We had the pleasure of hosting Dionne Brand in March of 2016. Brand read to an overflowing crowd in the EV Building’s York Amphitheatre. You can listen to an excerpt from that extraordinary reading here.

Writers Read Concordia Presents: Writing Lives: Creative, Critical & Bodily Activisms, Rituals of Mourning Thursday, December 5th at 4th Space Concordia 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd W. 6 – 8 pm  Writers Read hosts a feminist writing panel featuring Sue Sinclair, Sue Goyette, and Larissa Lai in conversation with Sina Queyras as part of Writing Lives

Sue Sinclair is the author of five books of poetry, all of which have won or been nominated for national and regional awards. Her most recent collection, Heaven’s Thieves (from Brick Books), won the 2017 Pat Lowther Award. Sue has a PhD in philosophy and teaches creative writing at The University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where she also edits for Brick Books and is editor-in-chief of The Fiddlehead.

Sue Goyette lives in Halifax and has published six books of poems and a novel. Her latest collection is Penelope (Gaspereau Press, 2017). She has been nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several awards including the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for her collection, Ocean. Sue teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.

Larissa Lai was born in La Jolla, California, grew up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and currently lives in Calgary. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Calgary and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She was awarded an Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers Award in 1995. Her novel When Fox is a Thousand was first published by Press Gang Publishers in 1995; a new edition, featuring an afterword by the author, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2004. In 2009, she published Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp), her first solo poetry book that was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize at the BC Book Prizes. She is also the author of Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002), as well as a book-length collaborative long poem with Rita Wong called sybil unrest, published by Line Books in 2009. Larissa’s latest novel is 2019 Lamda Award Winner, The Tiger Flu.

A Masterclass with Sue Goyette (Halifax) *students only*

Thursday, December 5th from 2 pm – 4 pm

LB 646 Pavillion JW McConnell Bldg Concordia University

1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest Montréal

Sue Goyette lives in Halifax and has published six books of poems and a novel. Her latest

collection is Penelope (Gaspereau Press, 2017). She has been nominated for the 2014 Griffin

Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several awards including the

2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for her collection, Ocean.

Sue teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.

This event compliments WRITING LIVES: CREATIVE, CRITICAL & BODILY ACTIVISMS, RITUALS OF MOURNING Thursday December 5^th Writers Read hosts a feminist writing panel featuring Sue Sinclair, Sue Goyette, and Larissa Lai in conversation with Sina Queyras as part of Writing Lives at 4th Space 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd W.  6 pm – 8 pm.

Please Note: All students are welcome to register for this event but seating is limited to 30 spots.
To register e-mail: writersreadconcordia@gmail.com with the subject line “Registration”
Please include your student status, department, undergraduate or graduate.

Margaret Christakos is a force in the Toronto and national poetry scene since the early 1990s, Margaret Christakos is a widely published award-winning writer whose many books unfurl along tendrils of feminist, anti-racist, bisexual, serial proceduralist modalities. Recent titles include Multitudes, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies, Social Medea vs. Virtual Medusa, and Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos (Laurier Poetry Series). Two collections are forthcoming: charger (2020) and Dear Birch (2021). A Chalmers Arts Fellow and the recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, Christakos has an extensive teaching/mentoring practice as well as an inspired record of instigating creative literary encounters that bring together writers and artists of diverse aesthetics.

On Thursday, November 7th, SpokenWeb and the Mile End Poets’ Festival feature Margaret Christakos as part of a series of events on Deep Curation facilitated by PhD student Klara du Plessis from 1- 5:30 pm on campus.

Writers Read x SAGE co-sponsor a reading event and workshop on Climate Change Activism in the VAV Gallery on Friday 25th October 2019 from 4pm – 6pm. Not to be missed!

