Join us May 27, as livewords welcomes Rob Colman, George Fetherling, and Priscila Uppal to the Black Swan, 154 Danforth Avenue, just east of Broadview (map).
Open Mic Sign-Up 7:30 p.m. (details below). Readings commence at 8 p.m.
Robert Colman is a writer and editor based in Newmarket, Ontario. His poetry has appeared in literary magazines across Canada. His first book of poetry, The Delicate Line, was published with Exile Editions in 2008. It was longlisted for the ReLit Award. The title poem received a Highly Commended Award in the Petra Kenney Poetry Competition (U.K.).
George Fetherling is a Canadian poet, novelist, journalist and essayist. One of the most prolific figures in Canadian letters, he has written and edited more than fifty books, including more than a dozen volumes of poetry, two novels, and a multi-volume memoir. Fetherling is the editor and publisher of Subway Books, an independent publishing house based in Vancouver, British Columbia. His column, “Books this Week”, appears in Seven Oaks magazine, an online journal and Geist magazine. A study of Fetherling’s books George Fetherling and His Work, edited by Linda Rogers, features essays by W. H. New, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Busby and others. Most recently he published the fiction titles Jericho in 2005 and Tales of Two Cities in 2006, along with the poetry collection, Singer, An Elegy published in 2004. He will be reading from his most recent book of poetry The Sylvia Hotel Poems which is being launched in May by Quattro Press.
Priscila Uppal was born in Ottawa in 1974 and currently lives in Toronto where she is a poet, fiction writer, academic, and professor of Humanities and English at the undergraduate and graduate levels at York University. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Toronto Arts Council. Her creative and academic interests frequently intersect, and she has published work that explores the tensions and dynamics between women (particularly in closed societies: schools, nunneries), the nature of human violence, sexuality (including infertility), multicultural clashes (ethnic, religious, geographical), revisionist mythmaking (classical myth, biblical myth, historical figures), illness (physical, psychological, cultural), mourning rituals and the expression of grief (towards individuals, communities, abstract concepts), the world of readers and the dangers and benefits of reading and the imagination, as well as the nature of the artistic process, among other things. She has also collaborated with visual artists in the past (Tracy Carbert, Daniel Ehrenworth), and plans on more collaborative projects in the future. She lives with poet and critic, Christopher Doda.
She is the author of five books of poetry: Ontological Necessities (2006), Live Coverage (2003), Pretending to Die (2001),Confessions for a Fertility Expert (1999), and How to Draw Blood From a Stone (1998), all from Exile Editions; and the novel The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002). Her work has been translated into Croatian, Dutch, Greek, Korean, Italian, and Latvian. Her second novel To Whom It May Concern was just released by Doubleday Canada, as well as a critical study on elegies, We Are What We Mourn, by McGill-Queen’s University Press. http://priscilauppal.ca/
Host and Producer: Edward Nixon
- $25 for best reading of a “hotel” poem by a favourite poet
- $25 for best original “hotel” poem written by you
Note: The premise of the Open Mic contest is that it is an entertaining way to encourage participation and that be constraining it by theme or form it provides a challenge to participants and interest for the audience. The Open Mic contest is judged by volunteer judges recruited at the event. Their decisions may seem arbitrary or capricious but they are final. The host has no role in determining the winners.
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