pazofarrell Event

Winter 2023 Season

Wednesday, February 15th

Creating Content for Video Games: 2:30 – 4 PM @ 4th SPACE Concordia

Curious about writing for video games? Writers Read has you covered. Get the perspective of four minds on working in the video game industry as writers, on entrepreneurship, on effective dialogue, on written versus visual storytelling, on building a ludic plot, and much more. Panelist include Osama Dorias, Ashley Obscura, Maize Longboat, and Jill Murray. The panel will be moderated by Paz O’Farrell.
Time will be allotted for attendees to ask the panelists questions.

All are welcome. No registration required. This event will be live on Zoom, and recorded in 4th Space’s YouTube channel.

Poetry Reading: 6 – 7:30 PM @ EV 1.615

What better way to recover from Valentine’s Day than a poetry reading? Liz Howard and Juliane Okot Bitek will read from their work and participate in a discussion on new directions in Canadian writing and in the teaching of creative writing. Liz Howard will join the Department of English as a tenure-track faculty member as of June 2023; Juliane Okot Bitek recently joined the faculty at Queen’s University as Assistant Professor of Black Creative Writing.

Thursday, February 16th

Writers Read presents Liz Howard’s Writing Masterclass!

Liz Howard is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. She is the 2023 Shaftesbury Creative Writer-in-Residence at Victoria College in the University of Toronto and will be joining Concordia University’s Department of English as an Assistant Professor of creative writing in June 2023. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Toronto.

The Masterclass will take place on Thursday, February 16th, from noon to until 2 PM. The location is in Concordia’s John Molson Building, MB 2.130 (Floating Box).

Note that capacity for this event is limited to thirty. All are welcome. Registration link: https://forms.gle/88Y38QqFaWV2Debk9

pazofarrell Event

Fall 2022 Season

Writers Read is back in-person! Follow us on Instagram @writersreadconcordia for reminders closer to each event’s date. All can be found at Concordia’s Events calendar.

Thursday, October 20th

Reading and Q&A with Xochitl Gonzalez

10 – 11:15 AM at LB 322. 

In honor of Latin-American Heritage Month, the U.S. Consulate in Montreal is sponsoring a talk by The New York Times best-selling author Xochitl Gonzalez. Gonzalez is the author of the novel Olga Dies Dreaming, and a graduate from Iowa’s MFA. Josip Novakovich will hosting the reading, and there will be space for questions from the audience.

New Grub Street: Non-Fiction Panel

12:30 – 2 PM at Floating Box (MB 2.130) in the John Molson Building.

Join us at Concordia for New Grub Street, a Non-Fiction Panel. Panelists Durga Chew-Bose, Perry King, and Taras Grescoe will cover writing on food, sports, and travel, among others, and discuss the intricacies of their careers in non-fiction. There will be a Q&A session moderated by Haley Mlotek.

This event is free and open to the public. Note that capacity is limited to fifty attendants. Registration link: https://forms.gle/Nji6LzhJQs8R25D36

Tuesday, October 25th

Reading and Q&A with Kasia Van Schaik

7 PM at LB 320.

Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the linked story collection, We Have Never Lived on Earth, and the poetry chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country. Her writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, The Rumpus, Maisonneuve Magazine, Electric Literature, the Best Canadian Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. A postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, Kasia is currently working on a book of cultural criticism entitled Women Among Monuments and is also co-editing an essay collection, Shelter in Text, which interrogates the relationship between the physical and textual spaces we inhabit. Kasia lives in Tiohti:áke (Montreal).

“My collection of linked short stories We Have Never Lived On Earth explores the constraints facing young women at the beginning of the 21st century, which include the feminist backlash of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the growing recognition of climate disaster. The main character, Charlotte, arrives in Canada as a young girl in the late 1990s where she must learn to navigate sexuality, friendship, gendered violence—both internalized and externalized—and cultural alienation during these formative years. But the world around her is in trouble as well. Earthquakes, wildfires, disappearing islands and animal species, wounded sea creatures, trash-strewn shores and rising levels of microplastics make up the environments and textures of these stories. With this book, I want to reflect on how our sense of threatened ecological futurity echoes and amplifies the precarious position of being a woman in the world.”

Tuesday, November 8th

How to Make Money (and Ideally Have a Little Fun) Writing for the Screen with Arthur Holden

12 – 1:30 PM at LB 322. 

Arthur Holden will briefly talk about the distinction between writing scripts for theatrical release and writing scripts for TV in its various forms: free broadcast, cable networks and online subscription (ie. Netflix).

Focus will be placed on:

– writing animation scripts for kids’ TV

– writing made-for-TV movies

– adapting non-English-language productions for broadcast in dubbed versions.

Holden will touch on working methods, the operative differences between purely creative writing and writing-for-hire, and writing for series TV. Questions are encouraged. There will be an opportunity for students to talk about their own script ideas – or ongoing projects – and to discuss possible strategies for developing and selling those ideas in Montreal and the wider world.

