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SUMMARY:Panel: Publishing Multilingual\, Multicultural & Hyphenated Authors
DESCRIPTION:This panel discussion brings together the founders of The Polyglot\, Laberinto Press\, Hungry Zine and Living Hyphen to discuss the need for and the challenges of publishing multicultural\, multilingual\, and hyphenated authors in the ever-evolving landscape of Canadian publishing. This panel will be moderated by translator and Edmonton’s 11th Poet Laureate\, Medgine Mathurin. \nFeaturing: Justine Abigail Yu (Living Hyphen)\, Maria Barbu (The Polyglot)\, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi (Laberinto Press)\, and Kathryn Lennon (Hungry Zine)\nModerator: Medgine Mathurin\nTickets: $5 (student/low income)\, $15 (regular)\, Available HERE (Use promo code “LITFEST2025” to access student rate) \n  \nJUSTINE ABIGAIL YU (she/her) is the founder of Living Hyphen\, a community and multimedia platform that explores what it means to live in between cultures as a hyphenated Canadian – that is\, an individual who calls Canada home but who has roots elsewhere. She is an award-winning workshop facilitator whose work with Living Hyphen has been featured on national and local media outlets including the Globe & Mail\, the Toronto Star\, CTV National News\, and the CBC. She was also named a “Changemaker” by the Toronto Star in October 2021. Justine Abigail is a fierce advocate for equity and anti-oppression. Her mission is to stir the conscience and spur social change. Learn more at www.justineabigail.com and www.livinghyphen.ca. \nSocial Media: You can find Justine across all social media platforms at @justineabigail and/or Living Hyphen at @livinghyphen. \n  \nMARIA BARBU (ARTISTA) is a multidisciplinary artist and poet who weaves language\, sound\, and performance into living experiences of consciousness exploration and homecoming. As an Innovation Catalyst with The Polyglot\, she is part of a volunteer-led team imagining a collective future that uplifts international\, multilingual\, and cross-cultural creativity through publications\, programs\, and community-rooted events. Author of the chapbook The Circle’s Cycle\, her work has been published in The Polyglot Magazine and Stroll of Poets Anthologies\, featured at the Edmonton Poetry Festival\, and supported through a partial scholarship to the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon\, Portugal. \nWeb: ThePolyglotMagazine.com IG: @the.polyglot.magazine \n\nLUCIANA ERREGUE-SACCHI is an award winning publisher (Laberinto Press)\, art historian\, translator\, author (Of Mothers and Madonna\, Polyglot 2023) and cultural worker. Luciana has presented at LitFest\, Edmonton Poetry Fest\, and Banff Centre. Her work and translations have appeared in academic publications\, Polyglot Magazine\, AGNI\, and others and she has been featured on CBC Edmonton\, Radio Canada\, Quill and Quire\, Literary Review of Canada\, Westword\, and Edmonton Journal. She is an activist for freedom to read and an advocate for hyphened Canadian literature. \n\nKATHRYN LENNON 君妍 is a poet\, community planner\, and the co-founder and co-editor of Hungry Zine. She was born and raised\, and resides in Edmonton/Amiskwacîwâskahikan. Her poetry has been published in Canthius\, Polyglot Magazine\, Living Hyphen\, and the Globe and Mail\, and included in anthologies: Reimagining Fire: the Future of Energy (Durvile & UpRoute)\, Back Where I Came From (Book*hug Press)\, and Beyond Touch Sites (Laberinto Press). \n  \nMEDGINE MATHURIN (Moderator): Haitian-born spoken word artist and advocate\, Medgine is someone for whom the love of language and the alchemy of words comes naturally. Her multilingual upbringing (French\, Creole\, and English) not only encouraged her to explore the potential and magic of language but also nurtured a deep love of poetry.  \nOver the years\, Medgine has been diagnosed with Lupus (SLE)\, CIDP\, Polymyositis\, and Raynaud’s — experiences that have fueled her commitment to merge storytelling with patient advocacy\, particularly for those living with chronic illnesses. She currently serves as Chair of the Patient and Family Advisory Committee with Health Quality Alberta\, a provincial committee that promotes patient-centered care across the health system. \nHer work has been featured on CBC\, Global TV\, at SkirtsAfire Festival\, and the Edmonton Poetry Festival. Medgine is a two-time recipient of awards from the National Black Coalition of Canada (NBCC)\, having received the Fil Fraser Award for outstanding contributions to the literary and performing arts\, and the Dr. John Akabutu Award for demonstrating resilience in the face of significant challenges. \nMedgine was selected as a participant in the 2022 Mentorship Program with the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and became a mentor in the 2022 Horizon Writers Circle\, a mentorship program for Black\, Indigenous\, and People of Colour (BIPOC)\, ESL\, and underrepresented writers living in Edmonton. \nIn 2023\, she received the Edmonton Artist Trust Fund Award from the Edmonton Arts Council and the Edmonton Community Foundation — an award granted to exceptional local artists to support their creative work and encourage their continued presence in the community.She is the author of the multilingual chapbook Waiting in the Land of the Living / Attendre dans le monde des vivants. She has recently been named the Edmonton 11th Poet Laureate. \n  \n   \nThis event is proudly presented in collaboration with Living Hyphen\, Laberinto Press\, The Polyglot and Hungry Zine.
