All Write in Sin City: Recent Episodes
Kim/Irene/Sarah
Let's talk about writers and writing, right here in Sin City. Before we were the Motor City, one of the nicknames we were known by was "Sin City." Maybe that's why we've got so many great stories to tell. Our Windsor-Detroit region is full of inspiring poetry, first rate fiction, outstanding non-fiction, amazing writers, and exciting publishers. At All Write in Sin City, we aim to bring them to you. Check out our shows here, or take a listen wherever you listen to podcasts.
Lisa de Nikolits is the award-winning author of twelve published novels.
She has appeared on recommended reading lists for Open Book Toronto, 49th Shelf, Chatelaine, Canadian Living, Hello! Canada, the Quill & Quire, and most recently, the CBC’s 65 works of Canadian fiction to watch for in Fall 2022. Her book The Occult Persuasion and The Anarchist’s Solution was longlisted for a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of The Fantastic, and The Rage Room was a finalist in the International Book Awards, 2021. Her short fiction and poetry have also been published in various international anthologies and journals. Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits came to Canada in 2000. She lives and writes in the Beaches in Toronto. The book we’re talking about today is her latest, Mad Dog and the Sea Dragon, a modern noir novel from Inanna Press
https://www.lisawriter.com/
https://inanna.ca/product/mad-dog-and-the-sea-dragon/
C. M. Forest, also known as Christian Laforet, is the author of multiple projects including the 2023 Benjamin Franklin silver award winning novel Infested (Eerie River Publishing), and the novella, We All Fall Before the Harvest (Timber Ghost Press.) and the upcoming (Sept. 2024) short story collection, The Roots Run Deep and Other Stories (Eerie River Publishing). His short fiction has been featured in over a dozen anthologies across multiple genres. A self-proclaimed horror movie expert, he spent an embarrassing amount of his youth watching scary movies. When not writing, he lives in Ontario, Canada with his wife, kids, three cats, and a pandemic dog named Sully who has an ongoing love affair with a blanket. His newest release is the short story collection The Roots Run Deep and Other Stories, from Eerie River Publishing.
https://christianlaforet.com/
Karen Smythe’s previous books include the novel This Side of Sad (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), the story collection Stubborn Bones (Polestar/Raincoast, 2001), and the critical study Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). Her family background is Norwegian and German/Irish. She lives with her husband in Guelph, Ontario. Her newest release is the novel A Town Without Noise published by Windsor’s Palimpsest Press.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/a-town-with-no-noise-karen-smythe/
Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. She holds an MFA from the University of King’s College. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. Her work has won the Malahat Review Creative Nonfiction Prize and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Her essays, reviews, and poems have been published by the CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Humber Review, Wasafiri International Contemporary Writing, and World Literature Today. Her first book of essays, called Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas, was released by Dundurn Press in 2024. Gloria lives in Toronto, and she dances daily.
Instagram @gloriawrites
Bluesky @gloriablizzard.bsky.social
Website: www.gloriablizzard.com
Links to buy: https://linktr.ee/blackcaketurtlesoup
Substack newsletter: https://carnivalesque.substack.com/
Skip Spence's life started in Windsor, but he became a poster boy for the 1960s, playing with groups like Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. His time in the spotlight lasted only three years, but he left a lasting impression on rock and roll.
Cam Cobb is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor and a rock journalist. Cobb’s writing has appeared in such magazines as Record Collector, Shindig!, and Ugly Things. His liner notes for Skip Spence's single, "Rock & Roll Band," accompanied the release in 2019. Cobb co-directed Buskin' in the Subway for the Windsor International Film Festival, and he coproduced O(A)R, a short documentary on Skip Spence.
His books include What’s Big And Purple And Lives In The Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, and Weighted Down: The Complicated Life of Skip Spence.
New Rolling Stone Record Guide 2nd ed. 1983. Is cited.
More information on the book here.
Felicia B. George is a native Detroiter who loves Detroit history and culture. She earned her doctorate in anthropology from Wayne State University, where she is now an adjunct professor. Her recent book, When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling’s History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City, was released by Wayne State University Press in 2024 and has been named as a 2025 Michigan Notable Bookby the Library of Michigan.
www.doctordetroit.net
https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814350768/
Born and raised in Windsor, Ontario, Peter Hrastovec is the author of three books of poetry, In Lieu of Flowers, Sidelines and There Will Be Fish, which we covered on a podcast episode in May of 2022. Peter is the current Poet Laureate of Windsor, and he has contributed to several anthologies, most recently, Where the Map Begins. Limbo Moon is his new chapbook. It was featured at BookFest Windsor 2024 and published by Woodbridge Farm Books.
Marty Gervais is perhaps the most well-known figure in the Windsor writing community. He is an award-winning Canadian journalist, poet, playwright, historian photographer and editor. He won Toronto’s Harbourfront Festival Prize for his contributions to Canadian letters and to emerging writers, and he was awarded the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award.
He was also awarded the City of Windsor Mayor’s Award for literature, and he is Windsor’s Poet Laureate Emeritus. He received an honorary doctor of laws from Assumption University in 2010. Gervais has written more than a dozen books of poetry, two plays and a novel. His most successful work, The Rumrunners, a book about the Prohibition period was a Canadian bestseller in 1980 and was #10 on The Globe and Mail’s non-fiction bestsellers list.
His most recent book is the poetry collection, The Sky Above, is an engaging book that follows his long and colourful career of spinning stories.
We recorded the launch of The Sky Above. It was held at Biblioasis and hosted by André Narbonne and Kalie Chapman. This episode was created from that recording.
Ghassan Zeineddine was born in Washington, DC, and raised in the Middle East. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College, and co-editor of the creative nonfiction anthology Hadha Baladuna: Arab American Narratives of Boundary and Belonging. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Ohio. His book of short stories, Dearborn: Stories is published by Tin House Books.
https://tinhouse.com/author/ghassan-zeineddine/
Elly Blake is the New York Times bestselling author of the Frostblood Saga. After earning a BA in English literature, she has worked as a project manager, customs clerk, graphic designer, reporter for a local business magazine, and library assistant. She lives in Southwestern Ontario with her husband and kids. Her latest book is The Forest King's Daughter published by Hachette Canada.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/elly-blake/the-forest-kings-daughter/9780316395724/
EllyBlake.com
Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan. Richard is also the author of I Am Herod, which takes readers undercover at one of the world’s largest religious events, and Caribou Run, a collection of poetry. He is the recipient of multiple awards including two National Magazine Awards and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s 2019 Award for Best Short Story. His new book is Hello, Horse, a collection of short stories published by Biblioasis. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
https://biblioasisbookshop.com/item/N8KJ1y9ScrxoDMASDESSPA
https://richardkemick.com/
Join us for a special minisode in which we reflect briefly on five(!) lovely years of podcasting, and on 2024 in particular.
Irene, Kim, and Sarah have selected a few works each that struck us in different ways, but don't get us wrong, we have had a blast chatting with each author this year, and all are worthy of you joining the conversation!
In no particular order or rank, here are the books we spoke about in this episode for your reference, or check out all of our episodes for the full list.
We'll chat with you again soon in 2025!
- Diver Beneath the Street by Petra Kuppers
- Precedented Parroting by Barbara Tran
- How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
- The Curious Lives of Non-Profit Martyrs by George Singleton
- On Community by Casey Plett
- The Blood of Five Rivers with Arjun Bedi
- The Future by Catherine Leroux
- Anomia by Jade Wallace
- non]disclosure by Renée Bondy
- Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins
Walter Metz is a Full Professor in the School of Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He earned a Ph.D. in Radio/Television/Film at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, and holds an S.B. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT (1989). He is the author of three books: Engaging Film Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema, published by P. Lang, and two titles published by Wayne State University Press, Bewitched, and Gilligan’s Island. He is also the author of sixty refereed journal articles and book chapters about the intertextual relationships between film, television, novels, and theatre. His work roves across disciplines, grappling with the importance of audio-visual productions for understanding such disparate subjects as gender, comedy, poetry, opera, the Cold War, the Holocaust, science, and animals. His latest book is Gilligan's Island, part of Wayne State University Press TV Milestones Series.
https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814333723/
Molly Peacock is the author of eight volumes of poetry. Earlier titles include The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. She joins us today to talk about her latest collection, The Widow’s Crayon Box. She also recently wrote a non-fiction book about a half-century friendship, A Friend Sails in on a Poem, published by Windsor-based Palimpsest Press. As a poetry activist, Peacock was the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series, and the creator of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University. The Widow's Crayon Box is published by Penguin Random House Canada.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/773911/the-widows-crayon-box-by-molly-peacock/9781324079439
Ben Berman Ghan is a writer and editor from Toronto whose prose and poetry have been published in Clarkesworld magazine, Strange Horizons, the Blasted Tree Publishing Co., the tƐmz Review and others. His previous works include the short story collection What We See in the Smoke. He now lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Calgary. His first novel is The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, Published by Buckrider Books/Wolsak and Wynn.
https://bookstore.wolsakandwynn.ca/products/the-years-shall-run-like-rabbits
Here is a special short with Literary Arts Windsor President Wesley Foster talking about the exciting lineup for Windsor's annual literary festival BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor 2024.
This year, it's all virtual, so accessible from anywhere, and the theme is Bridging Communities.Here's our co-host Irene Moore Davis chatting with Wes about the literary conversations coming right to you!
For tickets and more information, see
https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/event/bridging-communities-bookfest-festival-du-livre-2024/
Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh was born in Washington, D.C. to an Iranian father and an American mother. She moved to Iran at age 5 and grew up in Tehran under the Shah. She returned to the U.S. to attend Stanford University, and when the Islamic Revolution started brewing shortly after she graduated, she moved back to Iran and plopped herself down in it. She later received an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. A lifelong English teacher, she has taught in schools and universities on three continents, and she now lives in the United States. Her fiction has been published in numerous publications, including The Georgia Review, Gertrude Press, and Fiction International, and she received an honorable mention for The Best American Short Stories 2018. Her latest book, Zan, a collection of short stories, is published in 2014 by Dzanc Books and was the Winner of the 2022 Dzanc Short Collection Prize.
https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/zan
Renée D. Bondy taught in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Windsor, where she facilitated courses on queer activism, women and religion, and the history of women’s movements. Her writing has appeared in Herizons, Bitch, Bearings Online, and the Humber Literary Review. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Renée lives in Chatham, Ontario, and the book is inspired by events that happened there. [non]disclosure published by Second Story Press is her first novel.
https://secondstorypress.ca/collections/renee-d-bondy
Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (2013) and the co-author (with Heidi LM Jacobs) of 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (2021). His essays have appeared in journals including but not limited to Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, English Journal, College Composition and Communication, Biography, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Journal of Comics and Culture, and Studies in Comics. Dale is the editor of the Myles Horton Reader (2003) and Jeff Lemire: Conversations (2021,) as well as the co-editor of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies (2003.) He lives in Windsor, Ontario where he is a faculty member in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. His latest book, released this year by Wilfrid Laurier Press, is On Comics and Grief.https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/O/On-Comics-and-Grief
Kim Nelson is an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Windsor, and also the Director of the Humanities Research Group and the Live Doc Project. Originally from Vancouver, she has been based in Windsor since 2005. She has a BA in Film from UBC and an MFA in Film from York University. Her work spans fiction and documentary. Her interests include women’s rights and equality, colonialism and conflict, and the environment.
Her documentaries have been presented at festivals and campuses across Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a co-editor of The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image, and the author of Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film. Recently, she has also become a co-host of Moving Histories, a podcast that explores the films that connect us all with history.
https://www.thekimnelson.com/
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/making-history-move/9781978829770/
Barbara Tran’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, The Malahat Review, and Conjunctions. Included in Barbara’s writing for the screen is the narration for Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, a short XR film, which was a 2022 Official Selection of SXSW and in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Barbara’s poetry collection In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words was the winner of Tupelo Press’s inaugural chapbook award. A co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition, Barbara is a member of the She Who Has No Master(s) and AfroMundo collectives. Much of her writing is conceived while walking, playing, or sharing a tasty morsel with a rescue dog. Precedented Parroting is published by Windsor’s Palimpsest Press.
https://barbaratran.com/
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/precedented-parroting-barbara-tran/
A native "Thumbody," RS Deeren is an assistant professor of creative writing at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. His research interests include contemporary fiction, US working-class studies, and rural-urban dynamics. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in periodicals including The Great Lakes Review, Joyland, Midwestern Gothic, and more. Like some of his characters, he has also worked as a line cook, landscaper, lumberjack, and a bank teller. He received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His debut story collection, Enough To Lose, was selected as a Michigan Notable Book in 2023, and it was published by Wayne State University Press.
https://www.rsdeeren.com/
https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814350409/
Marty Gervais and André Narbonne
About our guests: The Publishing Practicum is a different kind of University of Windsor English course. It’s like a year-long internship for a group of students who take one or two books per year through the steps of the publishing process from editing to book design to creating a promotional campaign and a book launch. Marty Gervais, journalist, author, Poet Laureate Emeritus and publisher of Black Moss Press, has supervised the program for more than 20 years. 2024 is his final year at the helm, and he’s turning it over to award-winning author and U of W professor Dr. André Narbonne. They’re both joining us today to talk about the history of the program, the two books that the Practicum launched this year, and what the future holds for this popular educational experience.
Usually at the end of the podcast, we have the author read a selection from the book. This time, we have readings from some of the poets who participated in the anthologies.
Where the Map Begins—
Kalie Chapman is a master’s student at the University of Windsor in English Literature & Creative Writing. She is currently working on a creative manuscript for her thesis, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She has been published in three chapbooks, and was on the editorial team for at the end, beginnings by Christopher Lawrence Menard.
Peter James Billing. As a Poet, Author, Composer, Songwriter, Filmmaker and Incredible Dishwasher, Peter believes that a great idea at the top of a staircase stays there, if not jotted down. You may find him in deep thought in bank lines, or drifting off forming stories at cafes but always ready to listen and support artists in Windsor and Walkerville. Whether by Poe or Puck, rhyme or rhythm, pen or paper, a road hockey game may break out.
What Time Can’t Touch—
Barry Brodie is a poet, playwright, actor, director and teacher. He has written two books: The Language of the Star – Journals of the Magi and Tom Thomson – On the Threshold of Magic. His poetry has appeared in Amethyst Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal. He held the Chair in Religion and the Arts at Assumption University, co-founded Shō – Art, Spirit & Performance and currently teaches a course on the creative process at the University of Windsor.
Karen Rockwell is a lesbian poet, flash fiction author and accidental artist, who considers colour her home, chaos, a friend and words, her salvation. Author of Curious Connections, a chapbook of flash-fiction published in 2016 by Urban Farmhouse Press, Karen is published in journals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Recognition includes: First Place in Room’s 2013 Poetry Contest, and in Polar Expressions’ 2011 Story Contest; Second Place in Brooklin Poetry Society’s 2018 Poetry Contest, among others.
https://www.uwindsor.ca/english/317/practicum-courses
Colleen Coco Collins is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. She’s worked as a gallery director, in forestry, fossil preparation, and renovation; as an autism support worker, teacher, and women’s shelter counsellor. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, and more. Collins has studied at universities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Zealand, and Ireland. She lives in rural Mi’kma’ki, Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox. Sorry About the Fire is her poetry debut, published by Biblioasis.
https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/new-releases/sorry-about-the-fire/
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist who uses somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and codirector of the somatic writing studio Turtle Disco. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany, was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library, and it won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Her fourth collection, Diver Beneath the Street - true crime meets ecopoetry at the level of the soil – was published by Wayne State University Press in 2024.
https://www.petrakuppers.com/
https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814351116/
Jade Wallace (they/them) holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, and writes poetry, novels, and short fiction, serves as the inaugural book reviews editor for CAROUSEL, and is co-founder of the collaborative writing entity MA|DE. Jade’s work has been published in literary journals internationally and has been shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Their writing has also been nominated for The Journey Prize. In addition to their own writing, Jade works on poetry and fiction editing, manuscript consultation, ghost writing, workshops, and readings. Jade’s debut novel, Anomia, adapted from their Governor General’s Gold Medal-winning thesis, will be released by Palimpsest Press in Spring, 2024.
https://jadewallace.ca/
https://palimpsestpress.ca/shop/
Our featured author in this episode is Jason McBride. We’re bringing you the recorded highlights of a recent book event, a talk by McBride titled: Autobiography, Autofiction, Autoeroticism. It took place in downtown Windsor and was hosted by The University of Windsor’s Humanities Research Group.
In his talk, Jason McBride discussed his first book, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, the result of a ten-year project that produced a biography of the punk-rock era experimental novelist. Kathy Acker’s novels have been described as “visionary” and “transgressive,” with titles that include Blood and Guts in High School; Empire of the Senses; and Pussy, King of Pirates. She wrote about love and the limitations of language, as well as gender, sex, capitalism and colonialism.
Jason McBride is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, The Believer, The Village Voice, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Hazlitt, and many others. He lives in Toronto, and he recently wrote a piece on Windsor for an article in Maclean’s called THE GREAT ESCAPES: 10 Places in Canada to Visit Right Now.
The event and the recording took place at the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts. We’d like to thank Jason McBride, the author, as well as Dr. Kim Nelson, Director of the Humanities Research Group, and Trevor Pittman from the School of Creative Arts for their assistance in putting this podcast together.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Eat-Your-Mind/Jason-McBride/9781982117023
https://macleans.ca/culture/travel/best-places-to-travel-in-canada/
Carlos Anthony is a screenwriter, producer, and novelist who addresses the historically silenced experiences of Black men. With a background in Advertising and Marketing, he learned effective communication and storytelling. Through diverse work experiences, he empathized with individuals from various backgrounds, observing the impact of factors like education, class, culture, and immigration status on masculinity. As a survivor of loss, abuse, and addiction, Carlos draws from his personal struggles, using art as a healing tool to break generational curses. He lives in Windsor, Ontario with his family and is involved in various initiatives, including directing operations at the Windsor Black International Film Festival and co-founding the Millennial X filmmaking program. Carlos' creative work spans web series, short films, best-selling novels, essays, and viral short story series, exploring themes such as Black adolescence, fatherhood, relationships, addiction, and more. Shades of Black, published in 2023 by James Lorimer & Company,is his first novel.
https://formaclorimerbooks.ca/contributor/carlos-anthony/
George Singleton is a Southern author who has written ten books of short stories, two novels, an instructional book on writing fiction and a collection of essays. He was born in Anaheim, California and raised in Greenwood, South Carolina. In 2011 he was awarded the Hillsdale Award for Fiction by The Fellowship of Southern Writers. Singleton was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers in April 2015, and was awarded the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence in 2016. His latest collection of short fiction is The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs from Dzanc Books of Michigan.
https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/nonprofit-martyrs
Also in this episode:
we want to briefly highlight an upcoming annual event in the Windsor literary community. It’s the annual book launch evening for the Publishing Practicum program at the University of Windsor. It’s a unique educational program where thirty students collaborate each year to edit, publish and launch a book.
