Demeter Press, a division of York’s Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), is launching its fourth book on Nov. 12, White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood, a collection of poems about 
mothers and motherhood edited by York Professor and poet Rishma Dunlop.
Left: Professor Rishma Dunlop
The launch will feature readings by several poets, including York Professor Priscila Uppal of the Faculty of Arts, Professor Ann Fisher-Wirth of the University of Mississippi, Professor Rebecca Luce-Kapler of Queen’s University, Records Manager Chris Doda with York’s Information & Privacy Office, and Ruth Panofsky, director of the York-Ryerson joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture.
Work by a number of well-known poets and translators – female and male – from the late 20th- and early 21st-centuries is included in the anthology, including Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Gwendolyn McEwan, Rosemary Sullivan, Patrick Lane and Allen Ginsberg.
Editor Dunlop is a professor of English in the Faculty of Education at York, an acclaimed poet and author of three books of poetry – Metropolis (2005), Reading like a Girl (2004) and The Body of My Garden (2002). She is also the co-editor, along with Uppal, of Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets (2004). She has received the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry and was short listed for a CBC Canada Council Literary Award.
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Touted as “unsentimental, unflinching and edgy”, White Ink unveils some of the social and political changes that have occurred over the years as witnessed through the eyes of mothers. The anthology encompasses multiple cultures, ethnicities, genders and languages.
Demeter Press is the first publisher in Canada to focus specifically on motherhood and mothering. Its previously published books include Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering, edited by the director of ARM and York Professor Andrea O’Reilly of Atkinson’s School of Women’s Studies; Until Our Hearts are on the Ground: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth edited by Dawn Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeanette Corbiere-Lavell; and Maternal Theory: Essential Readings also edited by O’Reilly.
ARM recognized there was an interest in feminist books about all aspects of mothering and motherhood, and with that in mind Demeter Press was launched in May 2006. Several more books are in the works.
The book launch for White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood will take place from 7 to 10pm in the ballroom of the Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. W., Toronto.
For more information or to order a copy of the anthology, contact Reneee Knapp at ext. 560366 or by e-mail to arm@yorku.ca.