URL:https://litfestalberta.org/event-1/panel-publishing-multilingual-multicultural-hyphenated-authors/
LOCATION:Muttart Theatre\, 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square\, Edmonton\, AB
CATEGORIES:Panel
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T140000
DTSTAMP:20260501T170228
CREATED:20250916T014012Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251002T201542Z
UID:4626-1760788800-1760796000@litfestalberta.org
SUMMARY:Workshop: Crafting Superb Sentences\, with Julie Sedivy
DESCRIPTION:Facilitator: Julie Sedivy\nTickets: $15\, Available HERE \nSentences are the foundation of all writing\, and mastering the sentence is essential to developing a strong writing voice. In this workshop\, I will bring in gorgeous\, surprising\, intriguing\, devastating sentences from a variety of genres\, including romance\, sci-fi\, fantasy\, young adult and children’s books\, in addition to more traditional literary genres. I will discuss what makes a wonderful opening sentence\, what kinds of final sentences leave the reader satisfied while also keeping the work alive in the mind. We will talk about sentence structure\, how it can be exploited to create pacing or heighten certain emotions\, and how varying the structure of sentences can make a passage more interesting or beautiful. We will discuss how some parts of the sentence highlight information more than others\, much like throwing a spotlight on some of the content\, making that portion of the sentence especially memorable. Or how certain devices subtly allude to background information that the reader can quickly construct\, without bogging the prose down with boring exposition. I will begin the session by having participants free-write a short passage\, and then we will play with various structures and devices to alter their original sentences and observe the effects. This interactive workshop will have very broad appeal for writers across genres\, and will be useful for beginning and advanced writers alike. \n  \nJULIE SEDIVY is a writer and linguist whose work straddles scientific and literary worlds. Her book Memory Speaks (Harvard University Press) was shortlisted for two Alberta Literary Awards and was named by The Economist as one of the top five books about language in a “golden age” of language writing. She has contributed writing to outlets such as Nautilus\, Discover\, Scientific American\, the Literary Review of Canada\, LA Review of Books\, EuropeNow\, Aeon + Psyche\, and Politico. She is the co-editor (with Rona Altrows) of Waiting\, a collection of personal essays (University of Alberta Press)\, and the co-author (with Souad Shehab) of Ayah and the Big World Outside\, a forthcoming children’s book to be published by Orca Books in 2026. Her most recent book\, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love (Farrar\, Straus & Giroux)\, was named by The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2024 and won the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. Julie is a citizen of three countries. \nBluesky: @juliesedivy.bsky.social
URL:https://litfestalberta.org/event-1/workshop-crafting-superb-sentences-with-julie-sedivy/
LOCATION:EPL Community Room\, 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square\, Edmonton
CATEGORIES:Workshop
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T143000
DTEND;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T170000
DTSTAMP:20260501T170228
CREATED:20250916T015213Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250926T214943Z
UID:4629-1760797800-1760806800@litfestalberta.org
SUMMARY:Workshop: Intergenerational Imaginations\, with Justine Abigail Yu
DESCRIPTION:*This is a free workshop for BIPOC authors\n14 spaces available\, REGISTER HERE \nFacilitator: Justine Abigail Yu \nAs hyphenated individuals living in between cultures\, we are\, as activist Eboo Patel describes it\, “standing at the crossroads of inheritance and discovery\, trying to look both ways at once.” In this writing workshop\, we write to honour our ancestors and imagine the path we lay for generations to come.  \nWe ask ourselves\, who are our ancestors? For those of us from communities that have largely been displaced – on this land or another\, by force or by choice – what connections do we hold to our past and to those who came before us? We look to our ancestors – biological or chosen – and honor all they have given us\, while letting go of what no longer serves us. \nWe then turn to the future\, to the possibilities that lay before us. Have you ever considered yourself as a future ancestor? As an elder with wisdom to share and possibilities to create? In the second part of our workshop\, we ask ourselves\, what riches do we inherit\, and what discoveries are left for us to bestow upon future generations?  \nNo writing experience is necessary – only an open heart and an open mind with a readiness to give and receive vulnerability. We’ve carefully and intentionally designed this workshop to be intimate and generative. We’ll give you writing prompts to spark your creativity in a supportive environment. All writing materials will be provided. \n  \nAbout Living Hyphen \nLiving Hyphen is a community and multimedia platform that explores the experiences of hyphenated Canadians – that is\, anyone who calls what we now know as “Canada” home\, but also has roots elsewhere. \nWe publish a magazine and host a podcast featuring the voices of artists and writers all across Canada. Our stories have been adapted into a stage play with Canadian Stage as part of their Dream in High Park program. Most importantly\, we deliver cultural programming by way of writing workshops and storytelling nights to encourage courageous and tender storytelling within racialized communities. \nWe at Living Hyphen are a community made up of people from diasporas from all around the world\, as well as Indigenous people from many nations. Our aim is to reshape the mainstream and to turn up the volume on voices that often go unheard. Learn more at www.livinghyphen.ca. \n  \nJUSTINE ABIGAIL YU (she/her) is the founder of Living Hyphen\, a community that explores what it means to live in between cultures as a hyphenated Canadian – that is\, an individual who calls Canada home but who has roots elsewhere.  \nShe is an award-winning workshop facilitator whose work with Living Hyphen has been featured on national and local media outlets including the Globe & Mail\, Toronto Star\, CTV National News\, and the CBC. She was also named a “Changemaker” by the Toronto Star in October 2021. \nJustine Abigail is a fierce advocate for equity and anti-oppression. Her mission is to stir the conscience and spur social change.  Learn more at www.justineabigail.com.
URL:https://litfestalberta.org/event-1/workshop-intergenerational-imaginations-with-justine-abigail-yu/
LOCATION:EPL Community Room\, 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square\, Edmonton
CATEGORIES:Workshop
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T150000
DTEND;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T163000
DTSTAMP:20260501T170228
CREATED:20250917T050013Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251008T151354Z
UID:4754-1760799600-1760805000@litfestalberta.org
SUMMARY:Feature: Graphic Memoir\, with Teresa Wong and Sarah Leavitt
DESCRIPTION:Tickets: $5 (student/low income)\, $15 (regular)\, Available HERE (Use promo code “LITFEST2025” to access student rate) \nJoin us for this very special reading and conversation with graphic memoirists Teresa Wong and Sarah Leavitt\, featuring their latest graphic memoirs\, All Our Ordinary Stories and Something\, Not Nothing. \n  \nAll Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey\nWINNER of 2 Alberta Literary Awards (the Memoir Award and the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction) \nFrom the author of Dear Scarlet comes a graphic memoir about the obstacles one daughter faces as she attempts to connect with her immigrant parents. Beginning with her mother’s stroke in 2014\, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories – some epic\, like her mother and father’s daring escapes from communes during China’s Cultural Revolution\, and some banal\, like her quitting Chinese school to watch Saturday morning cartoons – Wong carefully examines the cultural\, historical\, language\, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family\, seeking answers to the questions “Where did I come from?” and “Where are we going?” At the same time\, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life. \nA book for children of immigrants trying to honour their parents’ pasts while also making a different kind of future for themselves\, All Our Ordinary Stories is poignant in its understated yet nuanced depictions of complicated family dynamics. Wong’s memoir is a heartfelt exploration of identity and inheritance\, as well as a testament to the transformative power of stories both told and untold. \nSomething\, Not Nothing:A Story of Grief and Love\nFinalist\, Will Eisner Award; Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes \nA poignant and beautifully illustrated graphic memoir about love and loss and navigating a new life. In April 2020\, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s partner of twenty-two years\, Donimo\, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. About a month after Donimo’s death\, Sarah began making comics again as a way to deal with her profound sense of grief and loss. The comics started as small sketches but quickly transformed into something totally unfamiliar to her. Abstract images\, textures\, poetic text\, layers of watercolour\, ink\, and coloured pencil – for Sarah\, the journey through grief was impossible to convey without bold formal experimentation. She spent two years creating these comics. \nThe result is Something\, Not Nothing\, an extraordinary book that delicately articulates the vagaries of grief and the sweet remembrances of enduring love. Moving and impressionistic\, Something\, Not Nothing shows that alongside grief\, there is room for peace\, joy\, and new beginnings. \n  \nSARAH LEAVITT (she/her) is a cartoonist\, writer and professor. Her most recent book\, Something\, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love (Arsenal Pulp Press\, 2024)\, was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Memoir. She is also the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s\, My Mother\, and Me (Freehand Books\, 2010). A feature-length animation based on Tangles is in production\, with release planned for 2026.  