This year, the Practicum is publishing two books with Black Moss Press, both poetry anthologies about our local communities. Where the Map Begins explores our roots through the neighbourhoods of Windsor. The anthology What Time Can’t Touch captures the spirit of Amherstburg through its history. Look for a full episode on the Publishing Practicum and these two anthologies in an upcoming episode of All Write in Sin City.
If you’re looking to hear some talented local poets, the launch celebration for both books will take place on April 2nd at Mackenzie Hall, starting at 7 p.m. Admission is free. Now, we have two selections of the poetry in the books read by their authors.
First, we havePeter Hrastovec. He is a Windsor-born University of Windsor law and literature grad, with three published poetry books, his most recent being There Will Be Fish (Black Moss Press, 2022). Previous books include Sidelines and In Lieu Of Flowers. He also contributed to the anthologies Because We Have All Lived Here and In The Middle Space with the University of Windsor Publishing Practicum. He is the current Poet Laureate for the City of Windsor. Peter teaches and practices law. He and his wife, Denise, have three children and four grandchildren.
Peter reads his poem, Kanata House, from the Windsor anthology, Where the Map Begins.
Rawand Mustafa, isa Palestinian Syrian writer living in Windsor, Ontario. She received her MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor. Rawand draws inspiration from social justice causes, and she is particularly impassioned by the struggles and resilience of Palestinians living in exile or under occupation.
Rawand reads her poem, Outside In, from the Amherstburg anthology, What Time Can’t Touch.
Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. His most recent publication is Without Form from The Blasted Tree and knife | fork | book. He has only ever lived in Hamilton, Ontario on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. His first book is The Book of Benjamin from Palimpsest Press.
You can find him online at benrobinson.work.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/our-authors/ben-robinson/
Catherine Leroux is the author of three highly praised novels and an innovative sequence of short stories. Her first novel, La marche en forêt (2011), was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. Her bestselling second novel, The Party Wall, a translation of Le mur mitoyen, won the France–Quebec Prize in the original and, in translation, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin IMPAC Award. In the United States, The Party Wall was a prestigious Indies Introduce selection. Leroux’s story sequence, Madame Victoria, won Quebec’s Adrienne Choquette Prize and was a finalist for the Booksellers’ Prize. Her novel, L’Avenir, won the Jacques Brossard Prize and was a finalist for the Imaginary Horizons Prize. Catherine Leroux works as a translator and editor in Montreal. She was awarded the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation. L’Avenir has now been translated into English by Susan Ouriou as The Future. Published by Biblioasis, The Future was released in the fall of 2023. It is now short listed for CBC's Canada Reads championed by author Heather O'Neill.
https://biblioasisbookshop.com/item/N8KJ1y9ScrwyM7ez4DnvLw/lists/L9Zzzb3Vt5iU
https://www.cbc.ca/books/meet-the-canada-reads-2024-contenders-1.7073689
Miriam Wright is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Windsor. She teaches Canadian history, and her recent work has focussed on race and sports in Canada as well as on Chinese immigration to Newfoundland and Labrador. Miriam is one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. Her new book, released by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in Fall 2023, is Sporting Justice: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars and Black Baseball in Southwestern Ontario, 1915-1958.https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/S/Sporting-Justice
Casey Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, and A Safe Girl to Love, the co-editor of Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, and the publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award and the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. On Community is the latest in the Field Notes series published by Biblioasis, and was released in 2023.
On Community has been named one of CBC's "30 Canadian books to read in winter 2024." https://www.cbc.ca/books/30-canadian-books-to-read-in-winter-2024-1.7073501
https://caseyplett.wordpress.com/
https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/new-releases/on-community/
Arjun Bedi is a second generation Indian-Canadian writer. He was born and raised in Mississauga. Formally educated in Philosophy, with an eclectic set of experiences to follow, his aim has always been to interact with the world in a way that keeps his curiosity alive. The Blood of Five Rivers is his first novel and is published by Palimpsest Press.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/our-authors/arjun-bedi/
About our guest: Elaine Feeney is an award-winning poet, novelist, short story writer and playwright from the west of Ireland. Her 2020 debut, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Her second novel, How to Build a Boat, is longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Previously, Feeney has published three collections of poetry, including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story “Sojourn” was included in The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Feeney lectures at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/feeney-elaine/
Join our three podcasters: Kim Conklin, Sarah Jarvis, and Irene Moore Davis for a fond look at some of the titles that caught our attention in 2023. It's not an exhaustive list as we loved all our interviews and you can find them all in our episodes.
Here are links to the ones we mentioned here:
The Middle Daughter Chika Unigwe
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12557891
G.A. Grisenthwaite’s Tales for Late Night Bonfireshttps://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/13410063
Psych Murders with Stephanie Heit
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12415544
https://stephanie-heit.com/books-psych-murders/
Black Scientist, Black Activist, Black Icon by Howard McCurdy. Edited by George Elliott Clarke
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/13453444
The African Samurai by Craig Shreve
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/13445022
Raising Bean by W.S. Penn
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/11908024
Ordinary Wonder Tales with Emily Urquhart
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12838402
Tend by Kate Hargreaves
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12514105
Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12867483
Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12962533
Jacqueline Vogtman’s fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Permafrost, The Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Third Coast, and other journals. A graduate of the MFA program at Bowling Green State University, she is currently Associate Professor of English at Mercer County Community College. She has lived in New Jersey most of her life and resides in a small town surrounded by nature, which she explores with her husband, daughter, and dog. Girl Country is her first book.
https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/girl-country#:~:text=A%20near%2Dfuture%20farmer%20battling,the%20end%20of%20the%20world.
https://jacquelinevogtman.com/
Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. He is the author of three novels: Breaking and Entering, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata. He is also the author ofa two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and has written nine books for children, two of which were nominated for a Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at Walrus magazine, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.
His latest book is Breaking and Entering, published by Biblioasis in 2023. Don was a featured author at this year’s BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor, October 12th-15th in Windsor, Ontario.
https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/gillmor-don/
http://www.dongillmor.ca/
Alise Alousi’s writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Three Fold Press, Mom Egg Review, The Detroit Free Press, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry and We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She is a 2019 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and has received awards and fellowships from the Knight Foundation, Mesa Refuge, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and others. Alise Alousi has worked at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit for two decades, she serves the Room Project, a workspace for women and nonbinary writers in Detroit, and she currently teaches poetry to teens at the Arab American National Museum. Her latest poetry collection, published by Wayne State University Press in August 2023, is What to Count.https://alisealousipoetry.com/
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/what-count
Our local writer feature this time is Erik ETomic Johnson. You'll catch one of his poems later in the episode.
Erik E-tomic Johnson is a local hip-hop lyricist, vocalist and slam poet. From the Windsor-Essex county area. Erik has been writing and performing poetry for a number of years. He draws his poetic inspiration from his Afro-Indigenous
culture and experiences as an artist of color and physically disabled creator. His goal as an artist is to highlight the experiences of BIPOC through storytelling, a theme that is deeply ingrained in all of his poetic endeavours.
https://biblioasisbookshop.com/
https://storytellersbookstore.ca/
Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has worked since 2004. He is also author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel An Exaggerated Murder and his fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary publications. He grew up in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. His latest book is The Art of Libromancy with Biblioasis Press.
https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/cook-josh/
Lisa Alward grew up in Halifax during the 1960s and 70s. She worked in literary publishing in Toronto in the 80s and began writing fiction at 50. Her stories have won The Fiddlehead Prize and the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories, as well as literary journals such as The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, untethered, Prairie Fire, and Exile. She lives with her husband, John, near the Wolastoq River in Fredericton. Cocktail is her first book, published by Biblioasis.
More information here: https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/fiction/short-fiction/cocktail/
Lisa's website: https://www.lisaalward.com/
More about BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor 2023 here: https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/
Poet, novelist, playwright, and critic Dr. George Elliott Clarke is a native of Windsor, Nova Scotia. He is a seventh-generation Canadian of African American and Mi'kmaq Indigenous descent. He earned his BA from the University of Waterloo, MA from Dalhousie University, and PhD from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario (which is where I first met him.) Clarke has served as both Poet Laureate of Toronto, Ontario and Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, and he teaches Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada. He has written too many books to mention but some particular favourites of mine are Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, Whylah Falls which he later adapted for the radio and stage, Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of George and Rue, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award, Red, Black, Blue, Gold, White, Canticles, War Canticles, Canticles III, and Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir (2021.) He’s also the author of many critical and scholarly works, including Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002).
George Elliott Clarke is no stranger to the Detroit River borderlands and to BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor in particular, and this October, he’ll be appearing BookFest Windsor again. On October 14th, he’ll be appearing at the Windsor launch of his latest project, Black Scientist, Black Activist, Black Icon, and on October 15th, he’ll be part of the always popular BookFest Windsor event, the Poetry Café.
Available from Nimbus Publishing.
About BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/
Craig Shreve was born and raised in North Buxton, Ontario, a small town that has been recognized by the Canadian government as a National Historic Site due to its former status as a popular terminus on the Underground Railroad. He is a descendant of Abraham Doras Shadd, the first Black person in Canada to be elected to public office, and of his daughter Mary Ann Shadd, the pioneering abolitionist, suffragette, and newspaper editor/publisher who was inducted posthumously into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in the United States. Craig has volunteered internationally on humanitarian building projects, and is a keen outdoor sports enthusiast – including climbing, hang gliding, caving, and other terrifying activities. Craig is the author of One Night in Mississippi and a graduate of the School for Writers at Humber College. His latest novel is The African Samurai, published by Sribner Canada which has already been optioned by Netflix. Craig will be one of the spotlight authors featured during BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor 2023, happening October 12th-15th in Windsor.
For more information: https://craigshreve.com/bio
Available from: https://www.simonandschuster.ca/authors/Craig-Shreve/191441634
and your favourite independent bookstore.
For more information about BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor : https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/
G. A. Grisenthwaite is Nlaka’pamux [Ing-khla-kap-muh], a member of the Lytton First Nation. He was a graphic designer in Vancouver and Kelowna before completing his master’s in English literature and creative writing at the University of Windsor. His stories and poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Our Stories Literary Journal, FreeFall, Exile Quarterly, ndnCountry, Offset 17, Prism International, and Bawaajigan: Stories of Power. Grisenthwaite’s work has earned a number of prizes, including the 2014 John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award for his short story “The Fine Art of Frying Eggs;” his first novel, Home Waltz, published by Palimpsest Press, was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for English Language Fiction and his short story “Splatter Patterns” was shortlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize. His new short story collection, published by Freehand Press, is Tales for Late Night Bonfires. G.A. Grisenthwaite lives in Kingsville, Ontario. And we’re thrilled that G.A. Grisenthwaite will be one of the authors featured during BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor 2023, happening October 12th-15th in Windsor.
*Contains a mention of suicide.
For more information: https://www.gordongrisenthwaite.com/
Available from: https://freehand-books.com/product/tales-for-late-night-bonfires/#tab-description
and your favourite independent bookstore.
More about BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor: https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/
In a special summertime "minisode" of All Write in Sin City, we connect with our friend and poet Kevin Spenst to find out what can happen on a no-holds-barred poetic romp across Canada. When he visited Windsor, he performed at the City of Windsor's birthday celebrations with our Poets Laureate, at the Art Windsor-Essex Gallery, and at Biblioasis bookstore. He was recorded live by Kim Conklin and interviewed by Irene Moore Davis. Kim Conklin and Sarah Jarvis did the editing (Kim did most of the editing - sj).
Kevin Spenst, a Pushcart Poetry nominee, is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong, and Hearts Amok: a Memoir in Verse (all with Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Surrey Sonnets (JackPine Press), Upend (Frog Hollow Press) and a holm with the Alfred Gustav Press coming out at the end of 2022. In 2019, he was writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa House. His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications including Event, the Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, the Rusty Toque, Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry 2019, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds. He co-organizes the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes a chapbook column in subTerrain magazine, is an occasional co-host with RC Weslowski on Wax Poetic on Co-op Radio, teaches Creative Writing at Vancouver Community College and is the 2022 Poetry Mentor at SFU’s Writers Studio. He lives in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory.
https://kevinspenst.com/about/
Dr. Heidi L.M. Jacobs was born and raised in Edmonton. A graduate of the University of Alberta, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Western University, she is currently a librarian at the University of Windsor as well as an award-winning writer and documentary producer. Her previous books include the novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear (NeWest Press, 2019), which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020, and 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (with Dale Jacobs, Biblioasis, 2021). She is one of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. Her new book, published by Biblioasis, is 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year.https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/jacobs-heidi-lm/
Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer of weird stories and climate change fiction. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Interzone. She won the Sunburst award for short fiction in 2020 for “The Fourth Trimester is the Strangest" and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021 for “An Important Failure.” NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. Her latest novel, ARBOREALITY, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. She lives in Windsor.
https://www.stelliform.press/index.php/product/arboreality-by-rebecca-campbell/
Featuring Brittni Brinn:
Brittni Brinn writes science fiction. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing from UWindsor. Her interests include rocks kicked up by the ocean, books from friends, and comfortable sweaters. She lives in a tower and sometimes a cottage with her husband and two cats in Nova Scotia. Her latest book is Where Long Shadows End, third in her series, The Patch Project.
https://brittniinink.wordpress.com/
Stephen Marche is a novelist, essayist, and cultural commentator. He is the author of half a dozen books, and has written opinion pieces and essays for The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Walrus, and many others. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children. On Writing and Failure is his latest book, and it is the latest in a series of essays call the Field Notes published by Biblioasis.
http://www.stephenmarche.com/
https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/marche-stephen/
Emily Urquhart is a journalist with a doctorate in folklore. Her award-winning work has appeared in Longreads, Guernica, and The Walrus, and elsewhere, and her first book was shortlisted for the Kobo First Book Prize and the BC National Award for Canadian Nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, my Father and Me, was listed as a top book of 2020 by CBC, NOW Magazine and Quill & Quire. She is a nonfiction editor for The New Quarterly and lives in Kitchener, Ontario. Her new book, Ordinary Wonder Tales, published by Biblioasis, explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine, and reveals the magic in the everyday. “Wonder tales” is the Irish term for fairy tales.
http://emilyurquhart.ca/
https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/non-fiction/memoir/ordinary-wonder-tales/
Blair Austin was born in Michigan. A former prison librarian, he is a graduate
of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan where he won Hopwood awards for Fiction and Essay. He lives in Massachusetts. Dioramas is his first novel. It won the Dzanc Prize for Fiction in 2021.
https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/dioramas
In a city far in the future, in a society that has come through a great upheaval, retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. urban wolves in the light of an apartment building. A line of mosquitoes in uniforms and regalia, honored as heroes of the last great war.
Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world—the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass.
After a phone call in the middle of the night, Wiggins sets out to visit the Diorama of the Town: an entire, dioramic world, hundreds of miles across, where people are objects of curiosity, taxidermied and posed. All his life, Wiggins has longed to see it. But in the Town, he comes face to face with the diorama’s contradictions. Its legacy of political violence. Its manipulation by those with power and money. And its paper-thin promise of immortality.
In this hybrid novel—part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative—Blair Austin brings us nose to the glass with our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost.
Ben Van Dongen: Born in Windsor, Ben spent many years thinking about writing and becoming an author without doing any of the actual work. Eventually, he figured he should give it a try, and after more time being bad at writing, he managed to write some books he’s proud of. Snow from a Distant Sky is Book Five in his science fiction series, The Synthetic Albatross. Currently the book is available at Biblioasis, or you can order it online.
https://benwltp.wordpress.com/
https://biblioasisbookshop.com/item/2yThqHuKelrII0-XD9yJ0Q
Jade Wallace is a writer from the Niagara fruit belt, currently living just south of the Detroit River and just north of Lake Erie. Wallace’s writing has won the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize and Coastal Shelf’s Funny & Poignant Poetry Contest, placed third in the Ken Belford Poetry Contest, been a finalist for the Wergle Flomp Humour Poetry Prize, and been nominated for The Journey Prize. They are the author of several solo and collaborative chapbooks, the reviews editor for CAROUSEL Magazine, and the co-founder of MA|DE, a collaborative writing entity. Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is their first book.
https://jadewallace.ca/
https://guernicaeditions.com/collections/vendors?q=Jade%20Wallace
Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She was educated at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and the Catholic University of Leuven prior to earning PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands. She now lives in the United States and teaches at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her work has been widely translated and has won multiple awards. Unigwe’s previous publications include the poetry collections Tear Drops and Born in Nigeria, novels The Phoenix, On Black Sisters’ Street, Night Dancer, and The Black Messiah, and the short story collection Better Never than Late, along with numerous other short stories, essays, and works of journalism. She has been widely anthologized and has published works in the New York Times, Guernica, Kenyon Review, the UK Guardian, Wasafiri, and Transition. She teaches at Georgia College, in Milledgeville, Georgia. Chika Unigwe’s highly anticipated new novel, The Middle Daughter, will be released by Dzanc Books in April 2023.
https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/the-middle-daughter
Trigger Warning: Stephanie Heit speaks and writes courageously and frankly about her own mental health issues and treatments, which included ECT shock therapy.
Stephanie Heitis a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space. She is a psych system/shock survivor, bipolar, a mad activist, Zoeglossia Fellow, and a member of Olimpias, a disability performance collective. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on Three Fires Confederacy territory and is the author of the poetry collection The Color She Gave Gravity. Her new book, Psych Murders, is a collection of experimental writing. It takes readers inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of mental health care.
https://stephanie-heit.com/books-psych-murders/
Our colleague Irene Moore Davis could not join Kim and Sarah for this episode recording.
Kate Hargreaves is the author of the poetry collection, Leak, as well as Jammer Star, a roller derby novel for young readers, and Talking Derby, a book of prose vignettes. She holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, where she received the Governor General's Gold Medal in Graduate Studies. Her work has appeared in literary journals across Canada, the US, and the UK. As a book designer for numerous Canadian presses, Hargreaves has received honours from the Alcuin Society for Excellence in Book Design, the CBC Bookie Awards, and the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. She grew up in Amherstburg, Ontario, and lives and works in Windsor. Her latest poetry collection, published by Bookhug Press in October 2022, is Tend.*https://bookhugpress.ca/shop/author/kate-hargreaves/tend-by-kate-hargreaves/
The City of Windsor, through the Poet Laureate & Storytellers Program, is gearing up for the upcoming launch of the fifth book in the City’s South Shore Collections series, In the Middle Space. The South Shore Collection books help capture, preserve and share Windsor’s stories with the community – one of the primary goals of the program.
The book is being published by Windsor’s Black Moss Press, in partnership with the City of Windsor and the University of Windsor’s Editing & Publishing Practicum program. Additional support for the publication comes from the Canada Council for the Arts and Museum Windsor.
