Canadian Writers in Person series features CanLit talent

This fall will be a real page turner for those interested in CanLit. On select Tuesday evenings throughout the 2017-18 academic year, York University’s celebrated Canadian Writers in Person series presents 11 established and new writers delivering readings from their published work.

“We have a terrific lineup of authors for 2017-18,” says Professor Gail Vanstone, coordinator of the Culture & Expression Program in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. Vanstone noted that since compiling the list, one of this year’s featured writers, Jordan Abel, won the Griffin Poetry prize.

The iconic Canadian Writers in Person series poster, designed exclusively for Canadian Writers in Person was created by Erik Morin, a Vancouver-based graphic artist. “Erik Morin is the graphic artist behind the brilliant series of pencil posters, the pencil reminds us of the human creative endeavour of writing,” notes Vanstone. “Erik designed the first poster for the 2005-06, featuring a pencil emerging from a beaver’s den and has been designing them ever since.”

All readings are free and open to the public and take place on select Tuesdays, from 7 to 10pm in 206 Accolade West Building.

Sept. 19
Mona Awad: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

Awad was born in Montreal, QC and has lived in the United States on and off since 2003. An alumna of York University, Awad received her MFA in Fiction from Brown University and her MScR in English literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Walrus, Joyland, Post Road, St. Petersburg Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and English literature at the University of Denver. Her first novel Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize.

Oct. 3
Anosh Irani: The Parcel

Irani has published three critically acclaimed novels: The Cripple and His Talismans, a national bestseller; The Song of Kahunsha, an international bestseller, shortlisted for Canada Reads and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; and Dahanu Road, nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize. His play Bombay Black won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, and his anthology The Bombay Plays: The Matka King & Bombay Black was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. His work has been translated into eleven languages. His new novel The Parcel is published by Knopf and was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award.

Oct. 17
Phoebe Wang: Admission Requirements

Wang’s poetry has appeared in Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, CV2, Descant, Grain, Malahat Review, Ricepaper Magazine, THIS Magazine and Diaspora Dialogues’ TOK 6: Writing the New Toronto anthology. She won the 2015 Prism International Poetry; her first chapbook, Occasional Emergencies, was published with Toronto’s Odourless Press in 2013 and her second, Hanging Exhibits, with The Emergency Response Unit in 2016. Admission Requirements, her debut collection of poetry, is forthcoming from McClelland and Stewart in spring 2017.

Oct. 31
Trevor Cole: Hope Makes Love

Cole is an award-winning journalist and novelist. As a journalist, he has won nine National Magazine awards and still writes for magazines such as Report on Business Magazine, Macleans and Toronto Life. In the fall of 2000, he began writing fiction.  His first two books — Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life and The Fearsome Particles — were both short-listed for the Governor General’s Literary Award and long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Norman Bray was also short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book in the Canada-Caribbean region. Cole’s third novel, Practical Jean, was nominated for the Rogers’ Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and won the famous Leacock Medal for Humour. His latest novel is Hope Makes Love, was named a 49th Shelf Book of the Year for 2015.

Nov. 14
Gary Barwin: Yiddish for Pirates

Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist and the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and books for children.  His recent books include Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada), which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the short fiction collection, I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457, and the poetry collection Moon Baboon Canoe.  In 2017, No TV for Woodpeckers, a new poetry collection, will appear from Wolsak and Wynn. He has a PhD in music composition and was a Writer-in-Residence at Western University and a Young Voices E-Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library. Barwin has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities.

Nov. 28
Kerry Lee Powell: Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush

Powell’s work has appeared in The Spectator, the Boston Review, the Virago Press Writing Women series and Best Canadian Stories. In 2013, she won the Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award and the Boston Review’s Aura Estrada Short Story Award. Her debut poetry collection was published by Biblioasis Press in 2014 and was nominated for the Gerald Lampert award and the Alfred Bailey manuscript prize. Her short fiction collection, Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush, was published by HarperCollins in 2016. It was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the 2016 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She is the series editor of Grey Suit, a London-based contemporary visual arts archive and press funded by The Elephant Trust and the Arts Council of England.

Jan. 16, 2018
Paul Yee: A Superior Man

Yee is the author of many books for children, including Teach Me to Fly, Skyfighter, The Curses of Third Uncle, Dead Man’s Gold and Ghost Train — winner of the 1996 Governor General’s Award for English language children’s literature.  In 2012, the Writers’ Trust of Canada awarded Paul Yee the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People in recognition of having “contributed uniquely and powerfully to our literary landscape over a writing career that spans almost 30 years” and most of his many publications have received individual awards.  A Superior Man, his latest work, and a novel for adults, details 19th-century Chinese Canadian history.

Jan. 30
Soraya Peerbaye: Tell

Peerbaye’s first collection of poetry, Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her poems have appeared in Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Women Poets (2004), edited by Priscila Uppal and Rishma Dunlop, as well as the literary journals Other Voices, Prairie Fire and The New Quarterly; she has also contributed to the chapbook anthology Translating Horses. In 2016, Tell was shortlisted for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.

Feb. 13
Jordan Abel: Injun

Abel is a Nisga’a writer from British Columbia. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD at Simon Fraser University where his research concentrates on the intersection between Digital Humanities and Indigenous Literary Studies. Abel’s creative work has recently been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope), The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (Arbiter Ring), and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21^st Century (Hayword). Abel is the author of Injun, Un/inhabited and The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award).

March 6
Katherena Vermette: The Break

Vermette is a Métis writer from Treaty One territory, the heart of the Métis nation, Winnipeg, Man. Her first book, North End Love Songs (The Muses’ Company) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her National Film Board short documentary, this river, won the Coup de Coeur at the Montreal First Peoples Festival and won the 2017 Canadian Screen Award for Best Short. Her first novel, The Break (House of Anansi) was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize and was a finalist for Canada Reads 2016.

March 13
Garfield Ellis: The Angel’s Share

Ellis grew up in Jamaica where he studied marine engineering, management and public relations and then completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Miami. He is a two-time winner of the Una Marson prize for adult literature; in the first instance for his first collection of short stories, Flaming Hearts (pub. 1997), and later for the novel, Till I’m Laid To Rest. He has twice won the Canute A. Brodhurst prize for fiction (The Caribbean Writer, University of Virgin Islands) 2000 and 2005 and the 1990 Heinemann/Lifestyle short story competition. He is the author of six novels and his work has appeared in several international journals, including; Callaloo, Calabash, the Caribbean writer, Obsidian III, Anthurium and Small Axe.

Readings are part of Culture & Expression’s AP/CLTR 1953 6.0, a degree credit course on Canadian literary culture. More information at: http://www.yorku.ca/laps/canwrite/ or call 416-736-5158, or 416-736-2100 ext. 33957 or email: leslie@yorku.ca or gailv@yorku.ca.