Kathryn Mockler is the author of the poetry books Some Theories (ST Press, 2017), The Purpose Pitch (Mansfield Press, 2015), The Saddest Place on Earth (DC Books, 2012) and Onion Man (Tightrope Books, 2011). She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and her BA in Honours English and Creative Writing from Concordia University.

Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. Her debut collection of poetry, Rag Cosmology, won the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and was described in the Globe & Mail as “an intimacy of ecological identities as wild, sensual and rhythmic as the cosmos,” by Canisia Lubrin. Her work has been published in Lemon Hound, Vallum, The Capilano Review, and Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, among others. Collaborative performance works with Hanna Sybille Müller and Andréa de Keijzer include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; revolutions; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies (forthcoming spring 2020, at Tangente). She is currently organizing a Geopoetics conference and residency, and working on a chapbook with House House Press. Erin is from Cortes Island.

Writers Read hosts the literary reading component for Ecotones 6 with CISSC on the evening of Thursday, October 24^th 2019 featuring David Chariandy and Shazia Hafiz Ramji. Admission is free and open to the public.

David Chariandy grew up in Toronto and lives and teaches in Vancouver. His debut novel, Soucouyant, received stunning reviews and recognition from eleven literary awards juries. Brother, his second novel, received rave reviews, was named a Best Book of 2017 on no fewer than eight lists, and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In 2019, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell prize.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Shazia is a columnist for Open Book and is currently at work on a novel.

To compliment An Evening of Irish and Choctaw Poetry with Doireann Ní Ghríofa and LeAnne Howe Thursday, October 17th@ 7 pm EV-6.720 (1515 St. Catherine West, 6th floor) Please Note: All students are welcome to register for this event but seating is limited to 30 spots. To register e-mail: writersreadconcordia@gmail.com with the subject line “Registration” Please include your student status, department, undergraduate or graduate.

An Evening of Irish and Choctaw Poetry with Doireann Ní Ghríofa and LeAnne Howe Thursday, October 17th@ 7 pm EV-6.720 (1515 St. Catherine West, 6th floor)

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual Irish writer whose books explore birth, death, desire, and domesticity. A Book of the Year in both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent, her most recent collection ‘Lies’ draws on a decade of her Irish language poems in translation. Awards for her work include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA, 2018), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University, 2018), the Ostana Prize (Italy, 2018), and The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (2016), among others. Doireann’s artistic practice encompasses cross-disciplinary collaborations, fusing poetry with film, dance, music, and visual art, and she has been invited to perform her work internationally, most recently in Scotland, Paris, Italy, and New Zealand. Her prose debut ‘A Ghost in the Throat’ is forthcoming from Tramp Press in spring 2020.

LeAnne Howe is a poet, novelist, filmmaker and scholar. She was born and raised in Oklahoma and is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation. Some awards include: the Western Literature Association’s 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award for her body of work; the inaugural 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures; 2012 United States Artists Ford Fellowship; and a 2010 Fulbright Scholarship to Jordan. She received the American Book Award in 2002 for her first novel, Shell Shaker. Her most recent book, Savage Conversations, 2019, Coffee House Press, is the story of Mary Todd Lincoln and a Savage Indian spirit that she (Mary) imagined was torturing her nightly. Harvard scholar Philip J. Deloria writes, “[the book] explodes with the stench and guilt and insanity that undergirds the American story.” Searching For Sequoyah is Howe’s latest documentary film project with Ojibwe filmmaker James M. Fortier. The film is set in the U.S. and Mexico where Sequoyah (Cherokee) traveled as he was writing the Cherokee Syllabary in 1841. LeAnne Howe is the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature in English at the University of Georgia.

Requests for more information contact Ali Pinkney
Email writersreadconcordia@gmail.com

Recording of Fred Moten’s reading at Concordia on September 27, 2017. Hosted by Sina Queyras, introduction by David Bradford.