Thirteen well-known local authors are featured in the collection. They are: Barry Brodie, Carlinda D’Alimonte, Irene Moore Davis, Peter Hrastovec, Maya Jessop, Dorothy Mahoney, Christopher Lawrence Menard, Mary Ann Mulhern, Rawand Mustafa, André Narbonne, Vanessa Shields, Laurie Smith and Teajai Travis.
You can find the book at https://blackmosspress.com/product/in-the-middle-space/
Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, four collections of non-fiction, and a book of poetry. His work has been nominated for several awards and have been translated into many languages. His non-fiction work, Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live has been made into a film. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, he lives in Toronto. Estates Large and Small is his latest book, published by Windsor publisher Biblioasis.
http://biblioasis.com/brand/robertson-ray/
https://rayrobertson.com/
Note: our teammate Irene Moore Davis could not join us for this recording, hence Ray referring to "both" Kim and Sarah!
Karl Jirgens, Professor Emeritus, former English Department Head and former Chair of the Creative Writing Program (University of Windsor), is author of three books of fiction and two scholarly books (Coach House, Mercury, ECW and The Porcupine’s Quill Presses). He edited two books (on painter Jack Bush, and poet Christopher Dewdney), plus the “Collaborations” issue of Open Letter magazine with Beatriz Hausner. His scholarly and creative works are published globally. Jirgens edited and published Rampike, an international journal of art, writing, and theory from 1979 to 2016, now digitally archived (free) on the University of Windsor Leddy Library scholars’ portal. Rampike contributors have been ground-breaking artists, writers, and theorists, including nominees and winners of awards such as the Booker, Commonwealth, Orange, Pulitzer, Dublin Impac, Giller, Trillium, Writer’s Trust, and Governor General’s Award, among other prizes. Jirgens serves on the Editorial Board of ellipse magazine. He is a long-time practitioner and grand-master (8th Degree Black Belt) of the martial art of Tae Kwon Do. He recently had a chapbook published by Above Ground Press featuring three stories, titled, Eco Blues: A Tale in 3 Parts, and it has recently been announced that his work will be featured in the 2023 edition of Best Canadian Poetry, published by Biblioasis. His short fiction collection, The Razor’s Edge, was recently released by The Porcupine’s Quill Press in 2022. Karl lives in Windsor, Ontario.
(https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/rampike/about.html)
https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2022/02/new-from-aboveground-press-eco-blues.html?fbclid=IwAR1sY-1Pyr6EPUGSV1aqK2XqBK5RpZpOfcKYeP6Dwi_K69FzQWk-p2oBnjA
https://porcupinesquill.ca//bookinfo6.php?index=369
About Gas of Tank: A Canadian Law Enforcement Odyssey 1979 – 2019:
Todd Ternovan believed in keeping things simple: Marrying his college sweetheart, studying Early Childhood Education at Ryerson University, spending his professional life as a daycare teacher. It was a tidy plan. Except for one thing: Man plans and the gods laugh.
To fund his life and education in Toronto, Todd worked a part-time job—as a corrections officer at the infamous Don Jail.
Although he spent a few years working with kids, Todd’s experience in corrections propelled him into a 33-year career within Canadian law enforcement.
Small-town policing isn’t just rescuing cats from trees and performing wellness checks. The concession roads and rural routes of southwestern Ontario are home to some incredibly kind, resilient people, and scene to some strange, tragic and heinous events. Todd dealt with them all, from the naked machete-wielding man who claimed to be Jesus Christ, to armed American fugitives, decades-old sexual assaults, harrowing traffic accidents, violent home invasions, and even a year spent “Uncle Charlie” (undercover) investigating drug traffickers.
The title comes from a phrase uttered by a motorcycle gang member who demonstrated his disdain for police by pulling a “wheelie” on his motorcycle following a traffic stop. The biker was charged with stunt driving. In his defense in court, the biker said, in a thick French accent: “It was not possible for me to a pull a ‘wheelie,’ Your Worship. I had a full gas of tank!”
“Gas of Tank” embodies, for Todd, all the surreal, upside-down, unbelievable, description-defying experiences police face daily.
Written by Matt St Amand
Freelance writer: Writer / Videographer. Father and husband with a slowly improving track record. Fan of Ultraman (Hayata series), Aphex Twin and
Based in Hamilton, Ontario, Jamie Tennant is a writer, author, broadcaster, and Program Director at McMaster’s radio station, 93.3 CFMU FM. He has covered music pop culture both locally and nationally. He also co-founded the Hamilton Independent Media Awards and became engaged in projects such as the 2015 JUNOs, the Polaris Prize, and Japan`s Fujirock Festival. His debut novel The Captain of Kinnoull Hill was released in 2016. On CFMU, Jamie hosts the weekly books and literature program and podcast Get Lit.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/river-diverted-jamie-tennant/
https://www.jamietennant.ca/index.php/about-me/
Local Book Feature:
C. M. Forest, also known as Christian Laforet, is the author of The Infested and We All Fall Before the Harvest, as well as the short story collection The Space Between Houses, and the co-author of the short-story collection No Light Tomorrow. His short fiction has been featured in several anthologies across multiple genres. A self-proclaimed horror movie expert, he spent an embarrassing amount of his youth watching scary movies. When not writing, he lives in Ontario, Canada with his wife, kids, three cats, and a pandemic dog named Sully who has an ongoing love affair with a blanket.
https://christianlaforet.com/
Pauline Holdstock is an award-winning Canadian author, originally from the UK. She writes literary fiction, essays, and poetry. Her novels have been published in the UK, the US, Brazil, Portugal, Australia, and Germany. In Canada, her work has been shortlisted for a number of awards, including the Best First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Pauline’s essays and book reviews appear in Canada’s national newspapers and have been broadcast on CBC radio. Pauline has served on faculty of the Victoria School of Writing, the University of Victoria, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. She lives on Vancouver Island.
http://paulineholdstock.com/
Local Books Feature: The Principal Chronicles
David Garlick is a retired educator who spent fourteen years of his thirty-three year career as a high school principal. His long-suffering wife has no idea what he does to cause the incidents he writes about that always seem to happen to him, but he must do 'something.' She's been saying this for more than thirty-two years. They live together in Windsor, Ontario.
He has been denied entry into the National Curmudgeon Club, because he always gives the neighbour kids' balls back when they're kicked over his fence.
Availability:
The print book is available at:
FriesenPress
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
And the eBook is available at:
Kobo
Google Play
Nook
Apple Books
W. S. PENN is a mixed-blood Native American (Nez Perce) who was a Washburn Distinguished lecturer and has won the distinguished Faculty Award at Michigan State University. He is the author of two novels, The Absence of Angels and Killing Time with Strangers; a collection of short stories titled This Is the World; and two collections of essays, All My Sins Are Relatives and Feathering Custer. He has won many literary awards including the North American Indian Prose Award and a Critic’s Choice Award. Raising Bean: Essays on Laughing and Loving is his most recent book.
More about the book at the Wayne State University Press website:
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/raising-bean
A marine engineer by first trade, André Narbonne was living out of his duffel bag when he arrived in Halifax on a damaged tanker in the mid-eighties. He completed two degrees in English at Dalhousie University – where he was a Killam Scholar – and his Ph.D. in Canadian literature at the University of Western Ontario. He is a former chair of the Halifax chapter of the Canadian Poetry Association. His short stories have won the Atlantic Writing Competition, the FreeFall Prose Contest, and the David Adams Richards Prize and were anthologized in Best Canadian Stories. He teaches English & Creative Writing at the University of Windsor and is the fiction editor of the Windsor Review. His latest book, Lucien & Olivia was long-listed for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
https://blackmosspress.com/andre-narbonne/
In this episode, Andre refers to "Alistair." Of course, in this region, that can only mean the late Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief, and a much-missed professor at the University of Windsor.
Andre also mentions Casey Plett's excellent novel Little Fish. Information on that book is here: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/L/Little-Fish
TW: there is a mention of suicide in the interview
We have a new segment on our show this season. Occasionally, we’ll introduce enterprising local authors with some information about them and their books – and perhaps a short reading by them. In this episode, we’re sharing a reading by Edmond Gagnon.
https://edmondgagnon.com/books/
Welcome to a live session presented by BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor 2022 featuring Luke Hathaway, David Ly and Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang. Moderated by Windsor poet Dorothy Mahoney. Sarah Jarvis, wearing two hats as podcaster and president of Literary Arts Windsor, the charitable organization that runs BookFest, introduces the sessions.
This was recorded live at Fionn MacCool's, Windsor, so there are background noises and the occasional dropping spoon. Occasional mature content.
Luke Hathaway is a trans poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He has been before now at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea. His book Years, Months, and Days was named a best book of 2018 in The New York Times. He mentors new librettists as a faculty member in the Amadeus Choir’s Choral Composition Lab, and makes music with Daniel Cabena as part of the metamorphosing ensemble ANIMA. His latest book is The Affirmations (Biblioasis, 2022.)
http://biblioasis.com/brand/hathaway-luke/
David Ly is a writer and editor whose debut poetry collection, Mythical Man (Palimpsest Press, 2020), was shortlisted for the 2021 Relit Poetry Award. David is the poetry editor at THIS Magazine, part of the Anstruther Press editorial collective, and a poetry manuscript consultant with The Writers’ Studio at SFU. Dream of Me as Water is his second poetry collection.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/dream-of-me-as-water/
Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang is the author of Grappling Hook (2022) with Palimpsest Press, Status Update (2013), which was nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, and the Gerald Lampert award winning Sweet Devilry (2011). Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry (2013, 2021, 2023,) and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry. She has been both longlisted and shortlisted for the CBC poetry prize as well as shortlisted for the UK’s Forward Award. She is the editor of the poetry collection, Desperately Seeking Susans (2013), the Poetry Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, the Creative Director at Poetry in Voice, and teaches in both the UBC optional residency MFA program and the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. She is also the author of eight children’s books.
https://sarahtsiang.com/
Literary Arts Windsor would like to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, Canadian Heritage CAPF Fund, and the Canada Council for the Arts for funding our festival.
Recorded at the BookFest Windsor/Festival du livre Books and Brunch presentation, this live recording features a thought-provoking conversation between author Rinaldo Walcott and University of Windsor professor Natalie Delia Deckard about Walcott's much-discussed book, On Property: Policing, Prisons and the Call for Abolition. The book has been nominated for the Heritage Toronto Book Award, longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, and selected as both a Globe and Mail Book of the Year and one of CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2021.
The opening remarks for the session are provided by Irene Moore Davis. While we apologize for the unexpected venue-sharing that caused some background noise, the conversation rises above the challenges to inspire new conversations about social justice and the way forward.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rinaldo Walcott is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada and Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies. In 2021, Walcott published The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom and On Property: Policing, Prisons and the Call for Abolition. Walcott is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality.
Literary Arts Windsor would like to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, Canadian Heritage CAPF Fund, and the Canada Council for the Arts for funding our festival.
This live event was recorded on October 15, 2022 at the Chimczuk Museum in Windsor, Ontario as part of the BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor 2022 literary festival.
You will hear a conversation with moderator Gord Grisenthwaite and Louse Bernice Halfe Skydancer, Carol Rose GoldenEagle, Joseph Kakwinokanasum, and Tyler Pennock.
The event has been edited for sound and length. There are some mature subjects and language. It's all great.
Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer was raised on Saddle Lake Reserve and attended Blue Quills Residential School. She is Canada's Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Halfe was awarded the Latner Writers Trust Award for her body of work in 2017, and was awarded the 2020 Kloppenburg Award for Literary Excellence. She was granted a lifetime membership in the League of Canadian Poets, and currently works with Elders in the organization Opikinawasowin (“raising our children”) and lives near Saskatoon with her husband, Peter. Brick Books has published a new edition of Burning in This Midnight Dream in May 2021. Her newest work is awâsis – kinky and dishevelled (Brick Books, 2021.)
Carol Rose GoldenEagle was appointed Saskatchewan’s Poet Laureate in 2021. She is an author of the award-winning novel Bearskin Diary. It was chosen as the national Aboriginal Literature Title for 2017. The French language translation of this novel, entitled Peau D’ours won a Saskatchewan Book Award in 2019.
Her first book of poetry, titled Hiraeth, was shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award in 2019. Her second novel, Bone Black, was released in the Fall of 2019.
Her latest novel, The Narrows of Fear, was released October 2020, and the chosen title for a 2021 Saskatchewan Book Award. Another collection of poetry, called Essential Ingredients, was released in 2021. Her poetry collection, entitled Stations of the Crossed, is published by Inanna Publications.
Joseph Kakwinokanasumis a member of the James Smith Cree Nation who grew up in the Peace region of northern BC, one of seven children raised by a single mother. A graduate of SFU's Writers Studio, his short story “Ray Says” was a finalist for CBC’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize. His work has appeared in The Humber Literary Review and Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing. In 2022, he was selected by Darrel J. McLeod as one of The Writers Trust of Canada’s “Rising Stars.” He now lives and writes on Vancouver Island. Loosely based on his own childhood, My Indian Summer is his first novel.
Tyler Pennock, author of Bones (2020) and Blood (2022) is a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Métis family in the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta. Tyler is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. They graduated from Guelph University’s Creative Writing MFA program in 2013, and currently live in Toronto.
Gord (G. A.) Grisenthwaite is Nłeʔkepmx, member of the Lytton First Nation. His work has earned a number of prizes, including the 2014 John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award. He lives in Kingsville, ON. His first book, Home Waltz was a Finalist for 2021 Governor General Award for Fiction and Longlisted for the 2021 First Nation Communities Read Award
A vibrant live event courtesy of the City of Windsor's Poet Laureate & Storytellers' Program, held on September 17, 2022 in the Coach House of Willistead Manor, Windsor, Ontario.
Featuring and presented by outgoing Youth Poet Laureate, Alexei Ungurenaşu
With contributions by:
Poet Laureate Emeritus Marty Gervais,
Victoria Hecnar,
Mbonisi Zikhali Zokhonto,
Serafina Piasentin,
Past Poet Laureate Mary Ann Mulhern,
Peter Hrastovec,
Chidera Ikewibe,
Nick Hildenbrand,
Jade Wallace,
Christopher Lawrence Menard,
Alexei Ungurenaşu
Edited for time.
A special episode for you in the midst of the Fall Literary Festival Season! The wonderful poets Luke Hathaway and Alexandra Oliver recently appeared at Biblioasis Bookstore.
Their publisher, Dan Wells introduces them. Episode edited for length. Enjoy these dynamic readings!
Luke Hathaway is a trans poet, librettist, and theatre maker. His mythopoeic word-worlds have given rise to new choral works by Colin Labadie, James Rolfe, and Zachary Wadsworth, among others, and to the folk opera The Sign of Jonas, a collaboration with Benton Roark.
He is the author of four books of poems, one of which (Years, Months, and Days, 2018) was named a Best Book of the Year in the New York Times.
He works with Daniel Cabena as part of the metamorphosing ensemble ANIMA to create and commission new works inspired by early music sources.
He teaches creative writing and English literature at Saint Mary's University in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He also appeared at BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor in October, 2022.
http://biblioasis.com/brand/hathaway-luke/
Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, BC. She is the author of three collections published through Biblioasis: Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (2013; recipient of the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Let the Empire Down ( 2016), and Hail, the Invisible Watchman (2022). Her libretto for From the Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, conceived in conjunction with composer Scott Wilson at the University of Birmingham, was performed by Continuum Music in Toronto in December, 2017. Oliver is a past co-editor of Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Everyman’s Library/Random House, 2015) as well as of the formalist journal The Rotary Dial. She has performed her work for CBC Radio and NPR, as well as at The National Poetry Slam and a murder of festivals and conferences. Oliver holds an M.F.A in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program and a Ph.D. in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University. She lives in Burlington, Ontario with her husband and son.
http://biblioasis.com/brand/oliver-alexandra/
A resident of Erie Beach, Ontario, Ian Kennedy is a secondary school teacher and journalist with a passion for sport and storytelling. In 2011, he founded CKSN (Chatham-Kent Sports Network), an online news outlet covering both amateur and professional athletes. His reporting has been featured on radio, in newspapers and publications that include The Hockey News, Canadian Horse Journal and Outdoor Canada magazine. He holds degrees in Kinesiology and Education from the University of Western Ontario. His new book is On Account of Darkness: Shining Light on Race and Sport.https://www.tidewaterpress.ca/ian-kennedy/
Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang is a poet, children’s writer, and all-around generalist when it comes to writing. Her books for children run the gamut from board books, Toesy Toes to YA Breathing Fire, with a whole bunch of picture books in-between. Her poetry books Sweet Devilry (winner of the Gerald Lampert) and Status Update (nominated for the Pat Lowther) are a mix of traditional forms, lyric, and invented forms. She is the Creative Director at Poetry In Voice. Her new book is Grappling Hook, a poetry collection published by Palimpsest Press. Sarah will be appearing twice at this year’s BookFest Windsor/Festival du Livre on October 17th and we are pleased to have her with us on the podcast now.
https://sarahtsiang.com/
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/grappling-hook/
Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Stéfanie Clermont travelled throughout Canada and the United States, working at a wide variety of jobs, before settling in Montreal in 2012. Le jeu de la musique, her first book, was published in 2017. For this work, she won the prestigious Prix Ringuet of the Quebec Academy of Arts and Letters, the Quebec Arts Council’s prize for a new work by a young artist, and le Prix Adrienne Choquette for short stories. It was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and was included in Le Combat des livres, the French-language counterpart of Canada Reads. Le jeu de la musique has been released in English translation as The Music Game, published by Biblioasis Press. Stéfanie Clermont will be appearing twice at this year’s BookFest Windsor/Festival du Livre, as part of a French language panel on October 14th and an English language panel on October 15th.
http://biblioasis.com/brand/clermont-stefanie/
Kim Conklin is a writer, filmmaker, and podcaster. Kim’s stories, poems and films have appeared in journals, anthologies, and film festivals. Her journalism has appeared in broadcast and print, and her communications work has received more than 15 awards, including a Clio and a NY International Film Festival award. Her first novel, King of Hope releases in October, 2022 with Palimpsest Press, and Kim will appear at BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor on October 14. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Windsor, Ontario.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/king-of-hope-kim-conklin/
BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor 2022
ALEXANDER MacLEOD was born in Inverness, Cape Breton, and raised in Windsor, Ontario. He is the author of two internationally acclaimed books of fiction: Light Lifting, with Windsor’s Biblioasis, a winner of an Atlantic Book Award, and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Fiction Award, and the Commonwealth Book Prize. His latest book is Animal Person, which includes the O. Henry Award-winning story “Lagomorph,” originally published in Granta. MacLeod holds degrees from the University of Windsor, the University of Notre Dame, and McGill. He currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, and teaches at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.
Editor's Note: when Alex refers to his "Dad," that is of course the late Dublin Impac Award winning author Alistair MacLeod.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/667155/animal-person-by-alexander-macleod/9780771029882
http://biblioasis.com/shop/fiction/light-lifting-2/
Former Detroiter Kimberly Garrett Brown is the Publisher and Executive Editor of Minerva Rising Press. Her work has appeared in Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems and Personal Narratives, The Feminist Collective, Compass Literary Magazine, Today’s Chicago Woman, Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus and elsewhere.