Sina Event

2021-2022 Season

SAVE THE DATE!

Tuesday, October 19th: Karen Solie and A.E. Stallings. Hybrid (4th Space & Zoom) 12 pm

Karen Solie is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2015); The Living Option: Selected Poems (2013); Pigeon (2009), which won a Griffin Poetry Prize, a Pat Lowther Award, and a Trillium Book Award; and Short Haul Engine (2001), which won a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She lives in Toronto.

A.E. Stallings has published three collections of poetry, Archaic Smile, Hapax, and Olives, and a verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things. She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece.

Thursday, October 21st: Kazim Ali. Webinar event, 8 pm

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water.

Tuesday, November 9th: Haley Mlotek and Doreen St. Félix. Hybrid (4th Space and Zoom) 3pm.

Doreen St. Félix has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017 and was named the magazine’s television critic in 2019. Previously, she was a culture writer at MTV News. Her writing has appeared in the Times Magazine, New York, Vogue, The Fader, and Pitchfork.

Haley Mlotek is a writer, editor, and organizer. Her works appeared in countless renowned magazines and newspapers all over the world. She is currently a senior editor at SSENSE and the 2019-2020 co-chair of the Freelance Solidarity Project, a distinct division for digital media workers within the National Writers Union.

Monday, November 15th: George Abraham. Hybrid/Webinar event, 8 pm

George Abraham is a Palestinian American poet and writer from Jacksonville, FL. He is the author of the poetry collection, Birthright (ButtonPoetry, 2020), winner of the 2021 Arab American Book Award in Poetry . He is a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), a recipient of grants and fellowships from Kundiman, TheBoston Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation.

Friday, November 19th: Rana Tawil. Hybrid/Webinar 8pm November 2021 tbd

Oana Avasilichioaei is the author of six poetry collections, including We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012, A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry) and Limbinal. Her most recent collection, Eight Track was a finalist for both the 2020 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. She has translated eight books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, including Bertrand Laverdure’s Readopolis (Book*hug, 2017, Governor General’s Literary Award).

Caroline Bergvall is an award-winning poet, writer, sound artist and performer whose interdisciplinary practice includes working across artforms, media and languages all over the world. Her worlds include books, performances, sound installations and print.

Friday November 26th: Communal reading of Pauline Gumbs, Webinar (12-4). Wednesday, January 19th: Joy Priest. 8pm.

Joy Priest is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a 2019- 2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, as well as the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Atlantic, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated. Her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South, and Best New Poets 2014, 2016 and 2019. Joy is currently editing an anthology of Louisville poets, forthcoming from Sarabande Books.

March 2022 Professional Panel TBA

deemare conversation, Event, poetry, prose, reading

Cancelled — Shani Mootoo & Helen Humphreys: A Reading & Conversation Cancelled

Cancelled — Concordia’s Writers Read, the Student Association for Graduates in English (SAGE) & the Department of English present Shani Mootoo & Helen Humphreys.

Dear Friends, from Sina Queyras at Writers Read on Facebook: We have had to cancel our March 20 event with Helen Humphreys and Shani Mootoo, but we are sending love and strength to you all and looking forward to seeing you all at the other side of these strange days.


Cancelled — 7-9 pm, Friday March 20th, 2020
York Amphitheatre, EV-1.605, Main Floor
EV Building, 1515 St. Catherine W, Concordia University
Free. All are welcome.
Wheelchair accessible
Attendees can use gender-neutral bathrooms at the following locations:
EV S3.408, S2.408, 1.42, 2.406, 2.608, 3.408 and 3.608.

About Shani Mootoo

Shani Mootoo is the much-loved author of the novels Cereus Blooms at Night, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; He Drown She in the Sea, which was longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award; and Valmiki’s Daughter, which was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Mootoo was born in Ireland and grew up in Trinidad. She immigrated to Vancouver more than 30 years ago and now lives near Toronto. Mootoo’s released her latest novel, Polar Vortex, this month through Book*hug Press.

About Helen Humphreys

Helen Humphreys is the award-winning author of eight novels, four works of creative non-fiction and four books of poetry. Her writing has been published internationally and optioned for film, theatre, opera and television. She lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario.

Books by the authors will be for sale.

 

Helen Humphreys
deemare Event, master class

A masterclass with Helen Humphreys (Kingston)

Writers Read presents a masterclass with Helen Humphreys (Students only)
Friday March 20, 2 – 3 pm
Room LB 646, Department of English
LB Building, Concordia University
Please note: All students are welcome and are required to register.
Limited to 30 seats.

Helen Humphreys is the award-winning author of eight novels, four
works of creative non- fiction, and four books of poetry. Her writing
has been published internationally and optioned for film, theatre,
opera, and television. She lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario.

TO REGISTER: Visit sign-up sheet outside Sina Queyras’ office,
S-LB 674-02. Please include your name, email address & status
(department, undergraduate, or graduate.)