She is also the author of the award-winning historical fiction comic Agnes\, Murderess (Freehand Books\, 2019). Sarah Leavitt is an associate professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver\, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012. \nTERESA WONG (she/her) is a writer and cartoonist based in Calgary\, Alberta. Her comics and illustrated essays have appeared in The Believer\, The New Yorker\, McSweeney’s\, and The Walrus. Her latest book\, All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey (Arsenal Pulp Press\, 2024) received two 2025 Alberta Literary Awards: the Memoir Award and the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction. Her first graphic memoir\, Dear Scarlet: The Story of My Postpartum Depression (2019)\, was a finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Both All Our Ordinary Stories and Dear Scarlet were longlisted for CBC Canada Reads.
URL:https://litfestalberta.org/event-1/feature-graphic-memoir-with-teresa-wong-and-sarah-leavitt/
LOCATION:Zeidler Hall\, 9828 101A Ave\, Edmonton\, AB
CATEGORIES:Feature
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T173000
DTSTAMP:20260501T170228
CREATED:20250916T070911Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251010T204336Z
UID:4730-1760803200-1760808600@litfestalberta.org
SUMMARY:Showcase: Agatha Press Fall Launch
DESCRIPTION:LitFest is thrilled to partner with Edmonton’s Agatha Press to bring you the launch of their fall releases – Sincerely\, Sincerely by Rayanne Haines and Carolyne Van Der Meer\, AS LONG AS I’M ALIVE I HAVE INFINITE CHANCES by ryan fitzpatrick\, and i give birth to my body by Leilei Chen. \nFeaturing: Leilei Chen\, ryan fitzpatrick\, Rayanne Haines and Carolyne Van Der Meer\nHost: Matthew Stepanic\nTickets: Free to attend\, Reserve your spot HERE \n  \nLeilei Chen 莫译 (muo-yee\, meaning “no translation”) translated from Mandarin the poetry of Ma Hui\, a contemporary poet reimagining Tibet’s sixth Dalai Lama\, in the collection\, I Have Forsaken Heaven and Earth\, but Never Forsaken You. She is the author of Re-orienting China: Travel Writing and Cross-cultural Understanding and the translator of Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction in both simplified and traditional Chinese. She has published the English versions of Chinese women’s writing and ecological literature. Her Chinese version of Margaret Laurence’s short story collection\, A Bird in the House\, is forthcoming in 2025. \nryan fitzpatrick is the author of five books of poetry\, including the recent No Depression in Heaven (Talonbooks\, 2025) and Sunny Ways (Invisible\, 2023). They were the 2024-25 Writer-in-Residence in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies. \nRayanne Haines is a producer\, podcaster\, educator and award-winning poet. Her third collection\, Tell The Birds Your Body Is Not A Gun (Frontenac House 2021)\, won the 2022 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for both the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award and the ReLit Award. Her poetic memoir\, What Kind of Daughter? (Frontenac House 2024)\, was shortlisted for the 2024 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Rayanne hosts the Crow Reads podcast\, is the President of the League of Canadian Poets\, and an Assistant Professor at MacEwan University. She teaches and writes with vulnerability as a guiding force. \nMatthew Stepanic is a queer writer who lives and works on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton. They are a co-author of the collaborative novel Project Compass (Monto Books\, 2017) and the author of Relying on that Body (Glass Buffalo\, 2018)\, a poetry chapbook about the queens of season 10 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. They edit and design chapbooks for Agatha Press\, and they host and co-organize VERS/E\, a monthly queer poetry open mic. \nCarolyne Van Der Meer lives and writes in Montreal. She has five published books\, including Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience\, and the poetry collections Sensorial and All This As I Stand By. Her most recent collection is the chapbook Birdology\, published by Cactus Press in early 2025. She is currently working on a book of linked fictional vignettes.