Cora’s Kitchen is her first novel, due out in September 2022 from Toronto’s Inanna Publications. It was a finalist in the 2018 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and the 2016 Louise Merriweather First Book Prize. She earned her MFA at Goddard College, and she currently lives in Boca Raton, Florida.
https://kimberlygarrettbrown.com/
https://www.inanna.ca/product/coras-kitchen/
David Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David’s work has been published in magazines such as The Walrus, Maisonneuve, enRoute, and Canadian Notes & Queries, and anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. His second collection, Chemical Valley, is largely set in Sarnia, and deals with the ecological legacy of the oil and gas industry which seems to seep into every aspect of the characters’ lives. Also published by Biblioasis, Chemical Valley has recently been nominated for two Atlantic Book Awards. He joins us from Atlantic Canada.
http://biblioasis.com/tag/david-huebert/
On April 22, 2022, Literary Arts Windsor and BookFest Windsor with funding from the Canadian Heritage Canadian Arts and Performance Fund celebrated a new outdoor and although very cool and rainy, well-attended event at Lanspeary Park in Windsor: BookFest Equinoxe. We welcomed wonderful musicians, but for rights issues, you’ll just hear the fabulous poetry and conversation with Alex-Andrei (Alexei) Ungurenaşu, Windsor’s Youth Poet Laureate and BookFest / Festival du Livre Planning chair during this episode.
This event was made possible by generous funding from Canadian Heritage CAPF.
You’ll hear a selection from:
Kate Hargreaves,
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch,
Nick Hildenbrand,
and
Jovan Stefanov
All of whom kindly read at the launch and allowed us to record their performance.
https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/tag/equinox-2022-artists/
We encourage you to check out the music from Flower Face here: https://www.flowerface.com/
And Madeline Doornaert here: https://www.soulcitymusiccoop.com/madelinedoornaert
Cindy Hunter Morgan is the author of Harborless, a book of poems informed by Great Lakes shipwrecks, which was published by Wayne State University Press. It was a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and the winner of the 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry. Apple Season won the Midwest Writing Center's 2012 Chapbook Contest, and The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker won The Ledge Press 2011 Poetry Chapbook Award. She writes regularly for Murder Ballad Monday, a blog devoted to the exploration of the murder ballad tradition in folk and popular music. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Tin House Online, Passages North, Salamander, Sugar House Review, The Pinch, and West Branch. Cindy Hunter Morgan writes occasionally for Murder Ballad Monday, a blog devoted to the exploration of the murder ballad tradition in folk and popular music. She is a co-founder of Filmetry: A Festival of Film and Poetry. For several years, Hunter Morgan taught poetry and book arts at Michigan State University. She now heads up communications for Michigan State University Libraries. Her new poetry collection, Far Company, will be released by Wayne State University Press in May 2022.
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/far-company
https://www.cindyhuntermorgan.com/
Rosemary Nixon is a short story writer, novelist, editor and creative writing teacher. She has served as the Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2011. Recently she returned as Writer in Residence in January and February of 2022.
Nixon’s first collection of short stories, Mostly Country, was shortlisted for the Howard O’Hagan Award; she won it with her second collection, The Cock’s Egg. Her novel Kalila was shortlisted for the George Bugnet Award for Fiction.
Her most recent work of fiction, Are You Ready to be Lucky? was nominated for two international awards: the Frank O’Connor International Short Fiction Collection Award and the Forewords Indie Fab Award.
During her latest residency, Nixon was available to the campus and Windsor communities for one-on-one creative writing consultations.
https://freehand-books.com/product/are-you-ready-to-be-lucky/#tab-description
Born and raised in Windsor, Ontario, Peter Hrastovec is the author of two books of poetry, In Lieu of Flowers and Sidelines. He was also a contributor to the writing project Because We Have All Lived Here. Peter practises law, advocates for his community and embraces the joys of grandparenthood with his wife, Denise
https://blackmosspress.com/product/there-will-be-fish/
https://www.fitzhenry.ca/Search-Results?q=Hrastovec&LEAP_SearchSubmit=Submit
On March 19, 2022, a virtual launch was held for a wonderful project called the Community Anthology, published by A Beautiful Place Publishing House, a part of Gertrude’s Writing Room owned by our friend Vanessa Shields.
With poetry from 65 contributors from three continents, eight countries, four Canadian provinces, and four American states, the Community Anthology is a great celebration of what we mean by community today. It was compiled and edited by Vanessa Shields and our own Irene Moore Davis.
You’ll hear selections from:
Colin Morton
Derrick Carl Biso
C.M. Gadapee
Sarah Morris
Judith Kambia Obatusa
Peter Hrastovec and
Karen Rockwell
All of whom read at the launch and allowed us to record their performance.
The original recording was edited for length.
https://gertrudeswritingroom.com/submissions/
Christopher Lawrence Menard is a writer of stage, screen, fiction & poetry, actor, producer, director, and singer. He was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario where his love and work with local arts and artists led him to his career as the City of Windsor’s Cultural Development Coordinator where he works to support the efforts of the arts, culture, and heritage communities in Windsor. He is a proud member and supporter of the LGBTQ2S+ community. As a writer, Christopher’s original stage plays, Whatever it Was, The Best Man, The View From Here, and the DRAG Trilogy have been produced and played sold-out runs over the years at Windsor’s KordaZone Theatre. He is an award-winning screenwriter for films that have been featured in several film festivals. Christopher was also the first recipient of the Windsor Endowment for the Arts (WEA) award for Emerging Artist in the performing arts (2010).
His poetry is published in the Windsor Review’s Border Issue of 2015, and the upcoming Community Poetry Anthology from Gertrude’s Writing Room.
In April 2022, Christopher Lawrence Menard’s first collection of poetry entitled at the end, beginnings: A Memoir in Poems will be published by Black Moss Press.
Christopher lives along Lake Erie in Kingsville, Ontario, where he loves spending time exploring the best of Windsor-Essex with his husband, their young son, and their dog Dexter.
https://www.facebook.com/attheendbeginnings
https://blackmosspress.com/
Featured Guest: Rochelle Riley
About our guest: Rochelle Riley ended a nearly 20-year career as an award-winning Detroit columnist in 2019 to become the City of Detroit’s Director of Arts and Culture. She now guides the city’s investment in the creative economy and creates opportunities for transformative innovation. She offers commentary on MSNBC and NPR and contributes to Essence and Ebony magazines. She received the 2017 Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists “for her outstanding efforts to make newsrooms and news coverage more accurately reflect the diversity of the communities they serve” and the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She was a 2016 inductee into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame and a 2019 inductee into the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame. And she is a co-founder of Letters to Black Girls, an initiative to give letters of advice and encouragement from women across the country to girls across the country. The essayist, keynoter, and arts advocate is the author of That They Lived: African Americans Who Changed The World along with Cristi Smith-Jones (2021) and editor of The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery(2020,) both published by Wayne State University Press. Rochelle lives near the banks of the Detroit River. But the world traveler never stays at home long. She has visited 28 countries and 33 states… and counting.
Rochelleriley.com
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/they-lived
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/burden
Emma Odrach is an author and literary translator from Toronto, who now calls Windsor home. Alaska or Bust and Other Stories was published by Crimson Cloak Publishing in Missouri in 2017. Her translation of novel Wave of Terror, written by her late father, Theodore Odrach and dealing with the Stalinist occupation during WW2, was published by Chicago Review Press in 2008. She won an honorable mention from the Translation Center at Columbia University for a book of her father’s stories. Her new novel, The Bank Street Peeper, was released in November, 2021, by Adelaide Books of New York City and Lisbon. Emma’s translation of her father’s Village Teacher and Other Stories will be published by Glagoslav Publications, a United Kingdom and Dutch press. Many of her works have appeared in journals such as Connecticut Review, Scrivener, The New Quarterly, Antigonish Review, Yukon, North of Ordinary, the Penguin Book of Christmas Stories edited by Alberto Manguel, and Translation at Columbia University to mention a few. She is currently working on a novel and a translation.
https://adelaidebooks.org/products/the-bank-street-peeper
Featured Guests - The Hosts! Kim Conklin, Irene Moore Davis, Sarah Jarvis
On today’s episode of All Write in Sin City, we thought we’d mark and celebrate our 100 episodes so far. We’re going to look back on a few episodes that stood out for each of us in different ways. We loved all of our guests, and all of our episodes – but well, you’ll see how we’ve selected them.
We’ll share some lovely feedback from former guests, and then reveal an episode that - well, knocked us all sideways with delight – and audience participation.
Are there any Easter eggs in there? Maybe ;)
List of clips:
Deep Dark Secrets with Shani Mootoo,
Samantha Badoa and Mary Ann Mulhern Giving voice to the community with the Windsor Poets Laureate program
ML Leibler
Detroit Love Stories with Esperanza Cintron,
Natalie Zina Walschotts
Mark Bourrie
Margaret Noodin
Christian Laforet’s nom de plume is C.M. Forest
Natalie Zina Walschot’s Hench was featured on CBC’s Canada Reads
Greeting from Gord (G.A. Grisenthwaite: ʔéxʷweʔƛ̓uʔ,
New YA novel out from Fifth Avenue Press called Center-Mid. Here's the Amazon link for it - Jeff Kass
https://www.amazon.com/dp/194798991X?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
Featured Guests: Elaine Weeks and Chris Edwards
About our guests: Elaine has a B.A. in English from the University of Windsor plus two years of
postgraduate studies in Visual Arts. She’s a community leader with over 30 years experience in advertising, public relations, event planning, publishing, writing, editing, photography, conservation and heritage preservation. She’s written a novel called “Time Trespasser” and is working on a sequel.
Chris Edwards holds a Master of Arts in Communication Studies degree from the University of Windsor, and has been an instructor at the University of Windsor, St. Clair College and Elder College.
He’s a publisher, photographer, digital design guru, educator and world-traveller.
Chris has a long career in marketing and advertising and has managed numerous traditional and new media projects.
Together with Walkerville Publishing, they have produced several best-selling books on Windsor and this region’s rich visual heritage.
Their latest book together is Brewed in Windsor: A Tasty History
https://www.walkerville.com/shop
The Occasion: In October 2021, something wonderful and astonishing happened: three authors published by small but mighty Windsor-based Palimpsest Press were nominated for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Awards: Sadiqa de Meijer for non-fiction, G.A. Grisenthwaite for fiction, and Tolu Oloruntoba for poetry. In November, Sadiqa de Meijer and Tolu Oloruntoba were indeed announced as two of this year’s seven English language Governor General’s Literary Award winners. Today we’re speaking with Palimpsest Press publisher and past guest Aimee Parent Dunn, along with GGLA winning poet, Tolu Oloruntoba.
About Tolu: Tolu Oloruntoba was born in Nigeria, and practiced medicine before his current work managing virtual health projects for BC health organizations. His poetry has appeared in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, PRISM International, Pleiades, Columbia Journal, Obsidian, The Maynard, Humber Literary Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His short fiction has appeared in translation in Dansk PEN Magazine. He founded Klorofyl, a magazine of literary and graphic art. His debut chapbook, Manubrium, was published by Anstruther Press, and was shortlisted for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award, while his debut full-length poetry collection, The Junta of Happenstance, published by Palimpsest Press in Spring 2021, recently won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in Surrey, BC with his family.
About Aimee: Aimee Parent Dunn is from Essex County and received her BA in English at the University of Windsor. In 2012, she became a publishing assistant at Palimpsest Press, which had been founded by Dawn Kresan in 2000. Just over a year later, with the support of her husband Shaun Dunn, she bought the press and became its publisher, with Dawn remaining as a poetry editor and designer. Palimpsest Press is a small independent publishing house that publishes beautifully designed books of poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction. A palimpsest, by the way, is a piece of writing material manuscript on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for other writing.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/
Robert Earl Stewart’s first collection of poetry, Something Burned Along the Southern Border (Mansfield Press), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His poems have been published in journals in Canada, the U.S., and Great Britain. In 2010, he received the Windsor Endowment for the Arts’ grant for Emerging Artist in Literary Arts. His poetry has appeared in
magazines, journals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., including This, Magma Poetry, Poetry Super Highway, Nthposition, Monday Night, Iota, Moosehead Anthology, and The Best Canadian Poetry 2012. In 2018 he was nominated for a Canadian Magazine Award for an article he wrote about a pro-wrestling role-playing game he co-created as a teenager. He has been a journalist, and has spent time as a creative writing instructor, a photography instructor, a CBC radio book panelist, and the manager of a book shop. He lives in Windsor with his wife and their three children. Robert Earl Stewart’s new book, Running-Shaped Hole will be published by Dundurn Press in Spring 2022.
https://www.dundurn.com/books_/t22117/a9781459749054-the-running-shaped-hole
A native of Detroit, Jim Daniels is the author of numerous collections of poetry and short stories. He’s also written four produced screenplays, collaborated with photographer Charlee Brodsky on gallery shows and publication projects including the book street, which won the Tillie Olsen Prize, and he has edited or co-edited six anthologies. He currently lives in Pittsburgh and is the Thomas S. Baker University Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon. His recent books include Rowing Inland (Wayne State University Press, 2017) and The Perp Walk. He also coedited the anthology RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music.
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/gunshy
A retired history teacher and veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, William Toffan lives in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife, Laura, and children Lauren, Heidi, Oksana, and Heather. Published by Biblioasis in the fall of 2020, his first book is Watching the Devil Dance: How a Spree Killer Slipped through the Cracks of the Criminal Justice System.http://biblioasis.com/brand/toffan-will/
Erin Bartels is the award-winning author of We Hope for Better Things, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, 2020 WFWA Star Award–winner, and a 2019 Christy Award finalist. Other books include The Words between Us, a 2020 Christy Award finalist and 2015 WFWA Rising Star Award–winner, and All That We Carried, released in January 2021. Her short story “This Elegant Ruin” was a finalist in The Saturday Evening Post 2014 Great American Fiction Contest. Her poems have been published by The Lyric and The East Lansing Poetry Attack.
Margaret Christakos is a widely published award-winning poet, fiction author, critic, and creative writing instructor. Her work has won the ReLit Award for Poetry and the Bliss Carman Award, has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award twice, and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She was appointed Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2004–2005, served as Canada Council Writer in Residence at Western University in 2016–2017 and at the University of Alberta in 2017–2018, and as Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto (2018–2019). Her recent publications include Charger, a poetry collection published by Talon Books (2020) and an intergenre memoir, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies, published by Bookhug (2016). In 2017, Wilfrid Laurier University Press published Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos. Her most recent collection is Dear Birch,* published by Palimpsest Press in 2021. Margaret Christakos will be appearing virtually at BookFest Windsor in October 2021.
Margaret Christakos
Margaret Christakos - Palimpsest Press
https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of five books. Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa won the Henry Kriesel Award for Best First Book. Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran won the Wilfred Eggleston Prize for Best Nonfiction at the Alberta Book Awards. Walls: Travels Along the Barricades and Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense were both winners of the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize, with the former winning the 2013 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. (Shaughnessy Cohen, for those who don’t know, was a remarkable Member of Parliament from Windsor.) His magazine writing has appeared in appeared in publications such as The International New York Times, The Walrus, EnRoute, Geist, Canadian Geographic, and Afar. Di Cintio has served as a writer-in-residence at the Calgary Public Library, the University of Calgary, and the Palestine Writing Workshop, and he teaches nonfiction writing at the annual WordsWorth youth writing residency. Marcello DiCintio’s latest book is Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers, published by Biblioasis in 2021. He will be appearing virtually at BookFest Windsor in October 2021.
https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/
http://biblioasis.com/brand/di-cintio-marcello/
Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University in the School of Creative Industries. She is author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture. She previously held a Banting postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in The Conversation, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, Spacing, Herizons Magazine, Halifax Coast, and Rabble.ca. She was born and raised in Toronto, where she currently resides. She has also lived in the United States and in Windsor, Ontario. Her most recent book is Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics Of Loyalty.https://www.drcherylthompson.com/https://chbooks.com/Books/U/Uncle
Alexa Winik is a Canadian poet and writer from Windsor, Ontario. She was awarded the 2020 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in various journals. She holds an MLitt in Women, Writing, and Gender and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. Winik has also served as poetry editor for the online literary journal The Scores. In 2019, she was the poet-in-residence with the At Sea Residency in Margate, England, as well as a finalist of Mid-American Review's James Wright Poetry Award.Close River by Alexa Winik was the winner of the Magma Open Pamphlet Competition in 2020 Alexa has recently returned to Windsor from Edinburgh, Scotland.
https://www.writerstrust.com/authors/alexa-winik/
https://magmapoetry.com/publications/close-river-by-alexa-winik/
Nick Conrad's poems first began to appear in national and international literary reviews in the late 70's. More than 125 poems have since appeared in a variety of journals and review in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland as well as on the web and in various anthologies. He lives in Toledo, Ohio. Nick’s most recent book is Lake Erie Blues, published by Urban Farmhouse Press.
https://urbanfarmhousepress.ca/index.php?id_product=25&controller=product
Elisa Sinnett is a writer and teacher and a member of the American Federation of Teachers. She lives in Windsor, Ontario with her family, but her hometown is Detroit, Michigan. She works on her writing with author Ariel Gore and the Literary Kitchen. Sections of her book Detroit Fairy Tales have been published in or recognized by various magazines and journals. Elisa says that she is “an immigrant to the middle class and is dismayed to discover shortly after her arrival that is was being dismantled.” Detroit Fairy Tales is her first book.
www.elisasinnett.com
Hammett Award and Nero Prize-winning novelist Stephen Mack Jones is the author of the critically acclaimed thrillers AUGUST SNOW and LIVES LAID AWAY. LIVES LAID AWAY was short-listed for the CWA-UK "Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award." He has also contributed an essay to the non-fiction book WHAT NOW?: Essays On Life After Trump (2021, Wellstone Center of the Redwoods.) His new book, DEAD OF WINTER, was published in May.
Stephen Mack Jones is also a published poet, an award-winning playwright, and a recipient of the prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary fellowship. Once-upon-a-time he worked in advertising and marketing communications for which he is deeply sorry and promises never to do that again. He lives in suburban Detroit and has three adult children that mostly like him.
stephenmackjones.com
In this episode we are celebrating two of Windsor’s earliest and most influential women writers, both of them women of African heritage who lived in Windsor in the 1850s: Mary Miles Bibb and Mary Ann Shadd Cary. We are joined Teajai Travis, Amina Abdulle, and our own Irene Moore Davis.
