Canadian Writers in Person continues with a reading of Michael Prior’s Burning Province
If you love meeting talented writers and hearing them read from their published work, or just want to soak up a unique cultural experience, don’t miss the opportunity to attend the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series.
The series gives attendees an opportunity to get up close and personal with an eclectic group of 11 authors while having the unique opportunity to engage with them in a dialogue about their work.
Canadian Writers in Person is a for-credit course for students. It is also a free-admission event for members of the public. All readings take place at 7 p.m. on select Tuesday evenings via Zoom. Links for each reading can be found here: https://cltr.huma.laps.yorku.ca/canwrite/.
This year’s lineup consists of a unique selection of emerging and established Canadian writers, whose writing explores a broad range of topics and geographical and cultural landscapes. Featuring seasoned and emerging poets and fiction writers, the series highlights Canada’s ever-growing literary talent.
The series will continue on Nov. 10 with a reading of poet Michael Prior’s Burning Province (Penguin Random House Canada).
Prior is a writer and a teacher. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and anthologies across North America and the U.K., including Poetry, The New Republic, Narrative, Ambit, Poetry Northwest, The Margins, PN Review, Verse Daily, Global Poetry Anthology 2015, The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. He is a past winner of Magma Poetry’s Editors’ Prize, The Walrus‘s Poetry Prize and Matrix Magazine‘s Lit POP Award for Poetry. His first full-length book of poems, Model Disciple, was named one of the best books of the year by the CBC. Prior holds graduate degrees from the University of Toronto and Cornell University. He divides his time between Saint Paul, M.N. and Vancouver, B.C.
Burning Province, Prior’s second collection explores, the enduring impact of the Japanese internment upon his family legacy and his mixed-race identity. Amid the record-breaking wildfires that scorched British Columbia in 2015 and 2017, the poems in this collection move seamlessly between geographical and psychological landscapes, grappling with cultural trauma and mapping out complex topographies of grief, love and inheritance: those places in time marked by generational memory “when echo crosses echo.”
Burning Province is an elegy for a home aflame and for grandparents who had a complex relationship to it, but it is also a vivid appreciation of mono no aware: the beauty and impermanence of all living things. “The fireflies stutter like an apology,” Prior writes; “I would be lying to you / if I didn’t admit I love them.”
Other presentations scheduled in this series are:
- Nov. 24: Megan Gail Coles, Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club (House of Anansi Press)
- Dec. 8: Sharon Butala, Season of Fury and Wonder (Coteau Books)
2021
- Jan. 19: Carol Rose GoldenEagle, Bone Black (Nightwood Editions)
- Feb. 2: S.D. Chrostowska, The Eyelid (Coach House Books)
- Feb. 23: Kaie Kellough, Dominoes at the Crossroads (Vehicule Press)
- March 9: Terry Watada, Mysterious Dreams of the Dead (Anvil Press)
- March 23: Cecily Nicholson, Wayside Sang (Talonbooks)
Canadian Writers in Person (AP/CLTR 1953 6.0A) is a course offered in the Culture & Expression program in the Department of Humanities in York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. For more information on the series, visit yorku.ca/laps/canwrite, or email Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca or Professor Leslie Sanders at leslie@yorku.ca.