Gabe Foreman reads 24 January!

Please join us for our first event of the new year, which is bound to be a fun one. Who doesn't need a good, witty, poetic laugh at the end of January? 

Gabe Foreman reads on Friday 24 January, at 8pm, in STJ 3027.

The opening act will be Lishni Salgado.

Photo credit: Anna Ross

Gabe Foreman grew up near Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is a founding editor of littlefishcartpress, a small poetry press based in Orono, Ontario. His first collection of poems, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House Books), received the 2011 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Concordia University First Book Prize. His poems have appeared most recently in The Walrus, and have aired on CBC radio (Daybreak). He lives in Montreal.

Steve McCaffery reads 28 November!

What more perfect addition to our Literartistry series than Steve McCaffery? He is a perpetual reworker of language and typography, sound and video, and was once upon a time a member of the legendary sound poetry troupe The Four Horsemen.

Please join us Thursday 28 November, at 8pm, in STJ 3014.

The opening act will be Harris Alterman. 

More about the feature author:

STEVE McCAFFERY has been twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award and is the author of more than 35 books and chapbooks of poetry and criticism. An ample selection of his poetic explorations in numerous forms can be savoured in the two volumes of Seven Pages Missing (Coach House Press). As well as Panopticon (1984, revised edition 2011) and The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, anachronism and the anomaly (University of Alabama Press, 2012). His book-object-concept A Little Manual of Treason was commissioned for the 2011 Shajah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. Two new books are forthcoming: Dark Ladies (Chax Press) and Revanches a collection of visual and concrete poetry (Xexoxial editions). English born and a long-time resident of Toronto he is now the David Gray Endowed Professor of Poetry and Letters at the University at Buffalo and Director of the Poetics Program.

Ann Shin reads 7 November!

Join us for the next event in our Literartistry series: a reading by Ann Shin -- Thursday 7 November, 4:30pm, STJ 3027. Our thanks to Brick Books for their support! 
The opening act will be Lindsay Kroes, who has recently published Gather by the Avon, an anthology of local history short stories. 

About the feature author:
Ann Shin is a writer, filmmaker and new media producer based in Toronto. She has two books of poetry published, the latest book being The Family China, published by Brick Books in May 2013. Her writing has also been published in anthologies and magazines in Canada and the US, including Literary Review of Canada, On a Bed of Rice, Anchor Books, Geography of Encounters, Rowman and Little Press, Alphabet City: FOOD, MIT Press.

About The Family China:

"This short, dazzling collection of poems contains a universe—nothing short of North American life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Somehow it is all here, joyously offered up, birth, death, and everything in between" – Karen Connelly, author of The Lizard Cage and Burmese Lessons

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!