJ 3027

Lisa Moore -- Wednesday 26 February, 8pm, Siegfried Hall

rob mclennan -- Wednesday 5 March, 4:30pm, STJ 2011

Daniel David Moses -- Thursday 27 March, 4:30pm, STJ 3014

And, once again, before each reading we'll be featuring up and coming creative writers from here at St Jerome's and UW.

Hope to see you there!

Adam Dickinson reads 4 April!

Photo by Scott Turnbull

For some time, we expected
the end of the world
to be a mushroom.
A vengeful good, a good
of fire, clouded thought.
But every spring they come out of the ground
like universal suffrage,
a writ of habeas corpus,
speech before writing.
They say, dirt. They say, get up.

- from Adam Dickinson's "The Good, part I"

It's Spring -- Get up and come hear Adam Dickinson read! We welcome him to bring to a rousing close another great year of The Reading Series at St Jerome's -- and to celebrate the release of his latest book, The Polymers (a poetry collection "structured as an imaginary science project"), hot off the presses from Anansi. 

Please join us on Thursday, 4 April at 4:30pm in STJ 3014.

Chrissy Brown will be the opening act.

Adam Dickinson is a writer, researcher and teacher. His poems have appeared in literary journals in Canada and internationally as well as in anthologies such as Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets and The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science. His collection Kingdom, Phylum was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He is the author most recently of The Polymers (Anansi 2013). He is also working on another poetry project that involves testing his blood and body for chemicals and microbes. When not giving his body to science, he teaches at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he researches intersections between pataphysics and ecopoetics.

Vincent Lam reads 19 March!

Photo: Barbara Stoneham

What do emergency medicine and fiction writing have in common? More than you might think! And who could take on both as simultaneous careers? Vincent Lam. We are delighted to welcome Dr Lam as part of this year's series, on our theme of the intersections of literature and science. 

Please join us Tuesday, 19 March, at 8pm, in the St Jerome's Community Centre.

The opening act will be Kenzie Reid.

Vincent Lam is a practicing physician whose first book of short stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has recently been adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada. His first novel, The Headmaster’s Wager, was a finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award. Lam is from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam, and was born in Canada. He is a Lecturer with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. He has also worked in international air evacuation and expedition medicine on Arctic and Antarctic ships.

Brian Henderson reads on 7 March!

We'll be welcoming Brian Henderson on Thursday, 7 March, at 4:30pm, in STJ 3027 (rescheduled from his original slot in October). Please join us!

Graeme Ruck will be the opening act.

Photo by Anna Ross

Brian Henderson is the author of 10 collections of poetry, one of which, Nerve Language (Pedlar Press 2007), was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. His latest, Sharawadji (Brick Books), was shortlisted for the 2012 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. He has published articles, reviews, and poetry in many literary magazines, has a PhD in Canadian Literature and is the director of WLUPress.