Teajai Travis is an Afro-Indigenous artist and activist, born and raised in Waawiiyaatanong, the last stop of the Underground Railroad. As an art practitioner, Teajai uses poetry, spoken word and traditional hand drumming to spin a tapestry of narratives to breathe flesh and blood to the long-lost stories of his ancestors. In 2017 he launched his Missing from History: Women of the Underground Railroad project to identify the important role women played in the intricate network of freedom fighters known as the Underground Railroad. He went on to develop these stories through poetry, spoken word, and theatre. More recently, Teajai’s exploration of his family history led to a multi-disciplinary project called Born Enslaved. He is a member of the founding board of The Windsor Youth Centre, the founder of an arts based community outreach initiative called The Bloomfield House, involved in many organizations, and currently the Executive Director at Artcite Inc. This year, in collaboration with Friends of the Court at Mackenzie Hall, Teajai successfully advocated for the renaming of a City of Windsor park in honour of nineteenth century writer, educator, and activist Mary E. Miles Bibb.
Irene Moore Davis is a Windsor, Ontario-based educator, writer, historian, and podcaster. In addition to being one of our All Write in Sin City co-hosts, Irene is President of the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, Program Chair at BookFest Windsor, and actively involved with many other community organizations. Irene has published works of poetry, short fiction, history, and journalism. Her forthcoming book is titled Our Own Two Hands: A History of Black Lives in Windsor from the 1700s Forward. She is a graduate of the University of Windsor, Western University, and Queen's University, and is an administrator at St. Clair College, where she also teaches English, Underground Railroad history, and Black cultural studies.
Amina Abdulle is a poet and a teacher who's passionate about art and expression. Born in Somalia, Amina has been living in Canada since she was 7 and is proud to call Windsor her home. Amina has been working as a teacher for the last 10 years. She has taught English at the high school level and is now the Department Head of ESL at Kennedy Collegiate. She is also the co-founder Black Staff Equity Alliance as well as a member of various organizations within the city that focus on equity and justice. Amina sits on the board of two organizations and tries to use her time and voice to support her community in whichever ways she can. Amina began writing fiction at a very young age and quickly fell in love with poetry and all forms of artistic expression. A graduate of the University of Windsor's Creative Writing program, Amina began to focus on writing works of poetry that touch on several issues including her cultural background and issues of identify.
Harvey Ovshinsky is a writer, producer, story consultant, educator, and public speaker. He was only seventeen when he started The Fifth Estate, one of the country’s oldest underground newspapers. Five years later, he become one of the county’s youngest news directors in commercial radio at WABX-FM, Detroit’s notorious progressive rock station. Both jobs placed him directly in the bullseye of the nation’s tumultuous counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. Later, as a documentary director, his work was awarded broadcasting’s highest honors, including a national Emmy, a Peabody, and the American Film Institute’s Robert M. Bennett Award for Excellence. Now he’s sharing the behind-the-scenes stories from his career in Scratching the Surface from Wayne State University Press. The memoir also doubles as a survival guide and an instruction manual that speaks not only to the need for storytelling and the role that endurance and resilience play in the creative process.
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/scratching-surface
Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy. He is the editor of Sunday with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game and The Myles Horton Reader, and co-editor of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. His academic/creative nonfiction book, The 1976 Project: On Comics and Grief, is forthcoming. He is the editor of The Windsor Review and teaches in the English Department at the University of Windsor.
Heidi LM Jacobs’ novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020. She is a librarian at the University of Windsor andone of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred "Boomer" Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. She is currently writing a book about the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars, the first Black team to win the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association Championship.
Their new book together is 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer. The book was inspired by their realization in 2016 that something was missing in their relationship with baseball. So, they drew a one-hundred mile radius around their home in Windsor, and set a goal of seeing fifty games within that circle. That took them across southwestern Ontario and into Michigan and Ohio, to games at the high school, university and major league levels.100 Miles of Baseball is the story of their sports-driven road trip and their rediscovery of their love of the game.
http://biblioasis.com/shop/new-release/100-miles-of-baseball-fifty-games-one-summer/
Vanessa Shields is a poet, writer and workshop facilitator in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Her first book, Laughing Through A Second Pregnancy – A Memoir, was published by Black Moss Press in 2011 to rave reviews. In April 2013, Shields edited a poetry anthology entitled, Whisky Sour City (Black Moss Press). I Am That Woman (Black Moss Press), her first book of poetry, was published in 2014, Look At Her (Black Moss Press) in 2016. In 2017, Shields was part of a Group of Seven poets published in an anthology about the history of Windsor, entitled Because We Have All Lived Here (Black Moss Press). In 2018, the chapbook Feminism: Revisit, Revise, Revolutionize: A Two-part Harmony was published by the League of Canadian Poets’ Feminist Caucus with Shields as co-editor/introduction writer. She writes a monthly blog for the League of Canadian Poets on being a writing parent. She is passionate about promoting poetry and the writing life, and is often on a jury for major awards and/or contests.
Shields self-published a collection of children’s poetry entitled From A to Ziffery Zanks with Windsor illustrator Glen Hawkes in 2019. A new collection of poetry, thimbles has just been published by Palimpsest Press.
https://vanessashields.com/
https://palimpsestpress.ca/our-authors/vanessa-shields/
Ellie Csepregi has been a cultural worker since 1972… a nomad who is currently situated in Windsor, Ontario, who graduated from the University of Windsor, and who has taught high school for over twenty years. Her work has been performed by dance and theatre companies in Vancouver and has appeared in several publications including The Windsor Review, Rampike, Ash (Oxford University Press), Spittoon (Beijing), Cranberry Tree Press Anthologies, and Whisky Sour City Anthology (Black Moss Press.) Tiers is her first full book of poems.
Visit her website: https://wordpress.com/view/swirl-yonders.ca.
Lainey Cameron is a debut author who has achieved great success with her novel, The Exit Strategy. It’s the winner of the 2020 Readers’ Favorite Award for women’s fiction and #1 Amazon Bestseller in Feminist books. The book has also been honored with:
• A Gold Medal in the 2020 Readers Choice Awards (for women's fiction)
• A Finalist designation in the 2020 Best Book Awards by American Bookfest
• A nomination as a notable indie for 2020 by Shelf Unbound
• And it was longlisted for Chanticleer Somerset Book Awards
The story was inspired by Cameron’s decade of being the only woman in the corporate boardroom. It tells the story of a Silicon Valley investor who first meets her husband’s mistress across the negotiating table. Cameron was introduced to us by the folks at The Detroit Writing Room, and she also hosts a podcast, The Best of Women’s Fiction. A digital nomad, she picks locations around the world to live, write and host podcast for months at a time. Originally from Scotland, she admits to a soft spot for men in kilts and good malt whiskey.
www.laineycameron.com
Cecily Nicholson is the author of Triage, and From the Poplars, which won the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize. Her most recent book, Wayside Sang, won a Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. She volunteers with community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Her performances, talks and residencies have been hosted by educational spaces such as New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Centre for Indigenous Research Creation at Queen's University, Woodland Pattern Book Centre, Milwaukee, and the Surrey School District. Cecily is currently the (virtual) Writer-in-Residence for the University of Windsor. She spoke to us from her home in British Columbia.
https://talonbooks.com/authors/cecily-nicholson
Jade Wallace’s fiction, poetry, and essays have been published, or are forthcoming, in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Sweden, New Zealand, and India. They are the author of several chapbooks, most recently the collaborative ZZOO (Collusion Books, October 2020) and Test Centre (ZED Press 2019), and the solo Rituals of Parsing (Anstruther Press 2018). Jade’s most recent chapbook is Southern Ontario Gothic Tour in 2020. Their writing has won the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize and the Anita and Alistair MacLeod Prize, and has been nominated for The Journey Prize. A former legal worker, they are currently the Reviews Editor for CAROUSEL, an organizing member of Draft Reading Series, an M.A. student in Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, and one half of the collaborative writing partnership MA|DE.
Note: at 40:45, there is a reference in a poem about suicide.
Full website references: https://jadewallace.ca/
http://carouselmagazine.ca/c42-lgbtqa-gta/
http://ma-de.ca/
It has been twenty five years since Christopher Paul Curtis first earned a Newbery Honor as well as an Honor from the Coretta Scott King Book Awards for The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, his critically acclaimed debut novel which was subsequently adapted for a Hallmark TV movie. In 2000, he became the first African American man to win the Newbery Medal for his 1999 novel Bud, Not Buddy, which also received the Coretta Scott King Award. His books Bucking the Sarge (2004), Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money (2005), Mr. Chickee’s Messy Mission (2007), Elijah of Buxton (2007) which also received a Newbery Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award, The Mighty Miss Malone (2012), The Madman of Piney Woods (2014), and The Journey of Little Charlie (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. His books regularly appear on lists of the best children’s books of the year, and in 2013, The Watson’s Go to Birmingham – 1963 was named one of the New York Public Library’s 100 Great Children’s Books of the Last 100 Years. Born in Flint, Michigan, Mr. Curtis has resided in Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario, where in his free time, he enjoys reading, playing basketball, and collecting music.
https://nobodybutcurtis.com/
This podcast is a little different than our usual programs. Dr. Naomi Long Madgett, the Detroit Poet Laureate, had been on our interview “wish list” for some time. Last fall, we tried to interview her here on the podcast about her latest book, You Are My Joy and Pain. That did not work out, and sadly, a few weeks later, she passed away. Today, we’ll be paying tribute to Madgett’s career as a poet, publisher and Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2020. We’re talking with two people in the Detroit literary community about her work, her legacy and how they will remember her. Our featured guests today are:
- Leisia Duskin, a graphic designer, artist and instructor who is a Board Member of Broadside Lotus Press and a longtime collaborator with Dr. Madgett
- And M.L. Liebler, an internationally known Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer and also the Poet Laureate for St. Clair Shores, Michigan
Listeners who would like to know more about Dr. Naomi Long Madgett’s career can find biographies on broadsidelotuspress.org, at poets.org, and also a more recent version at this link: https://naomilongmadgett.wixsite.com/naomi-long-madgett/biography)
Biography M.L. Liebler: www.mlliebler.com
Biography of Leisia Duskin, Graphic Designer, Educator, and Writer
Leisia Duskin is an artist, graphic designer, and educator. A graduate of the College for Creative Studies, Ms. Duskin is a Special Instructor teaching graphic design, varied format and apparel printing in the Printing and Graphics Program at Cornelius Golightly Career and Technical Center, Detroit Public Schools Community District.
In 1983, she received a grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts for her book of poems entitled Lights Out in Ten (edited by poet Stella Crews). Leisia Duskin’s poems have been published in the South End Newspaper (Wayne State University) and in the Broadside Press anthology, Hipology: Horizons in Poetry, edited by Ron Allen and Stella Crews, Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points (Great Lakes Books Series) 1991..
Ms. Duskin joined Dr. Madgett to support the writing efforts of others published by Lotus Press. Their teamwork led to a life-long friendship. Dr. Madgett commissioned Ms. Duskin to create two illustrations for her acclaimed book, Octavia - And Other Poems (1988), reprinted as Octavia - Beyond Guthrie (1992). Over the years, Leisia Duskin would win the Lotus Press Graphic Design Excellence Award in 2008 for outstanding book design, and inclusion in the Henry Ford College Faculty Graphic Design and Photography Exhibition in 2014, for the 2012 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award book cover design Three Birds Deep by poet Sheila Carter-Jones. Her most recent book layout and cover design was for the Naomi Long Madgett (NLM) Poetry Award is Blues Legacy by poet Jacquese Armstrong, 2019.
Ms. Duskin joined the Board of Directors of Lotus Press in 2000, and served as Board President from 2005 to 2015.
Our guest is D.A. Lockhart. He is the author of seven books, including Devil in the Woods, The Gravel Lot That Was Montana, This City at the Crossroads, Big Medicine Comes to Erie, and an essay collection called Wënchikàneit Visions. D.A. Lockhart holds degrees from Trent University, Montana State University, and Indiana University. His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2019, TriQuarterly, ARC Poetry Magazine, Grain, Belt, and The Malahat Review among others. He is also the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press and poetry editor for The Windsor Review. He is a Turtle Clan member of the Lenape people, a registered member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong on the south shore of the Detroit River (also known as the border cities of Windsor ON and Detroit MI). This year, he has published two new books, Breaking Right (with Porcupine’s Quill) and Tùkhòne: Where the River Narrows and the Shores Bend (with Black Moss Press.)
http://blackmosspress.com/d-a-lockhart/
https://porcupinesquill.ca/bookinfo6.php?index=361
G. A. Grisenthwaite is Nłeʔkepmx, member of the Lytton First Nation. His stories and poems have appeared in The Anitgonish Review, Our Stories Literary Journal, and Prism International. His work has earned a number of prizes, including the 2014 John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award. He lives in Kingsville, ON. His first novel is Home Waltz, published by Palimpsest Press in 2020.
Resources: https://palimpsestpress.ca/our-authors/g-a-grisenthwaite/
Welcome to a special edition of All Write in Sin City podcast. The podcasting elves are taking a break over the holidays, but thanks to the wonders of modern tech, we’ll be back in 2021 to bring you more great interviews and readings.
In this episode, we’re sharing some of the great readings we enjoyed throughout this year. All of the recordings were done safely and remotely, but you’ll certainly hear the authors’ passion and dedication.
We loved all of our interviews, and here we have selected four readings: two of fiction; two of poetry, with authors from both sides of the Windsor – Detroit border in order to celebrate the diversity of all of our presentations at All Write in Sin City.
So, relax, and enjoy! Each author’s reading from Fartumo Kusow, Brian Gilmore, Natalie Zina Walschots, and Margaret Noodin is preceded by the original introduction. You might even want to join in with some audience participation with Margaret! You can hear the full interviews and more at allwriteinsincity.com
Dr. Dale Jacobs teaches Composition and Rhetoric with interests in comics, composition pedagogies, literacy, and visual rhetorics at the University of Windsor, Ontario. In addition to numerous books and articles on rhetoric, he is the editor of North by North Wit: An Anthology of Canadian Humour (Black Moss Press, 2003) and Ice: New Writing on Hockey (Spotted Cow Press, 1997). He has edited Sunday with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game (Black Moss Press, 2015). Dale Jacobs is the new editor in chief of The Windsor Review which is published biannually by the University of Windsor Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Department of English and Creative Writing. Established in 1965, The Windsor Review features poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and review essays.
The Windsor Review at 50: https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/windsor_review/issue/view/563
The latest edition of the Windsor Review Fall 2020: https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/windsor_review
Stories by Joseph Harris have appeared in Midwest Review, Moon City Review, Great Lakes Review, The MacGuffin, Third Wednesday, Storm Cellar, and have received the Gesell, Tompkins, and Detroit Working Writers’ Awards for fiction. He holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota, an MA from Wayne State University, and a BFA from Emerson College. His collection of short fiction, You’re in the Wrong Place, is a collection of linked short stories about young people in Ferndale, Michigan, struggling to find their way after the crash of 2008. It was recently published by Wayne State University Press.
Note that there is some strong language in the reading. But it's a great story.
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/youre-wrong-place
Bob Campbell is a writer based in Flint, Mich. His creative nonfiction and essays have appeared in Belt Magazine, Forge Literary Magazine and Gravel Magazine. He is a contributor to Belt Publishing’s Midwest Architecture Journeys, published in October 2019. Bob was a staff writer for the Flint Journal, Lexington Herald-Leader and Detroit Free Press. He was also an electrician at AC Spark Plug, formerly a division of General Motors, before moving into journalism. His debut novel, Motown Man, was published by Urban Farmhouse Press in November 2020.
Note that there is some strong language in the reading. But it's a great story.
https://urbanfarmhousepress.ca/index.php?id_product=27&controller=product
https://www.bobcampbellwrites.com/
Born in Ottawa, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent poetry collections are A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life sentence (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.comrob mclennan is a BookFest / Festival du livre 2020 guest.
Based in Vancouver, Evelyn Lau is the author of thirteen books, including eight volumes of poetry. Her poetry has received the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award, the Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a Canadian woman, and nominations for a BC Book Prize and a Governor-General’s Award. From 2011-2014, Evelyn served as Vancouver’s Poet Laureate. Her latest book is Pineapple Express.
Evelyn Lau is a BookFest / Festival du livre 2020 guest.
https://www.anvilpress.com/books/pineapple-express
Kevin Spenst, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of Ignite, Jabbering with Bing Bong (both Anvil Press), and over a dozen chapbooks including Pray Goodbye (Alfred Gustav Press), Ward Notes (serif of nottingham), Flip Flop Faces and Unexpurgated Lives (JackPine Press), and Upend (Frog Hollow Press: Dis/Ability series). His work has won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry, been nominated for both the Alfred G. Bailey Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and has appeared in dozens of publications including Prairie Fire, CV2, BafterC, Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and the Best Canadian Poetry 2019 anthology. He lives on unceded Coast Salish territory (Vancouver) with the love of his life Shauna Kaendo.
His latest book is Hearts Amok: A Memoir in Verse, released in May by Anvil Press.
https://www.anvilpress.com/authors/kevin-spenst
Kevin Spenst is also a BookFest/Festival du livre 2020 author.
Mark Laliberte is a Canadian artist, writer, editor and graphic designer — and the creator of The 4PANEL Project. He curates the strips that appear on 4panel.ca, and, as project founder, is also an active artist-participant. Recent books include: BRICKBRICKBRICK (BookThug), Grey Supreme 01 (Koyama Press), asemanticasymmetry (Anstruther Press), BookBook (above/ground) and Explosive Comic (Swimmers Group). He is the owner and operator of POPNOIR EDITIONS (established in 2016) which publishes art books, comics, zines and other creative ephemera.
PopNoir’s newest book is 4Panel 3. Mark Laliberte debuted the book at this year’s virtual BookFest Windsor on October 17th.
http://popnoir.ca/
https://www.bookfestwindsor.com/
AVA HOMA is a writer, journalist and activist specializing in women’s issues and Middle Eastern affairs. Born and raised in the Kurdistan Province of Iran, Homa now divides her time between Toronto and San Francisco. She holds an MA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor. Her collection of short stories, Echoes from the Other Land, was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and she is the inaugural recipient of the PEN Canada–Humber College Writers-in-Exile Scholarship. Her short fiction and translations have appeared in several English and Farsi journals and newspapers, including the Literary Review of Canada, Rabble, the Windsor Review, and the Toronto Star. Daughters of Smoke and Fire is her debut novel.
Ava Homa is another BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor 2020 author.
https://www.avahoma.com/
https://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443460132/daughters-of-smoke-and-fire/
Natalie Zina Walschots, originally from Essex County, is a writer and game designer whose work includes live action role-playing game (LARP) scripts, heavy metal music journalism, video game lore, and weirder things classified as "interactive experiences." Her writing on the interactive adventure The Aluminum Cat won an IndieCade award, and her poetic exploration of the notes engine in Bloodborne was featured in Kotaku and First Person Scholar. She is also an accomplished poet, publishing: Thumbscrews, which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains. Natalie sits on the board of Dames Making Games, a space for queer and gender-marginalized people to create games freely, and where she hosts interactive narrative workshops. Her first novel, Hench, with the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins Canada, about a young office temp who discovers the dark side of working for super heroes and super villains, will be released in September 2020, and has already garnered several starred reviews, and accolades including the Publishers WeeklyWriter to Watch, Amazon’s Top September SFF pick, and Apple Books’ Best Books of September.
