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 Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series, which continues Nov. 9 with a reading from Chantal Gibson’s debut poetry collection, How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019).
The series gives attendees an opportunity to get up close and personal with 11 authors who will present their work and answer questions. Canadian Writers in Person is a for-credit course for students and 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.
Gibson is an award-winning writer, artist and educator living on the unceded, traditional, ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by systemic cultural and institutional erasure. Recipient of the prestigious 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship, Gibson teaches writing and visual communication in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University.
How She Read, winner of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination. Drawing from grade-school vocabulary spellers, literature, history, art, media and pop culture, Gibson’s sassy semiotics highlight the depth and duration of the imperialist ideas embedded in everyday things, from storybooks to coloured pencils, from paintings to postage stamps. A mediation on motherhood and daughterhood, belonging, loss and recovery, the collection weaves the voices of Black women, past and present.
This year’s Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series 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 pool of literary talent.
Other readings scheduled in this series are:
- Nov. 23: Ava Homa, Daughters of Smoke and Fire (HarperCollins Canada)
- Dec. 7: Katłįà (Catherine) Lafferty, Land-Water-Sky /Ndè–Tı–Yat’a (Fernwood Publishing)
2022
- Jan. 18: Thomas King, Sufferance (HarperCollins Canada)
- Feb. 1: Zsuzsi Gartner, The Beguiling (Penguin Random House Canada)
- Feb. 22: Rebecca Salazar, sulphurtongue (Penguin Random House Canada)
- March 8: Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic (Penguin Random House)
- March 22: Louise B. Halfe/Sky Dancer, Burning in This Midnight Dream (Brick Books)
Canadian Writers in Person is a course offered in the Culture and 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.