URL:https://litfestalberta.org/event-1/showcase-agatha-press-fall-launch/
LOCATION:Muttart Theatre\, 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square\, Edmonton\, AB
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T190000
DTSTAMP:20260501T170228
CREATED:20250916T064158Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251011T162411Z
UID:4714-1760806800-1760814000@litfestalberta.org
SUMMARY:Showcase: Daaira: The Healing Will Come\, The Polyglot Launch
DESCRIPTION:This event is free to attend\, but please pre-register as space is limited \nAn evening of literature\, art\, and music hosted by The Polyglot and Daaira House \nLitFest\, October 18\, 2025\, 5:00pm to 7:00pm\, The Green Room \nFor the past nine years\, The Polyglot—an award-winning local multilingual magazine—has offered a vibrant platform for artists\, writers\, and translators to experiment with language and art. \nAt LitFest\, we are honoured to launch our fifteenth issue\, Daaira—a collaboration with Daaira House\, guest edited by Aaima Azhar and Zainab Azhar. \nAs the editors write: “This issue has been curated to capture what is well and unwell within us all and the rituals that play witness. The healing will come. Let us first call it what it is. Let us make for it a little space. Let us draw around it a circle\, a دائرہ.” \nDaaira (circle) moves between ritual (Rasm-e-Dil\, Ritual of the Heart) and remembrance (Yaad-e-Dil\, Re-membrance of the Heart)\, creating a space where wellness is not individual but communal. For this reason\, we’re thrilled to be hosted by the Green Room. \n✨Join us for an evening of multilingual readings\, music\, and visual art\n✨Participate in a guided writing session led by Aaima Azhar\n✨Share light refreshments in community\n✨Witness performances that embody healing and creativity \nHosts: Aaima Azhar & Zainab Azhar\nAuthors: Muhammad Azhar\, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi\, Tamara Aschenbrenner\nMusicians: The Calamansi Club\nArtists: April Angeles\, Maryam Lary\, Niabi Kapoor \nCome sit in the circle with us. All are welcome. ✨ \nAuthor bios \nAaima Azhar is a Pakistani-Canadian Muslim writer\, spoken word poet\, filmmaker\, and mental health coach whose work explores the healing power of language and creativity. She is the founder of Daaira House and author of A Thing With Teeth. \nZainab Azhar is an artist and facilitator drawn to ritual\, storytelling\, and the spaces where creativity meets memory. She works across mediums and recently showcased her immersive installation in The New Frame exhibition by Odyssey Works in New York City. \nTamara Aschenbrenner (she/they) is a queer writer and communications professional whose work explores the intersections of identity\, mental health\, and language. As the grandchild of refugees and the daughter of a first-generation Canadian\, she writes about the quiet weight of inheritance—what gets passed down\, what gets lost\, and what we choose to carry forward. Her work often reflects on queerness\, feminism\, neurodivergence\, family\, and the process of making sense of emotions that don’t always translate easily. A former magazine editor and a current volunteer with The Polyglot\, she is especially interested in how language shapes our understanding of self\, belonging\, and wellbeing. \nLuciana Erregue-Sacchi is an art historian\, publisher\, poet\, translator\, cultural worker\, and author from Treaty 6. Luciana works at the intersection of art\, words\, languages\, and literary genres. She is the publisher behind award-winning imprint Laberinto Press\, and the author of the chapbook Of Mothers and Madonnas (The Polyglot). Luciana is working on a creative nonfiction memoir\, Daughters of the Current\, based on her obsession with the work and life of Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni. \nMusicians \nThe Calamansi Club is an all-Filipino indie band based in Edmonton. The band is named after a tiny but massively flavourful citrus fruit from the Philippines. They started with a casual jam session at the library and have since formed a deep connection through their shared passion for creating music with meaning. They’re inspired by the struggles and joys of life\, and they hope their songs make people feel less alone. With Eoshanelle on vocals and bass\, Chema on vocals and guitar\, Ryan on guitar and vocals\, and TJ on the drums\, The Calamansi Club writes songs in both English and Tagalog. They’ve performed at the Heart of the City Music & Arts Festival and Edmonton Poetry Festival\, and they headlined DRTY Ice Cream’s Kanto