If you listen carefully, you might hear Lydia the cat in the background!
https://www.harpercollins.ca/9780062978578/hench/
http://nataliewalschots.com/
Kristyn Dunnion grew up in Essex County, the southernmost tip of Canada, and now lives in Toronto. She is the author of six books, including Tarry This Night and The Dirt Chronicles, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her short fiction is widely published, most recently in Best Canadian Stories 2020, Foglifter, Orca: A Literary Journal, and Toronto 2033. Dunnion works supporting adults with mental illness, and has been a healthy food advocate for marginalized communities. Her latest book is Stoop City, a short story collection which will be released this fall by BIblioasis. Kristyn Dunnion will be part of the Friday Night Fiction panel at this year’s virtual BookFest Windsor on October 16th.
http://biblioasis.com/brand/dunnion-kristyn/
https://www.bookfestwindsor.com/
David Ly is a writer and poet based in Vancouver, BC. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in World Literature, English, and Creative Writing, and a Master of Publishing degree from Simon Fraser University. He is the author of the chapbook Stubble Burn (2018.) His poetry has appeared in an array of magazines and anthologies, including The Puritan, carte blanche, The Maynard, Pulp Literature, PRISM international, and The /tƐmz/ Review. David has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been long- and short-listed for the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Literary Excellence and the Magpie Award for Poetry, respectively.
His latest book and his first full-length collection is Mythical Man, published earlier this year by Palimpsest Press. David Ly will be appearing at this year’s virtual BookFest Windsor on October 17th.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/mythical-man/
https://www.bookfestwindsor.com/
Hana Shafi is a writer and artist who illustrates under the name Frizz Kid. Both her visual art and writing frequently explore themes such as feminism, body politics, racism, and pop culture with an affinity to horror. A graduate of Ryerson University’s Journalism Program, she has published articles in publications such as The Walrus, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Torontoist, Huffington Post, and has been featured on Buzzfeed India, Buzzfeed Canada, CBC, Flare Magazine, Mashable, and Shameless. Known on Instagram for her weekly affirmation series, she is also the recipient of the Women Who Inspire Award, from the Canadian Council for Muslim Women. Born in Dubai, Shafi’s family immigrated to Mississauga, Ontario in 1996, and she currently lives and works in Toronto. Her first book, It Begins With The Body (Book*hug, 2018) was named by CBC as a Poetry Book of the Year.
Hana Shafi’s latest work is Small Broke, and Kind of Dirty: Affirmations for the Real World, also published by Book*hug, and we’re excited that she will be a guest in this year’s virtual BookFest Windsor on October 17th.
https://bookhugpress.ca/product-category/author/hana-shafi/
Bookfestwindsor.com
Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland, grew up in Trinidad, and lives in Canada. She holds an MA in English from the University of Guelph, writes fiction and poetry, and is a visual artist whose work has been exhibited locally and internationally. Mootoo’s critically acclaimed novels include Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, Valmiki’s Daughter, He Drown She in the Sea, and Cereus Blooms at Night. She is a recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, and the James Duggins Mid-Career Novelist Award from the Lambda Literary Awards. Her work has been longlisted and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the International DUBLIN Literary Award, and the Man Booker Prize.
Shani Mootoo's latest novel, Polar Vortex, was released by in March 2020, and we’re excited that she will be a guest in this year’s virtual BookFest Windsor on October 16th.
You can find out more about the festival at www.bookfestwindsor.com.
Carol Rose GoldenEagle is a novelist, poet, playwright, visual artist, and musician. She is the author of the award-winning novel Bearskin Diary, published by Nightwood Editions in 2015, which won the Saskatchewan Book Award for its French translation in 2019. A sequel, The Narrows of Fear, will be published in October 2020 by Inanna Publications. Her novel, Bone Black was released by Nightwood Editions in 2019, and her poetry collection, Hiraeth, a finalist for the 2019 Rasmussen, Rasmussen and Charowsky Indigenous Peoples’ Writing Award, was published by Inanna Publications in 2018. As a visual artist, her work has been exhibited in art galleries across Saskatchewan and Northern Canada. As a musician, she has been featured on a critically acclaimed CD of women’s drum songs. Before pursuing her art on a full-time basis, Carol Rose worked as a journalist for more than 30 years in television and radio at APTN, CTV, and CBC. She lives in Regina.
She will be joining us virtually for the fully online 2020 edition of BookFest Windsor/Festival du Livre Windsor October 15th-18th. For more information on the festival, see bookfestwindsor.com.
Alice Aspinall is a high school mathematics educator and author who lives in Windsor, Ontario. She loves spending time with her husband and two children reading books, playing math games, and exploring the outdoors. She is a strong advocate of the growth mindset. She is continually looking for ways to build young people’s confidence in math and to make math fun, challenging, and satisfying, including through her YouTube channel, “MrsALovesMath.” Alice is also a champion for females in STEM, encouraging girls to pursue science and mathematics in high school and in post-secondary education. Alice believes everyone can learn math and she is on a mission to prove it.
Alice Aspinall’s book, Everyone Can Learn Math, has been released by EduMatch Publishing.
Margaret Noodin received an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she also serves as the director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education.
She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and Weweni (Wayne State University Press, 2015), a collection of bilingual poems in Ojibwe and English. Her poems and essays have been anthologized and published in New Poets of Native Nations, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Poetry, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Water Stone Review and Yellow Medicine Review. She is co-editor of The Papers of the Algonquian Conference and is an advocate for education and community engagement through relevant research and teaching.
Note: After our "conversation close," after Margaret's reading, our post-show chit-chat with Margaret about language evolution and sharing with the next generation was so interesting that we kept it in the show! Enjoy.
Her latest book, What the Chickadee Knows is available in September 2020 from Wayne State University Press. https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/what-chickadee-knows
The first full-length collection from poet and environmental activist Alison Swan, A Fine Canopy, will be released in October by Wayne State University Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in many publications, including her poetry chapbooks Before the Snow Moon and Dog Heart, the recent award-winning anthologies Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, and Here: Women Writing on the Upper Peninsula.
Her work has also been featured in the journals North American Review and TriQuarterly, and The Michigan Poet broadside series and anthology. In 2006, her book Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes was named a Michigan Notable Book. She’s been awarded a Mesa Refuge Residency and the Michigan Environmental Council’s Petoskey Prize for Grassroots Environmental Leadership. She teaches in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University and lives in Ann Arbor.
You can find out more about the book here: https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/series-and-imprints/made-michigan-writers-series
Karen Dionne is the USA Today and #1 internationally bestselling author of the award-winning psychological suspense novel, The Marsh King’s Daughter. It was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Karen has been active in the writing community for over twenty years. She co-founded the online writers community Backspace, organized the Backspace Writers Conferences in New York and the Bahamas, and served on the board of directors of the International Thriller Writers organization.
Originally from the Detroit area, Karen and her husband moved to ten acres in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula when they first married. They lived there for 30 years before moving back to Greater Detroit. She has described her previous book, The Marsh King’s Daughter, as a love letter to the Upper Peninsula. Her new book, The Wicked Sister, is also set there. She joins us to talk about the new book, launching on August 4th.
https://www.karen-dionne.com/
Esperanza Cintrón is the author of three books of poetry: Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Sunrise (Stockport Flats Press, 2014), the 2013 Naomi Long Madgett Award winner What Keeps Me Sane (Lotus Press, 2013) and Chocolate City Latina (Swank Press, 2005). Her poetry has been anthologized many times. She has been awarded a Michigan Council for the Arts Individual Artist Grant, the Metro Times Poetry Prize, Callaloo Creative Writing Fellowships at Oxford and Brown Universities and a National Endowment for the Humanities scholarship. A native Detroiter, she is co-founder of The Sisters of Color Writers Collective and creator of its literary journal Seeds for which she served as Editor until 2006. Cintrón holds a doctorate in English Literature and teaches writing, film and literature at Wayne County Community College. Her latest work is Shades: Detroit Love Stories, a collection of interconnected short stories published by Wayne State University Press.
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/shades
Dr. Heidi L.M. Jacobs was born and raised in Edmonton. A graduate of the University of Alberta, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Western University, she is currently the English and History Librarian at the University of Windsor. Those of you who are regular listeners may recall that we interviewed Jacobs last June, just after the release of her debut novel, Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear. Recently, Heidi L.M. Jacobs was announced as the winner of the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for her novel. We’ve invited her to come back and celebrate with us.
Find out more about the book here: https://newestpress.com/
Carlinda D’Alimonte grew up in Amherstburg and has lived in the Windsor area most of her life. She was Head of English at Walkerville Collegiate Institute, where she taught English and Creative Writing. Prior to her teaching career, she worked for CBC television in Windsor researching and writing for a current affairs program, and for the University of Windsor where she wrote and produced instructional and promotional works in a variety of media. D’Alimonte has been writing poetry since she was 13. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and in Contemporary Verse 2 and The Windsor Review. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Now That We Know Who We Are, Other Living Things, and Morning Song, and she contributed nine poems to the anthology Because We Have All Lived Here: Poems Along the South Shore.
Brian G. Gilmore was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including We Didn’t Know Any Gangsters, a 2014 NAACP Image Award Nominee. He is both a Cave Canem Fellow and a Kimbilio Fellow, and he currently teaches social justice law at Michigan State University.
Brian joins us today to talk about his Michigan Notable Book of poetry, Come See About Me, Marvin from Wayne State University Press. In this latest collection, Brian imagines a dialogue between himself and Marvin Gaye, another black man from Washington D.C. who moved here to follow his career. The poems were written, in part, as a way of coping in a strange new land.
Check out the book here: https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/come-see-about-me-marvin
Herb Colling has an abiding interest in, and respect for, local history. His first two books deal with the auto industry in Windsor. He cut his teeth in 1993 on Pioneering the Auto Age, about Windsor as an automotive capital of Canada, and went on to write 99 Days: The Ford Strike In Windsor, 1945, in 1995, and Turning Points: The Detroit Riot of 1967, a Canadian Perspective. His most recent book is Radio Transcriptions: Historical Vignettes of Essex County, which was edited for the Essex County Historical Society. He is a retired CBC radio Windsor broadcaster.
http://biblioasis.com/brand/colling-herb/
https://www.dundurn.com/books/Turning-Points
Dorothy Mahoney is the author of several poetry collections including, Off-Leash (Palimpsest Press, 2016). Her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies, most recently Heartwood, poems for the love of trees (The League of Canadian Poets, 2018). Her haibun, M PATHY, won an Honourable Mention in the Genjuan International Haibun Contest in Japan, 2017. Dorothy is a former member of the Literary Arts Windsor board. She is a Hospice volunteer in Windsor.
You can find out more about her new book at palimpsestpress.ca.
The Windsor Review has been in publication for half a century, an important accomplishment for a Canadian literary journal. André Narbonne is a lecturer in English literature and an award-winning poet and fiction writer. He is the fiction editor of the Windsor Review and oversaw the publication of the 50th anniversary issue as the general editor. Marty Gervais is a publisher, poet, developer of the Publishing Practicum course at the University of Windsor, and Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Windsor. He is was a long-time editor for the Windsor Review.Join us for a remarkable conversation about the establishment and development of a unique, cosmopolitan writing community and culture. The 50th anniversary edition of the review can be found online:
https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/windsor_review
Aimée Parent Dunn is the publisher of Palimpsest Press, a local independent literary press. Aimée has a degree in English Literature and Language from the University of Windsor and a graduate certificate in Publishing from Ryerson University. She has over 15 years of experience editing fiction and is the literary fiction editor at Palimpsest. She is on the board for Literary Arts Windsor and the programming committee for BookFest Windsor. She lives in Windsor with her husband and two children. Her pronouns are she/her.
In 2012, she became a publishing assistant at Palimpsest Press, which had been founded by Dawn Kresan in 2000. Just over a year later, with the support of her husband Shaun Dunn, she bought the press and became its publisher. Palimpsest Press publishes beautifully designed books of poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction. A palimpsest, by the way, is a piece of writing material manuscript on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for other writing. Palimpsest Press celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/
Rebecca Ledingham-Gbadebo grew up in Windsor, Ontario, and attended the University of Windsor. She has been an elementary school teacher since 1995 and a member of Most Precious Blood Catholic Church in Windsor since 1983. She’s also been an avid volunteer around Windsor through the years, committed to causes that benefit children and youth. Rebecca’s new book, published by Cranberry Tree Press, is Movin’ On: Life after the Diagnosis. Rebecca’s epilogue includes these words: “A passion to write has been ignited to help others who are facing challenges. This isn’t only a story about multiple sclerosis: it’s about life.”
For more information on the book, email: rebeccagb@hotmail.com
Jeff Kass is a 23-year teaching veteran of Pioneer High School. His book, Teacher/Pizza Guy chronicles Kass’s experiences working as a full-time English teacher, a part-time teen literary arts director, and a part-time pizza delivery driver during the 2016-17 school year. The book travels back and forth between Kass’ experiences in the classroom and the pizza shop.
His poetry addresses some of the challenges and crazy events that happen in school and service industry jobs, aging, and his relationships with his colleagues at both jobs and his students. The book, published by Wayne State University Press, has been selected by the Library of Michigan as one of 20 Michigan Notable Books for 2020.
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/teacherpizza-guy
All Write in Sin City Short: https://youtu.be/Y1MLspffW5g
Born in Somalia, Fartumo Kusow immigrated to Canada in 1991, at the start of the civil war. After arriving in Canada with fluency in Somali and Arabic but with no knowledge of English, she went on to earn an Honours B.A. in English Language and Literature and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Windsor. She is now a high school English teacher for the Greater Essex County District School Board. Her first novel, Amran, was published in 1984 in Somalia. Her second novel, Tale of a Boon’s Wife, was published in 2017 by Second Story Press, and is her debut novel in English. Set in the fifteen-year period before Somalia’s civil war, Tale of a Boon’s Wife focuses on a young Somali woman whose decision to marry the man she loves, in defiance of tradition and her family’s wishes, transforms her life in very difficult ways. The novel has received positive reviews. Fartumo Kusow is a mother of five and lives in Windsor, Ontario.
https://secondstorypress.ca/adult/tale-of-a-boons-wife
Check out the short version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/O3AiWTNKoH8
Laurie Smith is a graduate of the Creative Writing program (M.A.) from the University of Windsor. She has been publishing for over thirty years, as well as editing the work of others and facilitating workshops. She is co-publisher/editor of Cranberry Tree Press in Windsor. Laurie’s work has appeared in many publications across Canada and in the U.S. Collections include menagerie, The Truth about Roller Skating, smack in the middle of spotlit obvious, and Said the Cannibal with Urban Farmhouse Press. In addition, she recently edited By the River – a literary anthology featuring Windsor writers. She has earned several writing prizes. She is a two-time winner of the Mayor’s Award of Excellence in the Arts for literary endeavors and presence in the community. She is working on new poetry manuscripts. Her latest work to be released April 2nd is Suck and Spit in collaboration with the Publishing Practicum program at the University of Windsor, and published by Black Moss Press.
https://cranberrytreepress.com/
http://blackmosspress.com/productcat/poetry/
Justin Rogers is a Black poet, educator, coach, and editor from Detroit. He most recently has work published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Gramma Press, is author of micro-zine Nostalgia as Black Matilda (Rinky Dink Press 2017) and he released his chapbook Black, Matilda in 2019 with Glass Poetry Press.
He is also the coordinator of InsideOut’s after school program, Citywide Poets. Justin’s journey with InsideOut began first as a student at Cody High School where a Writer-in-Residence encouraged his writing and recruited him to join Citywide Poets. Since then, Justin has performed for international audiences and published his writing widely. Justin now coordinates our Citywide Poets program, elevating youth voice through weekly sessions around the city, guest writer workshops, performances, and open mic opportunities for youth.
He is also the Detroit representative for Poets & Writers. Founded in 1970, Poets & Writers is the nation’s largest nonprofit organization serving creative writers by fostering the professional development of poets and writers and promoting communication throughout the literary community.
https://justinrogerspoetry.weebly.com/
https://insideoutdetroit.org/
https://www.pw.org/
Dorene O’Brien is a Detroit-based creative writing teacher and writer. Her stories have won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the Nelson Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, and the international Bridport Prize. She has won fellowships from the NEA and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in the Baltimore Review, Madison Review, Chicago Tribune, Montreal Review, and others. Voices of the Lost and Found, her first fiction collection won the USA Best Book Award for Short Fiction.
Her second full-length collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, released in 2019 by Baobob Press was named first runner-upin the Mary Roberts Rinehart Fiction Prize and won a gold medal in the 2019 Independent Publishers Book Awards (IPPY).
The stories take place in Detroit and small towns in the upper Midwest, and they’ve been described as “gritty.” They feature characters ranging from a man barely surviving eight compulsory blind dates with daughters of his mother’s friends, to a tarot card reader who schemes to save Detroit from blight and casinos, to a research scientist whose Alzheimer’s diagnosis leads him to find new meaning in the crystals he can no longer study.
https://baobabpress.com/books/what-it-might-feel-like-to-hope/
https://www.doreneobrien.com/
Dr. Karl Jirgens was born and raised in Toronto, and attended University of Toronto for his BA, Ontario College of Art for his BFA, and York University for his MA and PhD. He is a specialist in literary theory, contemporary literature with a focus on Canadian literature, and creative writing and publishing. He currently lectures at the University of Windsor.
He is the author of several works on literary and art criticism, and digital culture and performance, and has published in several journals and periodicals. His fictional works have been anthologized by Coach House Press, Black Moss Press, Mercury Press and Texteditions. His theatre/performance works have been presented nationally and internationally including at the Ultimatum Fest in Montreal and at the INTER-Festival in Quebec City.
Karl Jirgens founded and edited Rampike, the international literary journal of contemporary art, writing, and theory, from 1979 to 2016. The entire 36-year print-run is now available through the U Windsor scholar’s portal care of the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/rampike/about.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Jirgens
Veronique Perrier Mandal has had a long and celebrated career, having won many awards for her work in both radio and print journalism, including Ontario Journalist of the Year, Windsor Woman of the Year, and the Queen’s Jubilee Medal. She currently coordinates and teaches full-time in the Journalism and Media Convergence programs at St. Clair College in Windsor, and she is the host of the show Scribes and Songsters on YourTV. Veronique is also a successful author, writing both fiction and non-fiction books, including The Pink Hat in 2012 and Chasing Lightning in 1999, a book she co-authored with her husband, veteran journalist Chris Vander Doelen.
