Nine faculty members from the Creative Writing program will present readings from their works during an annual event. This year, it will take place on Monday, Oct. 18, from 3:30 to 5 p.m.
Participating in this event are: Professor Allan Weiss (departments of English and humanities); Andy Weaver, associate professor (English); Concetta Principe, contract faculty (English); David B. Goldstein, associate professor (English) and co-ordinator of the Creative Writing program; Jennifer Duncan, contract faculty (English); Kenzie Allen, assistant professor (English); Michael Helm, associate professor (English); Pasha Malla, assistant professor (English); and Suzanne Zelazo, contract faculty (English).
The event, which is free and open to the community, will be presented over Zoom. Participants will need to preregister to receive a Zoom link or email Kimberly Wilson, Creative Writing program secretary, at kimberly@yorku.ca.
Allan Weiss is a professor of English and humanities at York University. He the author of three story cycles: Living Room (Boheme Press, 2001), Making the Rounds (Edge, 2016) and, most recently, Telescope (Guernica Editions, 2019). He has published other short stories, both literary and science fiction/fantasy, in various anthologies and magazines, including Wascana Review, On Spec and the Tesseracts series of anthologies of Canadian fantastic literature. Among his scholarly publications are articles on various topics in Canadian fiction, including the short story and Canadian fantastic fiction, and two monographs, The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Fantastic Literature and The Mini-Cycle (both 2021).
Andy Weaver has published three books of poetry. His most recent publication is the poetry chapbook Haecceity, from Gap Riot press. He has recently completed a manuscript for a book-length serial poem titled “The Loom,” which attempts to work through notions of love, both as an abstract concept and in relation to the actuality of becoming a parent.
Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on trauma and literature. Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide has recently come out with Gordon Hill Press. Several essays from this collection have been nominated for CNF awards at The New Quarterly and The Malahat Review. Her recent collection of poetry, This Real (Pedlar Press, 2017), was longlisted for the League of Canadian Poet’s Raymond Souster Award. Her poetry has appeared recently in The Capilano Review, experiment-o and Hamilton Arts and Literature, and is forthcoming in Wordgathering. Currently, she is in the final stages of editing a book-length project for Palgrave Macmillan, in which a chapter of hers will be included, titled Rereading Lacan’s “Science and Truth”: From Cogito to Covid, to be published in spring 2022. She is also guest editor of a special issue on Lacan, titled “Lacan Now” for English Studies in Canada. She teaches English literature and creative writing at Trent and York universities.
David B. Goldstein, the author of two books of poetry and numerous essays, directs the Creative Writing program at York. He is the author of a book of literary criticism, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, which won the 2014 Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award; two co-edited collections of Shakespeare criticism; and two volumes of poems, Lost Originals and Laws of Rest. He has published articles on the politics of soil in Paradise Lost, the Scottish context of The Merchant of Venice, food in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Titus Andronicus and American cannibalism, Martha Stewart and domestic labour, and Robert Duncan as a translator of Rilke, among others. His poetry and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies across North America.
Jennifer Duncan is the author of two books, Sanctuary & Other Stories and Frontier Spirit: Brave Women of the Klondike, as well as numerous poems, short stories, and book reviews in literary journals and newspapers. She co-designed the original curriculum for the Yukon School of Art and innovated a community-based writing program in Dawson City. She is currently completing her first novel and her PhD in language, culture and teaching, specializing in creative writing pedagogy.
Kenzie Allen is a descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She received her PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her MFA in poetry from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Allen’s most recent project is a multimodal book of poetry that incorporates intergenerational histories and diasporic movements, Haudenosaunee traditions and archival materials of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School. Her poems can be found in the Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, Best New Poets and other venues, and she is the founder and managing editor of the Anthropoid collective.
Michael Helm’s most recent novel is After James. He also writes nonfiction on culture and the arts. The Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize citation calls After James “a warning, a lament, a virtuoso engagement with our times” and “a singular, puzzle-box of a novel delivered in gorgeous prose.” His other novels are Cities of Refuge, a Writers’ Trust finalist and a Globe and Mail and Now Magazine Best Book of the Year; The Projectionist, a finalist for the Giller Prize and the Trillium Award; and In the Place of Last Things, a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction in 2019. His writings on fiction, poetry and the visual arts have appeared in North American newspapers and magazines, including Tin House and Brick, where he’s an editor.
Pasha Malla is the author of six books. His writing has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, an Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction and several National Magazine Awards, has been shortlisted for the Amazon Best First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Prize, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Malla is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the Globe and Mail and CBC Radio. His new novel, Kill the Mall, will be released in February.
Suzanne Zelazo is the author of the poetry collections Lances All Alike and Parlance (Coach House Books) and is the editor and co-editor of a number of collections of work by experimental female artists and writers. She holds a PhD in English with a specialty in female modernism and avant-garde poetry and performance.