Party. They’re releasing an EP in the fall of 2025. You can listen to their music on Spotify\, Apple Music\, and YouTube Music. Instagram: @thecalamansiclub \nArtists with work on display \nApril Angeles is a Filipino-Canadian visual artist based in Edmonton. Though she dabbles with the use of different media in her artistic pursuits\, she works mainly with acrylics\, recycled materials\, and graphite. Her art has been featured in various spaces. In 2022\, she was in the Top 15 of the Philippine Arts Council’s The Filipino in Me – Insights into Living Heritage online gallery. In 2023\, she won the People’s Choice Award at Rachel Notley’s Art From the Unknown gallery at the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre. In 2024\, she won the People’s Choice Award at the Allied Arts Council of Spruce Grove’s Form Redux Exhibit. \nMaryam Lary is a poet\, author\, and self-taught string artist whose work blends craft and fine art to explore themes of resilience\, belonging\, and the universal search for peace. In 2020\, she published journey through 99\, an anthology of poems chronicling a personal journey toward healing and meaning. The same year\, she was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder that temporarily took her eyesight. This transformative experience deepened her commitment to creating art with purpose and intention. Maryam’s practice reimagines thread as both a drawing and sculptural medium\, combining it with acrylic paint\, collage\, and calligraphy to create layered\, contemporary works. Her art celebrates culture\, spirituality\, and the stories that connect us all. As her work has evolved\, she has used it to inspire dialogue around issues such as migration\, statelessness\, and the search for belonging\, always with the aim of bridging communities through creativity and understanding. Deeply engaged in her community\, Maryam has collaborated with organizations across Edmonton to raise awareness about mental health\, welcome newcomers\, and share the therapeutic power of art. Her work has been collected\, and acquired by supporters\, with many pieces donated or sold to benefit humanitarian causes\, including sponsoring orphans worldwide. Through each artwork\, she aspires to offer comfort\, spark reflection\, and build connections grounded in empathy and hope. \nNiabi Kapoor is a first-generation daughter born in Canada to immigrant Indian parents. She recently relocated back to Canada after living in Madrid for the last five years. Most of her inspiration comes from nature\, specifically plants and small creatures\, from stories she has read or heard throughout her life\, from architecture\, and her travels. She enjoys using art as a way to share her imagination with others\, with the hope that it offers a small escape and brings them as much joy as it does her while creating it. \n  \nThis event is proudly presented in partnership with Daaira House \n \nThe Green Room is an Edmonton based youth program serving Muslim youth (16–35)\, providing leadership opportunities\, creative recreation\, wellness support\, and community connections. Would you like to stay informed about their upcoming events
URL:https://litfestalberta.org/event-1/showcase-daaira-the-healing-will-come-polyglot-magazine-launch/
LOCATION:The Green Room\, 10545 108 St NW Unit 2-786\, Edmonton
CATEGORIES:Showcase
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Edmonton:20251018T203000
DTSTAMP:20260501T170228
CREATED:20250916T053116Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251008T151316Z
UID:4709-1760814000-1760819400@litfestalberta.org
SUMMARY:Showcase: Books with Buzz(kill) Cabaret
DESCRIPTION:Join us and discover some of this year’s most buzzed about books in this not-to-be-missed showcase! \nFeaturing: Jennifer Bowering Delisle\, Amber Dawn\, Canisia Lubrin\, and Alex Manley\nHost: Kate Gibson\nTickets: $5 (student/low income)\, $15 (regular)\, Available HERE (Use promo code “LITFEST2025” to access student rate) \n\nStock\, by Jennifer Bowering Delisle \nStock photographs are everywhere. With their contrived poses\, unusual angles\, and bizarre visual metaphors\, they’re instantly familiar – and familiarly narrow in their vision of our society. Their ubiquity shapes and reinforces the biases\, privilege\, and stereotypes of their distinct aesthetic. \nFrom found poems using metadata and keywords to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like ‘Good Mother Morning Family Happy\,’ ‘Beautiful Woman Eating Salad\,’ and ‘Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded\,’ Delisle’s ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography’s clichés and delight in all its strangeness\, while casting a critical eye on its representations of women. \n\nBuzzkill Clamshell\, by Amber Dawn \nAmber Dawn’s latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power \nAs a novelist\, memoirist\, and poet\, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery\, raw\, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell\, her third poetry collection\, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry\, offering twisted mythmaking\, extreme hyperbole\, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness\, aging\, and desire. \nWith poems populated by severed heads\, domme swan maidens\, horny oracles\, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure\, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby – gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD. \nAlready acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse\, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant\, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer – not for the pain to end\, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it. \n\nThe World After Rain: Anne’s Poem\, by Canisia Lubrin \n“How incandescent the language is\, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness\, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.”—Dionne Brand \nIn her signature epic vision\, Canisia Lubrin distills a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment\, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief\, tender and searing\, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the blistering paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance\, with meditations on love\, time\, and loss\, at once meticulously far-seeing\, interior\, and inexpressible \n  \nPost-Man\, by Alex Manley\nIn this divisive moment in the history of gender politics\, Alex Manley navigates life as a neurodivergent non-binary person and explores their dislocations from the norm. Post-Man delves into the ways in which Manley has always felt apart\, alone and othered—how they always felt there was something wrong with them. In adulthood they came to recognize that in addition to suffering from depression\, anxiety\, ADHD\, and possibly more\, they understood themselves as existing outside the neat binary of gender that modern society imposes on us. \nWith this understanding of themself\, Manley takes readers through the stultifying machismo of hockey culture\, the improbable job of working for a men’s website\, the strange unpleasantness of going bald as a nonbinary person\, and more. Heart-wrenching and profound\, Post-Man is a book that will make you reconsider your own perceptions of gender and masculinity. \n  \nJENNIFER BOWERING DELISLE’s collection of lyric essays\, Micrographia (2023) won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She is also the author of Deriving\, a collection of poetry (2021) and The Bosun Chair\, a lyric family memoir (2017). Her new collection of poetry\, Stock\, responds to stock imagery with a feminist lens. She is on the board of NeWest Press and lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory. \nAMBER DAWN (she/her) is a writer and creative facilitator living on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver\, BC). She is the author of several books\, including two novels (Lambda Literary Award winner Sub Rosa and Sodom Road Exit) and three poetry collections (Where the words end and my body begins\, My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems\, and Buzzkill Clamshell)\, and the editor of three anthologies. \nCANISIA LUBRIN’s work has been recognized with accolades including the Griffin Poetry Prize\, Windham-Campbell Prize\, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Born in St. Lucia\, Lubrin now lives in Whitby\, and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. \nALEX MANLEY (they/them) is a non-binary writer\, editor\, translator and poet from and living in Montreal/Tiohtia:ke. They are the author of We Are All Just Animals & Plants (Metatron Press) and The New Masculinity (ECW Press)\, as well as the English-language translator of Daphne B.’s Made-Up (Coach House Books). Their new book\, Post-Man: Esays on Being a Neurodivergent Non-Binary Person (Arsenal Pulp Press) is out on September 30\, 2025.
URL:https://litfestalberta.org/event-1/showcase-books-with-buzzkill-cabaret/
LOCATION:Zeidler Hall\, 9828 101A Ave\, Edmonton\, AB
CATEGORIES:Showcase
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