Her latest book, Getting Off, which details the rise, fall, and redemption of the legendary, late Windsor lawyer Don Tait, was recently recognized as a finalist in the 2019 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest.
https://www.windsorpubliclibrary.com/?page_id=62276
https://twitter.com/veroscribe?lang=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgDN2ixYFrT1_WRKV32x0dw
Today’s podcast features a live reading from the Explorers Room in the Detroit Public Library main branch. It’s an edition of Poets and Pies, a reading series sponsored by the Detroit Writers Guild and other literary organizations. It features:
- A rare treat for fans of rock legend Frank Zappa, a Detroit reading from Los Angeles Poet, Memoirist and Musician Rubén Guevara
- Detroit Essayist Lori Tucker Sullivan
- Detroit Poet Justin Rogers
- and The Rev. Michael Jones The Dancing Poet
The event was emceed by the Detroit Writers Guild president, internationally-known poet M.L. Liebler.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/ruben-guevara-mn0000354319/biography
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-tucker-sullivan-464a6015/
https://justinrogerspoetry.weebly.com/
https://www.facebook.com/events/198212394668706/
On today’s podcast, we’ll visit the By the River reading series hosted by Urban Farmhouse press. This event took place at historic Mackenzie Hall here in Windsor, and it features readings by three poets:
- Samantha Badaoa, Windsor' Youth Poet Laureate. Listeners have heard an interview with Samantha on an earlier episode
- Sandra Ridley, an award-winning writer of four books of poetry: Fallout, Post-Apothecary, The Counting House, and Silvija—a finalist for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize. She was also nominated for the KM Hunter Artist Award for Mid-Career Writer in 2015.
- Peter Hrastovec, Windsor author of Sidelines and In Lieu of Flowers, two books of poetry published by Black Moss Press
This event was emceed by poet and publisher Daniel Lockhart.
https://www.citywindsor.ca/residents/Culture/Pages/Samantha-Badaoa.aspx
https://www.sandraridley.com/
http://blackmosspress.com/peter-hrastovec/
Melanie Janisse Barlow is a poet and a visual artist. Her first collection of poetry, Orioles in the Oranges (Guernica, 2009), was listed for the Relit Award, and her essay poems Detroit were listed in Best American Essays (2013). She has published in a variety of anthologies and journals in Canada and the US, and her painting practice includes The Poets Series, a popular portraiture series of contemporary poets which has been widely received and reviewed, most recently in Poets and Writers, Taddle Creek, The Humber Literary Review, and Quill and Quire. Her latest book, Thicket, was released in Fall 2019 by Palimpsest Press. Melanie Janisse Barlow lives between her home in Windsor, Ontario and her wooden boat Kalinka in Toronto.
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/thicket/
https://www.melaniejanissebarlow.com/
On this week’s podcast, we have a group of selected poetry readings from the annual Black History Month celebrations from 2019 and 2020. The 2019 readings were recorded before our All Write in Sin City podcast was launched last May.
Our Windsor-Detroit region is rich with history, including the history of previously enslaved peoples of African descent. Today, it’s also a multicultural area, home to many people who have come from all over the world, including African and Caribbean nations. So, Black History Month is a time of celebration in our area. On this podcast, we have a brief introduction into the history of the celebration itself by the event master of ceremonies, Irene Moore Davis.
We’ll hear selected poems from Mbonisi Zikhali, a poet, activist and law student here in Windsor. He reads two poems from this year’s event, followed by a selection from the 2019 event.
We'll also hear from Teajai Travis. A Windsor son, Travis is a poet, spoken word artist, and activist. We’ve heard about his City of Windsor Heritage Grant-supported project, Born Enslaved, on a previous podcast. Here, we’ll hear two of his selections from 2020, accompanied by his fiancee, Ninia Sotto. They will be followed by two additional poems from the 2019 celebration.
This podcast features poet Daniel Lockhart, fresh from his tour of multiple Canadian cities. Lockhart holds degrees from Trent University, Montana State University, and Indiana University, and is the author of four poetry collections, The Gravel Lot That Was Montana, This City at the Crossroads, Big Medicine Comes to Erie, and most recently, Devil in the Woods. He has also written a collection of essays called Wënchikàneit Visions. His work has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and has appeared in Malahat Review, Contemporary Verse 2, the Dalhousie Review, Grain, McNeese Review, and the Windsor Review among others.
Daniel Lockhart is also the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press. He is a Turtle Clan member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong on the south shore of the Detroit River (also known as the border cities of Windsor ON and Detroit MI).
https://www.brickbooks.ca/books/devil-in-the-woods/
https://urbanfarmhousepress.ca/index.php
Before they become history, historical events are often family stories. Today we have a live recording of the Windsor book launch for To the River: The Remarkable Journey of Caroline Quarlls. It’s about one of the most famous escape stories in Underground Railroad history, and co-author Kimberly Simmons is a direct descendant of the book’s heroine.
The event was held at The Historic Sandwich First Baptist Church. The church was founded in 1820, and is the oldest active black church in Canada, and it was an important Underground Railroad site. The current building—a large open structure—dates to 1851. Irene Moore Davis introduces Kimberly Simmons and the amazing true story in her book.
For more information on the book, follow these links:
https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/jarvis-caroline-quarlls-part-of-windsors-remarkable-history
https://www.facebook.com/959138707439041/posts/it-is-here-may-i-offer-a-great-read-to-the-river-the-remarkable-journey-of-carol/2679135402106021/
On today’s podcast, we feature poetry and the blues on a live recording from Third Man Records in Detroit. It’s more from the fourth All Access Café, and this program brings you two amazing performances that mix the blues with poetry. The All Access Café is a unique spoken word event with a special focus, serving differently-abled artists and audiences.
First, we’ll hear from Robert Bradley, a Detroit-based blues singer-songwriter and musician, and then we’ll hear from writer and political activist John Sinclair, who delivers a powerful performance set to blues riffs. He's accompanied by Detroit musician and record producer, Tino G.
The event was hosted by Detroit poet and arts activist M.L. Liebler. For more on these artists, check out the links below.
https://funkydrecords.com/robert-bradley
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-sinclair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sinclair_(poet)
Today’s podcast is a live recording of an event at Third Man Records in Detroit last November. It’s selected performances from the fourth All Access Café, and this program brings you transformative music and poetry performances. The All Access Café is a unique spoken word event with a special focus, serving differently-abled artists and audiences. On this episode you'll hear from:
- Detroit musician, poet and recording artist Tino G
- Jim Ferris, poet laureate of Lucas County and the Disabilities Studio Director at The University of Toledo
- Acclaimed Detroit poet and performance artist Semaj Brown, now Poet Laureate of Flint, Michigan
Detroit poet and arts activist M.L. Liebler emcees the event. For more on these talented artists, check out the following links.
https://funkydrecords.com/tino-g
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jim-ferris
https://poets.org/poet/semaj-brown
Today’s podcast features a live recording of an event last fall with Benedek Totth, author of Dead Heat. It’s a book that has received a lot of positive reviews by major publications, but fair warning to the faint of heart: It’s a book for fans of dark, graphic literature.
Totth studied American literature and now works as an editor and translator in Budapest. His translations into Hungarian include works by Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, andHunter S. Thompson. Dead Heat caused a sensation in Hungary, where it won the Margó Prize for best first novel of the year. Find out more about the book at the link below.
http://biblioasis.com/shop/new-release/dead-heat/
This live recording took place at the St. Clair Centre for the Arts in Windsor, Ontario on October 20, 2019. Part of the BookFest / Festival du livre Windsor celebrations, the annual Books and Brunch was given over to publisher Marty Gervais, who with wife Donna, started Black Moss Press 50 years ago. Peter Hrastovec is the emcee who introduces Marty, there's a special reading by Elise Gervais, and the authors gathered share stories and celebrate the press.
Featured Guests on the podcast: Marty Gervais, John B. Lee, Susan McMaster, Robert Hilles, Marilyn Gear Pilling, Rosemary Sullivan, Bruce Meyer, Laurence Hutchman, and MaryAnn Mulhern.
For more information about Black Moss Press and its books, visit the link below.
https://blackmosspress.com/
Marty Gervais is an award-winning journalist, photographer, poet, playwright, historian, editor and teacher. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Windsor, Ontario, and now Poet Laureate Emeritus. His awards include the Toronto’s Harbourfront Festival Prize, the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award, the City of Windsor Mayor’s Award for literature, and nearly twenty awards for journalism. Marty is also is the founder and publisher of Windsor-based Black Moss Press, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
For the past five years, Gervais has also led a group of writers and students to France where they read at Shakespeare & Co. Books in Paris.
Marty Gervais has written more than a dozen books of poetry, two plays, and a novella. His most successful work, The Rumrunners, a book about the Prohibition period, was a Canadian bestseller in 1980, and again when re-released in 2011. Marty designed and now teaches an Editing & Publishing Practicum at the University of Windsor.
https://blackmosspress.com/
Lindsay Wong is the bestselling, award-winning author of The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug-Raids, Demons, And My Crazy Chinese Family. Her debut memoir won the 2019 Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize, and it was a finalist for the Writers Trust’s 2018 Hilary Weston Prize, the 2019 edition of Canada Reads, and long listed for the 2019 Stephen Leacock Medal in Humour. It was also named a Best Book of 2018 by the Quill and Quire and a 2018 Globe 100 Book. She joined author Casey Plett for a discussion about the book at BookFest Windsor/Festivale du livre 2019. Please note: This is a live recording in an auditorium.
Wong holds a BFA in Creative Writing from The University of British Columbia and a MFA in Literary Nonfiction from Columbia University in New York City. Her YA novel My Summer Of Love And Misfortune is forthcoming from Simon Pulse in 2020. Find out more about the author and the book at the following links:
https://lindsaymwong.wordpress.com/
https://quillandquire.com/review/the-woo-woo-how-i-survived-ice-hockey-drug-raids-demons-and-my-crazy-chinese-family/
Part of a series that was recorded at BookFest Windsor/Festivale du livre 2019, this podcast features four poets in conversation about Respect, a new anthology of poems inspired by the incredible richness of Detroit music. The book was published in late 2019 by Michigan State University Press.
Two of the poets in this interview were also editors of the book, Jim Daniels and M.L. Liebler. They are joined by Cindy Hunter Morgan and W.D. Ehrhart. We hope you enjoy this conversation with four of the poets in RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music.
For more information about the book and the authors, follow these links:
http://msupress.org/books/book/?id=50-1D0-45A0
https://www.cmu.edu/cas/people/daniels_jim.html
http://www.mlliebler.com/about
https://www.cindyhuntermorgan.com/
https://www.wdehrhart.com/
This podcast is one of a series recorded at BookFest Windsor 2019. In this episode, we talk with Mark Bourrie, an award-winning writer and a respected military historian with a PhD in history. A National Magazine Award-winning journalist, he has been a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery since 1994. Bourrie lectures on propaganda and censorship at the Department of National Defence Public Affairs Learning Centre and periodically teaches courses on media history, censorship and propaganda at Carleton University and in Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa. His latest book, Bush Runner, is the first English-language biography in nearly a century of Pierre-Esprit Radisson—pirate, cannibal, and co-founder of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
So how does a co-founder of the longest-lived corporation in North America, a “free man in a time when they were rare,” die penniless in London? Drawing directly from Radisson’s journals, Mark Bourrie paints a vivid picture of the class and national tensions that gripped the globe tightly even as colonial ownership of specific territories shifted with the seasons. Bush Runner brings Radisson to life: a man adopted as a teenager into a Mohawk family before his ocean-crossing adulthood, a peddler of goods and not of worldview, more trading partner than colonizer, “a brave man who must have been a tremendous dinner companion—as long as you weren’t on the menu.”
http://biblioasis.com/mark-bourrie-challenges-us-to-retire-the-word-explorer-from-the-lexicon/
https://twitter.com/MarkBourrie?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
On the podcast this week, recorded at BookFest Windsor 2019, we’ll hear from two fiction writers, Blair Hurley and Nadja Lubiw-Howard.
Blair Hurley received her A.B. from Princeton University and her M.F.A. from NYU. Her stories are published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, West Branch, Mid-American Review, Washington Square, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Descant, Fugue, and elsewhere. She has received a 2018 Pushcart Prize and scholarships from Bread Loaf and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her debut novel, THE DEVOTED, was published in August 2018 from WW Norton & Company. the New York Times Book Review had this to say: “[An] intimate, fluid debut…The beauty of The Devoted lies in its intricate descriptions of religion’s hush and ritual… [A] novel as tender and fervent as a prayer.”
Nadja Lubiw-Howard is a writer, a children’s educator, and a veterinarian. She holds a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from the University of Guelph and a Post Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing from the Humber School for Writers. Her work has been published in Understorey, Room, Canthius, The Dalhousie Review, and The New Quarterly; her first novel, The Nap-Away Motel, was published by Palimpsest Press in May 2019. She is currently working on several picture books about animals, and a second novel, Her Name Was Friday. A life-long animal-lover and long-time vegan, her writing often explores themes related to the natural world. She lives in Toronto.
http://blairhurley.com/
https://www.nmlhazard.com/
This week’s podcast was recorded at BookFest Windsor 2019. Today, we’ll talk with Ben O’Neil and Jessica Bromley Bartram.
Illustrator, artist, and screenwriter Ben O’Neil is currently based in Toronto, but was born and raised in London. He counts Matt Groening (The Simpsons) and Greg Capullo (Spawn) among his influences. It wasn’t until Ben attended OCAD for Curatorial Practice and Art Criticism that he rediscovered comic illustration. From there, Ben began self-publishing comics and zines. He also works as a freelance illustrator. His book, Apologetica is described as a sign of the times, a letter of regret, a feeble attempt, a collection of comics dealing with guilt, shame, martyrdom, jaguars, bad meat and fashion.
Jessica Bromley Bartram is an illustrator, and graphic designer who lives in Ottawa. Her collection of illustrated short stories, Ghost Water Kiss, published in 2019 by Popnoir Editions. She has illustrated two picture books for Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Charles, published in 2018, and Summer North Coming.
She has a BA in English and History from the University of Guelph (2003-2007) and a second Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from the Ontario College of Art & Design (2010-2015), where she won the Graphic Design Medal for her final thesis project at the 2015 Graduate Exhibition.
Both authors are with POPNOIR EDITIONS, a publisher of graphic novels based in Toronto. Together, they led an awesome workshop on Graphic Storytelling, and then they stopped by to talk about their own personal work.
http://popnoir.ca/
https://www.benoneil.com/
http://jessicabartram.ca/about/
This podcast was recorded live at Biblioasis bookshop in Windsor in October 2019. You’ll hear Biblioasis publicist Theo Hummer introducing each author. The first reader is Stan Rogal, reading from Investigation into the Death of Roberto Bolaño, and then you’ll hear author Michael Januska reading from Prospect Avenue. After the readings, there’s an insightful Q&A moderated by Theo.
Stan Rogal is a poet, novelist and playwright. His work has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. He is the author of twenty-five books, including Investigation into the Death of Roberto Bolaño.Windsor native Michael Januska is the author of the Border City Blues mystery series set in the Prohibition Era of Windsor/Essex. There are three books in the series beginning with Riverside Drive. Stories from Januska’s Prohibition-era Border City Blues novels have won two consecutive Scene of the Crime short story prizes.
For more information:
https://insomniacpress.com/new-releases
https://www.dundurn.com/books/Prospect-Avenue
Born and raised in Windsor, Michael Januska has worked with books his whole life, both as a bookseller and for several publishing companies. He is the author of the Border City Blues mystery series set in the Prohibition Era of Windsor/Essex. There are three books in the series beginning with Riverside Drive. Stories from Januska’s Prohibition-era Border City Blues novels have won two consecutive Scene of the Crime story prizes. He is also the author of Grey Cup Century. He now lives in Toronto.
To find out more about his individual titles, check out these links:
https://www.dundurn.com/authors/Michael-Januska
https://www.facebook.com/bordercityblues/
https://twitter.com/michaeljanuska
"To chance the ducks" is a nineteenth-century idiom that means to do something regardless of the risks or potential for disaster.
Windsor's Biblioasis press has grown from a 1-person operation into "the first truly great new Canadian press of the 21st century" according to The Globe and Mail. In this podcast, you'll hear highlights of the celebratory evening if 15 years of chancing the ducks, including readings from Biblioasis authors:
Taras Grescoe Possess the Air
Pauline Holdstock Here I Am!
Stéphane Larue The Dishwasher
Catherine Leroux Madame Victoria
Martha Wilson Nosy White Woman
For more on the history of the press, check out last week's podcast, or this article
https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/windsor-publishing-house-biblioasis-celebrates-15-years-of-books-and-chancing-the-ducks?fbclid=IwAR1R9Kpx5_PLo-Q8fpSQoa5vlOHnIaChS-lzQG5pxXhVAE0WJA9lkJJ6k-E
Born in Chatham, Ontario, Daniel Wells attended the University of Windsor as a history and philosophy major. He opened a second-hand bookshop, Biblioasis, on Ouellette Avenue in Windsor in 1998.
Dan and his wife Alexis helped to found BookFest Windsor in 2002, where he was inspired to think about publishing a book by another author. The Biblioasis bookshop was moved to Wyandotte Street in the trendy Walkerville district of Windsor, and now the Biblioasis press has grown, and now has its own location on Ottawa Street.
Biblioasis publishing has just celebrated its 15th year, with books shortlisted and finalists for many prizes, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and now even long-listed for the Man Booker prize. You can find out more about the press on its website, biblioasis.com.
Patrick Brode was born in Windsor, Ontario. He was called to the Ontario Bar in 1977 and has practiced law ever since, most recently as Senior Legal Counsel for the City of Windsor. As a well-respected historian, he has written six books, including Sir John Beverley Robinson: Bone and Sinew of the Compact, which was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award, and The Odyssey of John Anderson, a finalist for the Trillium Award. The Slasher Killings: A Canadian Sex-Crimes Panic, 1945-1946, was nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award.
Border Cities Powerhouse: The Rise of Windsor, 1900-1945, was shortlisted for the 2017 Ontario Speaker’s Book Award. The River and the Land: A History of Windsor to 1900 was published in 2014. His most recent book, Dying for a Drink: How a Prohibition Preacher Got Away with Murder, a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award, was released in 2018.
You can find our more about his latest book, Dying for a Drink, on the Biblioasis website:
http://biblioasis.com/shop/new-release/dying-for-a-drink/
Windsor, Ontario is one of several Canadian cities that boasts a Poet Laureate program. In this podcast, we talk with the two current Poets Laureate of Windsor, Poet Laureate Mary Ann Mulhern and Youth Poet Laureate Samantha Badaoa.
Mary Ann Mulhern, Poet Laureate of Windsor, was a well-respected teacher before she embarked on a second career as a poet. Mulhern’s first book of narrative poetry, The Red Dress, which focused on her experiences living in a convent for eight years in the sixties, was published by Black Moss Press in 2003. Her next book, Touch the Dead, was published in 2006 and focused on her life experiences growing up in a "cemetery house," located at the edge of a cemetery in St. Thomas, Ontario, where her father was grave-digger and caretaker. She has published countless poems, and seven books to date, including When Angels Weep (2008), Brides in Black (2010), How We Fare (2016), and All the Words Between (2018.)