This event took place over a six hour period on October 16th, 2014 in the Hall Building and featured approximately 70 readers in French and English, curated by Sina Queyras, Genevieve Robichaud and Jesse McEachern. This is the final section and by now, all of the readers are reading at once. Here you can see Candace Maddy, Jacob Wren and Corinna Copp and hear the chorus.

Here’s an excerpt of Scott reading in the evening event. See below for more of the event and check back for more footage.

From left to right: Nicole Brossard, Gail Scott, Rachel Levitsky and Lisa Robertson. | Image courtesy of Writ

Concordia’s Writers Read, in collaboration with the Université de Montréal’s Département d’études anglaises and the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature, is hosting a daylong celebration of Quebec women’s writing on October 16. The event will kick off with a marathon reading of Gail Scott’s experimental novel My Paris (Mercury Press, 1999), beginning at 11 a.m. in Room 767 of the Henry F. Hall Building (H).

“Somebody once told me that the best way to read My Paris was to get on a subway somewhere in, say, Brooklyn, and sit reading till the utmost stop on the uptown line,” said Scott during a 2010 conversation with novelist Sina Queyras, assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of English. The chat is published on Queyras’ literary website, Lemon Hound.

At the Writers Read event, students, authors and professors will attempt to recreate the subway experience — albeit, in the Henry F. Hall Building — as they read back-to-back excerpts from the book, which Quill and Quire reviewer Mary Soderstrom called “a pleasure for those who enjoy playing with language.”

Queyras, who organized the Writer’s Read event, says My Paris is fun to read aloud because of its inventive sentence constructions. “It’s like Pop Rocks on the tongue to read; full of sparkly, linguistic treats.”

The marathon event will be followed by another reading of excerpts from La Théorie, un dimanche (les editions du remue-ménage, 1988) featuring Gail Scott and Nicole Brossard, two writers who contributed to the collaborative feminist text. Queyras says the book was of vital importance for many experimental writers in North America.

“The text came out of a salon that Nicole Brossard started. She, along with Louky Bersianik, France Théoret, Louise Cotnoir, and Louise Dupré, met every Sunday in the 1980s and discussed theory and its implications for women’s rights. These essays evolved out of that.”

Last year, 25 years after the book was first published in French, Belladonna*, a New York-based avant-garde publishing house, released an English version, Theory, A Sunday.

In anticipation of the October 16 Writers Read event at Concordia, Queyras has been posting excerpts from the book on Lemon Hound, including a newly added introduction by internationally recognized Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. She has also invited writers to send in their thoughts inspired by the text.

The responses pay testimony to the book’s continued relevance.

“In the 12 years since I first encountered La Théorie, un dimanche, I have developed or been welcomed into feminist networks of mentorship that span time zones, generations and the bounds of genre,” writes Erin Wunker, an English professor at Mount Allison University. “Because of a book, because on Sundays in Montréal in the 1980s, six women gathered together to talk, to theorize, to think, and to listen.”

Following the reading, Scott and Brossard will take questions from the audience. They’ll be joined by Robertson and Rachel Levitsky, poet and founder of Belladonna*.

Queyras says she hopes the event will raise awareness among young readers of the impact Theory, A Sunday had when it was first published in French.

“It’s a seminal book for a lot of writers across North America, not just women, but a lot of experimental, innovative writers were profoundly influenced by the work of these women,” she says. “They were enacting a kind of feminist, utopian world.”

For more information about Writers Read and other readings series happening at Concordia, visit the Writers Read website.

In collaboration with the CEP, Writers Read is pleased to present attendees of our events with an original broadside designed to honour our guests and celebrate the occasion of their visit. You’ll have to come to get one with a new poem by Billy-Ray Belcourt. They’re quite something, and I thank Jessica Bebenek for design and printing of the series.

The first 25 people in the building in March will also get a broadside from CA Conrad’s event in November 2018. #concordia #writersread #curatingthefuture

excerpt from Gail Scott and Renee Gladman in Conversation: introduced by Tatum Howey. #writersread #offthepage