Samantha Badaoa is Windsor’s inaugural Youth Poet Laureate. As a poet and spoken word artist, she has developed a reputation for excellence at open mic events and, in particular, Windsor Poetry Slam events. She has served as a contributor and editor for publications including The Windsor Salt (Poetry and Prose, 2014); The South Detroit Chapbook Series (Water Damage, 2015); Sundays with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game (2015, Black Moss Press); The Voodoo Journals: Dispatches from a Haitian Grave (2016, Black Moss Press); and The Spitfire’s Embers: A Windsor Poetry Slam Collection (2018).
You can find out more about the Windsor Poet Laureate program here: https://www.citywindsor.ca/residents/Culture/Pages/Poet-Laureate.aspx
New this year, the All Access Café is a unique series of readings and performances that features differently-abled artists and is ASL-accessible through Deaf Can, Inc. It's sponsored by the Detroit Writer's Guild, the Knight Foundation, Poets & Writers, the Detroit Public Library, Wayne State University and Third Man Records. In this episode, you'll hear performances from several artists:
- Ali McManus, a singer, songwriter and motivational speaker
- Mark Levin, a poet, musician and production assistant who is deaf. Mark has long been a prolific Slam poet and disabilities activist in his native Chicago and more recently in Detroit
- Diane DeCillis, a poet. Her collection, Strings Attached, has been honored as a Michigan Notable Book for 2015, won The 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award for poetry, and was a finalist for the Forward Indie Fab Book Award for poetry
- Mona Jean Cedar, a poet, ASL Slam Interpreter, and Disabilities Activist. Her organization Pas d’ASL was designed for one being’s adventure in the evolution and expression of self through dance, sign language and poetry
- Jan Krist an American singer-songwriter from Detroit, a former New Folk Finalist at the Kerville Music Festival, and a founding member of the Yellow Room Gang, a songwriting collective in South-East Michigan
For more information on the artists or the All Access Café, check out the following links:
https://www.alimcmanus.com
https://dianedecillis.com/
http://circuitryandpoetry.com/aboutus/AboutUsMonaBio.html
https://www.facebook.com/Jan-Krist-Music-and-Art-200018087253052/
Marian L. Thorpe grew up in Harrow, Ontario. She holds a Masters in Biology from the University of Guelph, and has recently retired as a Special Education supervisor at a school district in Ontario. Marian is the author of the alternative world medieval trilogy Empire’s Legacy. The series was rated Top Ten (#5, #7, and #8) in Alternate History, on Amazon.com, April 8, 2019. Her life-long interest in Roman and post-Roman European history informs her novels, while her avocations of landscape archaeology and birding provide background to her settings. Marian also has published short stories and poetry.
As well as writing and editing professionally, Marian oversees Arboretum Press, a small publishing imprint run as a collective. Marian is currently writing Empire’s Reckoning, the next book in her series. Marian and her husband Brian live in Guelph. For more information, check out these websites:
https://marianlthorpe.com/
https://arboretumpress.com/
This week's podcast takes place at Gertrude’s Writing Room on the grounds of historic Willistead Manor in Windsor. We talk with two authors of very different genres who just happen to be married. They live in Windsor with adjoining writing spaces and their menagerie of animals.
Alexander Zelenyj is the author of the books Blacker Against the Deep Dark, Songs for the Lost, Experiments at 3 Billion A.M., and Black Sunshine. Alex was also one of the authors selected for the Juniper Books Spring Reads series.
Elizabeth J. M. Walker is the author of the books She Dreamed of Dragons, This Night Sucks, Slip Jig Summer, and The Boy Who Owned the Forest.
Find out more about Alex and Elizabeth's writing at these links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zelenyj
http://www.eibonvalepress.com/chapbooks/Chap12_Animals.htm
https://elizabethjmwalker.wordpress.com
This week’s podcast brings you a variety of Detroit poets reading at Poets and Pies, a regular event hosted by the Detroit Writers’ Guild. This set of readings was recorded in August at the St. Clair Shores library.
Joyce Jenkins is a Detroit native who has spent much of her life in Berkeley, California. Joyce has long been a noted Bay Area poet and the editor of “Poetry Flash,” as well as the producer and sponsor of the Northern California Book Reviewers and the Northern California Book Awards.
Caroline Maun teaches creative writing and American literature at Wayne State University, and she is the Chair of the English Department. She is also the editor of The Collected Poetry of Evelyn Scott, and author of Mosaic of Fire: The Work of Lola Ridge, Evelyn Scott, Charlotte Wilder, and Kay Boyle. Her poetry publications include the volumes The Sleeping, and What Remains.
Pat Barnes is a longtime Metro Detroit poet who is a favorite with poetry audiences. Her work is witty, funny and always leaving audiences with a good vibe and food for thought.
Alinda Dickinson Wasner the author of 4 collections of poetry, the most recent being, When You Don't Know Who You Are published by Crisis Chronicles Press. Winner of several U.S. poetry prizes and an international prize, her work can be found in numerous print and online journals. Called "one of Detroit's best poets" by poet laureate, M.L. Liebler, Wasner is currently at work on a new collection, Too Much Love: Detroit Poems.
To find out more about Poets and Pies or the Detroit Writer's Guild follow them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/DetroitWritersGuild.
Last week on All Write in Sin City, we talked with Teajai Travis, Windsor activist, artist and writer and also the recipient of the 2018 City of Windsor Heritage Grant. One of his recent projects is the Windsor Storytellers Collective. He and two other artists recently kicked off their first experimental, collaborative spoken-word presentation at the Green Bean Cafe.
Titled Wordz!, the sound and song art performance featured two poets reading spontaneous selections of poetry and a DJ, weaving together a unique experience of spoken word and song. The featured performers are:
Slam Poet Eric E-tomic Johnson
DJ Needle 9:14
And Teajai Travis
For event photos, check out the Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/359541714967740/
Teajai Travis is a proud and mindful descendant of Afro-indigenous ancestors who survived slavery in the Americas and settled in North Buxton, Ontario prior to the American Civil War. Teajai’s relations spread across the North American continent, and abroad. Teajai researches and writes about his ancestors, specifically those in the Americas during a time of chattel slavery. He is inspired by the stories of his own family. A recipient of the 2018 City of Windsor Arts and Heritage Grant, Teajai is currently working on a multi-media project, Born Enslaved: a series of poetry, fiction, and drama inspired by family history. He is a revered community activist, and is the founder of Bloomfield House, an arts and social centre for youth in Sandwich, Ontario.
How did one of the shining cities on the hill in mid-century North America become the poster child for de-industrialization? In this All Write in Sin City, you’ll hear Part Two of a presentation by Anna Clark, talking about her award-winning book, The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy. Anna continues her commentary about the Flint water crisis, and takes a look at possible structural causes, with additional insight provided by Flint-based writer and former journalist Robert Campbell. You’ll also hear additional questions and commentary from moderator and Windsor community organizer, Steve Green.
Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. The Poisoned City was named one of the year’s best books by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, Audible, Amazon, the New York Public Library, and others. It is the winner of the Hillman Prize in Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, and more.
Anna’s writing has appeared in Elle, the New York Times, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other places. She has been a Fulbright fellow in Nairobi, Kenya, and a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. She received the Excellence in Environmental Journalism award from the Great Lakes Environmental Law Council. You can find out more about the book and Anna’s writing on her website, annaclark.net.
When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water supply to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes.
Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. The Poisoned City was named one of the year’s best books by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, Audible, Amazon, the New York Public Library, and others. It is the winner of the Hillman Prize in Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award.It was also named a Michigan Notable book, won a State History Award, and it was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and it was also a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Anna’s writing has appeared in Elle, the New York Times, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other places. She has been a Fulbright fellow in Nairobi, Kenya, and a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. She received the Excellence in Environmental Journalism award from the Great Lakes Environmental Law Council. You can find out more about the book and Anna’s writing on her website, annaclark.net.
This podcast features two outdoor readings from the Woodbridge Farm Writer's Retreat Reading Series in Kingsville, Ontario. Windsor Poet Laureate Mary Ann Mulhern reads selected poems from her seven books, and Alix Hawley reads from her award-winning historical fiction series about the life of Daniel Boone.
Mary Ann Mulhern holds a Masters of Education and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Windsor. Mulhern wrote The Red Dress, her first book of narrative poetry, which focused on her experiences living in a convent for eight years in the 1960s. Her next book, Touch the Dead (2006) was shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos Award in 2007. She has written countless poems, and published seven books to date. Mary Ann Mulhern was selected as Windsor’s Poet Laureate for the 2019-2022 term.
Alix Hawley studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University, the University of East Anglia, and the University of British Columbia. She published a story collection, The Old Familiar, which was longlisted for the ReLit award, with Thistledown Press in 2008. Several of her stories have won accolades from the CBC, and in 2017 "Witching" won the CBC Short Story Prize. Her first novel, All True Not a Lie in It, was published by Knopf Canada as its New Face of Fiction pick for 2015, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the BC Book Prize for Fiction. And her second novel, My Name Is a Knife, was longlisted for the Giller Prize. Both follow the story of larger-than-life frontiersman Daniel Boone.
Find out more about the authors:
http://blackmosspress.com/mary-ann-mulhern/
https://www.citywindsor.ca/residents/Culture/Pages/Mary-Ann-Mulhern.aspx
http://www.alixhawley.com/
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/authors/188181/alix-hawley
This podcast features two award-winning speculative fiction authors reading to a live audience at Windsor’s Phog Lounge. Coming to us from London Ontario, Timothy S. Johnston is an award-winning writer of futuristic and contemporary mystery/thrillers. He has won multiple awards including the CYGNUS, the CLUE , and the Science Fiction Epic Award. In this episode, he reads from his lates award-winning novel, The War Beneath.
Next is the Detroit-based author of over a dozen novels and countless short stories, Kathe Koja. She has been a major voice in genre fiction for many years. Her stories frequently concern characters who have been in some way marginalized by society. She has also won many awards, including the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award for her first novel, The Cipher, and the Deathrealm Award for Strange Angels. Kathe has since branched off into other genres, including young adult and multi-media projects, and she shares some of her work with our ChiZine Series audience at the Phog.
Find out more about these authors:
https://timothysjohnston.com/
https://kathekoja.com/blog/
Part Two of last week's podcast, a live recording of a recent interview with award-winning fiction author Casey Plett, recorded at Biblioasis bookstore. Windsor poet Vanessa Shields is the interviewer.
Casey Plett is the author of the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love and the novel Little Fish, which won this year's Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Lamda Literary Award. It was also short-listed for the 2019 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers.
Casey's also co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers. She wrote a column on transitioning for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Maclean’s, The Walrus, Plenitude, and the Winnipeg Free Press. She is the winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction, a finalist for this year’s Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and a was a past finalist for the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. She lives in Windsor, Ontario.
Check out Little Fish on the publisher's website: arsenalpulp.com/Books/L/Little-Fish
In this podcast, you'll hear a live and lively recording of a special event in Windsor. Today, you’ll hear Part One of a recent interview with award-winning fiction author Casey Plett, recorded at Biblioasis bookstore. Windsor poet Vanessa Shields is the interviewer.
Casey Plett is the author of the short story collection A Safe Girl to Love and the novel Little Fish, which won this year's Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Lamda Literary Award. It was also short-listed for the 2019 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers.
Casey's also co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers. She wrote a column on transitioning for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Maclean’s, The Walrus, Plenitude, and the Winnipeg Free Press. She is the winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Best Transgender Fiction, a finalist for this year’s Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and a was a past finalist for the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. She lives in Windsor, Ontario.
Check out Little Fish on the publisher's website: arsenalpulp.com/Books/L/Little-Fish
This episode was recorded in the cozy library at All Saints’ Church in downtown Windsor. It usually has the advantage of being quiet, intimate, and full of actual books, however today we shared the hallway with excited folks from the Arts Collective Theatre (ACT) company which also rents space from All Saints’. It’s all part of being embedded in the lively Windsor-Essex arts scene!
Josef Bastian, the Detroit-based creator of the Folktellers universe brings his media partner Steve Sadler to talk about their unique trans-media project around Josef’s fantasy series, and the first book in the series, Excerpts from an Unknown Guidebook Book 1: Phases of the Moon.
Joseph F. (Josef) Bastian is an award-winning, master storyteller. He's spent the past 25 years helping people tell their stories, specializing in broad-based international workforce development, corporate learning programs and public education initiatives.
Josef’s career began in the automotive industry. Josef moved into large government, healthcare and corporate education programs, where he designed and developed blended learning programs for Fortune 500 clients.
Joe holds advanced degrees in instructional design and learning technology from Oakland University, the University of Detroit/Mercy and Oxford University in England. Mr. Bastian is also an award-winning, internationally published author and poet with fifteen books currently in print, with a new storytelling series set for film and television.
Dive into the Folktellers universe at folktellers.com. The link for the literacy fundraising golf tournament is here.
Josef tells us about an initiative to have students create videos about the Folktellers Universe. Here’s a link to Josef’s blog announcing the Awards shortlist.
Don’t forget! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to find out about more great episodes of All Write in Sin City coming your way.
https://www.facebook.com/allwriteinsincity/
https://twitter.com/allwritewindsor
Full website references:
https://folktellers.com/
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fthe-cryptofolk-movement%2Fthe-2019-folkie-film-awards-are-live-40cbc95b6ca1%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1dgFtcvDsLGr8lTnBLHGOZhY-X2MEOk7LxYOjP-WFoRjnXR6_I3_pj2mA&h=AT3hruNk4Pkt-MRVud05QsGj_S5G9AF5bcsN9Hi7aDjPeuIaAREN9Z_SJ0k9CUffYt5vr20csOnzjVrjWiCdmaTHC6PIfIPzEB5vM3IXfR6N1HPNBL2YHqw9HThvdimGdqs
https://medium.com/the-cryptofolk-movement/the-2019-folkie-film-awards-are-live-40cbc95b6ca1
In this episode, we'll talk with author and University of Windsor faculty member, Heidi Jacobs about her new novel inspired by the historic Daniel Defoe novel, Moll Flanders. We'll also hear a clip of Christian Laforet of Adventure Worlds Press reading from his new novel at the ChiSeries Reading at Windsor's premier downtown music venue, the Phog Lounge.
Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Heidi L.M. Jacobs completed her Bachelor’s and Masters’ degrees in English at the University of Alberta. She also holds a Mater’s of Library and Information Science from Western University, and a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is currently the English and History Librarian at the University of Windsor and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Scholarship. And she’s a superb writer. Her new novel is Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass & Purveyor of Fine Footwear: Her History and Misadventures, released just this spring by NeWest Press.
This episode launches our mobile studio, and we talk to an Essex County native who writes for money and for love, and a powerful speculative fiction writer. We recorded this show in the cozy library at All Saints’ Church in downtown Windsor.
Essex County native Van Waffle drops by from his home in Waterloo to talk about his writing. Van makes his living writing freelance for various nature and health publications, but also writes poetry and fiction. We hear a sample of a novel underway. Author Brittni Brinn also chats with us about genre writing and reads from her latest book, The Patch Project.
Catch Van’s Speed River Journal blog at vanwaffle.com and find out more about Brittni at brittnibrinn.com.
And remember to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to find out about more great episodes of All Write in Sin City coming your way.
https://www.facebook.com/allwriteinsincity/
https://twitter.com/allwritewindsor
This podcast is a wide-ranging, extended conversation with M.L. Liebler, an internationally known and widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer, and also an editor. M.L.’s work has received many awards, but most recently, Heaven Was Detroit, the anthology that he edited about the history of the Detroit music scene from jazz to hip-hop and beyond won a PEN/Oakland award. Liebler brought the book to BookFest Windsor in October of 2018.
This interview was recorded in his office at Wayne State University, where he talks about the book and how it came to be, and also about what he’s seen happening in the Detroit music and arts scene over the last four decades. He also talks about a companion poetry anthology, Respect, due out summer 2019. During the conversation, you’ll also hear some excerpts from the musical performance of Heaven was Detroit with the Coyote Monk Band performed earlier at the Aretha Jazz Café at The Music Hall. Liebler and the band also give a shout-out to the rock-and-roll history of Windsor.
Find out more about M.L. Liebler on his website, mlliebler.com, and more about the book on the Wayne State University Press website, wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/heaven-was-detroit
And find out what’s happening with authors and writing in Windsor and Detroit. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to find out about more great episodes of All Write in Sin City coming your way.
https://www.facebook.com/allwriteinsincity/
https://twitter.com/allwritewindsor
On this episode, we talk with two of Windsor’s favorite genre authors Christian Laforet and Ben Van Dongen. These authors have a special relationship: They’re friends, they’re both genre authors, and they are both publishers at Adventure Worlds Press, based here in Windsor.
Christian and Ben have worked hard at hand-selling books, and they’ve been successful at it. Today, they’ll both talk about how they approach the writing process for their respective genres. Christian specializes in horror, and Ben in science fiction, but they do sometimes take on projects together. They also run ChiSeriesWindsor, a part of The Chiaroscuro Reading Series national reading series.
Find out more about Christian and Ben and their latest adventures at adventureworldspress.com.
Don’t forget! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to find out about more great episodes of All Write in Sin City coming your way.
https://www.facebook.com/allwriteinsincity/
https://twitter.com/allwritewindsor
This episode of All Write in Sin City features Windsor poet Vanessa Shields. She talks about her new book of poetry, now in production with Windsor-based publisher Palimpsest Press. She also shares her process for writing poetry, and talks a bit about her new venture, Gertrude’s Writing Room, a place where writers of all ages and interests can come hone their craft and get inspired.
We’ll also feature author Cecil Foster talking about his new book, They Call Me George, and how African Canadian railway workers changed our national history. His book is the first in a new history series of publications coming out from Windsor’s own Biblioasis press.
Find out about Vanessa Shields and her work at vanessashields.com, and see what’s happening at Gertrude’s at gertrudeswritingroom.com. And learn more about Cecil Foster and his book at http://www.cecilfoster.ca/ or http://biblioasis.com.
And remember to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to find out about more great episodes of All Write in Sin City coming your way.
https://www.facebook.com/allwriteinsincity/https://twitter.com/allwritewindsor
New York Times bestselling author Elly Blake stops by to talk about her Frostblood trilogy in our first show. We also feature Sarah, Irene and Kim telling the short story about how All Write in Sin City began, and we reveal the Spring List of Recommended local books, curated by Juniper Books in Windsor.
Elly Blake’s books, Frostblood, Fireblood, and Nightblood, are widely available, and you can find out more and where to follow her on www.ellyblake.com.
You can find the complete Spring List posted on the Show Notes on our website, allwriteinsincity.com. Books are available at Juniper Books and other local bookstores, or through the author’s websites.
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter to find out about more great episodes of All Write in Sin City coming your way.
https://www.facebook.com/allwriteinsincity/https://twitter.com/allwritewindsor