welcome to
common readings
2016
December 19th, 2016 - 8pm
SHARI KASMAN
ANDREW FAULKNER
LEIGH NASH
SHARI KASMAN is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer. She has created short, medium, long, extra-long sentences that have appeared in publications including Taddle Creek and This Magazine. Some of her best work took the form of handwritten letters to Steven Spielberg that she left on a bicycle labelled with the director's name. She has a new collection of short stories! It’s called Everything Life Has to Offer and exists thanks to Invisible Publishing.
ANDREW FAULKNER is the co-curator of The Emergency Response Unit and is the author of Need Machine, published by Coach House Books in 2013. He lives in Picton, Ontario.
LEIGH NASH is the publisher of Invisible Publishing, co-curates The Emergency Response Unit and lives in Picton, Ontario. Mansfield Press published her first book, Goodbye, Ukulele in 2010.
November 21st, 2016 - 8pm
NICOLE CHIN
DAVID JAMES BROCK
LIZ HOWARD
NICOLE CHIN is the author of the House of Anansi Press Digital Short, Shooting the Bitch, which received the McIllquham Foundation Prize for best original short story. Her work has appeared in Joyland Magazine, Found Press, The Puritan, and is forthcoming in Room Magazine. She has been long-listed for the House of Anansi Broken Social Scene Short Story Contest and is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Guelph.
DAVID JAMES BROCK’s first collection of poetry is Everyone is CO2 (Wolsak & Wynn, 2014), and he is the co-creator of Breath Cycle, an opera developed for singers with cystic fibrosis. Learn more about his plays, poetry, and opera at www.davidjamesbrock.com.
LIZ HOWARD’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, the first time the prize has been awarded to a debut collection. It was also a finalist for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and received an honourable mention for the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize. Her chapbook Skullambient (Ferno House, 2011) was shortlisted for the bp Nichol Chapbook Award. Born and raised in northern Ontario, Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing through the University of Guelph. She now lives in Toronto where she works as a neurocognitive aging research assistant.
October 17th, 2016 - 8pm
JOSHUA P'NG
AMBER MCMILLAN
NATHANIEL G. MOORE
One day JOSHUA P'NG picked up a pen and now doesn’t know how to stop writing. His work has appeared in the filling station, untethered, Daily Science Fiction, Sewer Lid, and the Great Lakes Review. When he isn’t writing, he sketches people on the train, reads graphic novels, and tries to get lost on bike trips.
AMBER MCMILLAN is the author of The Woods: A Year on Protection Island (2016) and the poetry collection We Can’t Ever Do This Again (2015). Her work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, PRISM International, and other journals across North America. Her latest books The Woods: A Year on Protection Island, was just published by Nightwood Editions. She lives and works on BC’s Sunshine Coast.
NATHANIEL G. MOORE is the author of several books including Savage, winner of the 2014 ReLit Award for best novel. His latest, Jettison, a collection of short fiction, was just published by Anvil Press. He lives on works on BC's Sunshine Coast. Visit www.jettison.ca to download the free Jettison soundtrack.
September 19th, 2016 - 8pm
DAMIAN ROGERS
SARAH PINDER
SORAYA PEERBAYE
DAMIAN ROGERS was born and raised outside Detroit and has lived and worked inside Toronto since 2003. She is the poetry editor at House of Anansi Press and The Walrus, the founding creative director of Poetry In Voice, and the co-host and literary curator of the Basement Revue. Her second collection of poems, Dear Leader, came out in 2015 with Coach House Books.
SARAH PINDER is the author of Cutting Room and Common Place (Coach House Books). Her writing has been shortlisted for the Expozine Small Press Awards, and included in magazines like Geist, Arc and Poetry is Dead. A long time zine-maker, you can find her work in Montreal’s Distroboto art vending machines, as well as a mailbox near you.
SORAYA PEERBAYE’s most recent collection of poetry, Tell: Poems for a Girlhood (Pedlar Press, 2015), won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry prize. Her first collection, Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (Goose Lane Editions, 2009) was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her poems have appeared in Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Women Poets, and the chapbook anthology Translating Horses. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.
August 22nd, 2016 - 8pm
KHALIDA HASSAN
CLARA BLACKWOOD
TALYA RUBIN
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KHALIDA HASSAN is a Toronto based short fiction writer. Her story "Complicit" will be available in the Summer 2016 issue of The Puritan. She is a Creative Writing MFA candidate at the University of Guelph, where she is often lauded as the best dancer in her program.
CLARA BLACKWOOD is a poet and visual artist born in Toronto. Her first poetry collection, Subway Medusa (2007), was the inaugural book in Guernica Editions’ First Poets Series, which features first books by poets thirty-five and under. Forecast, her second book of poetry, was published by Guernica Editions in 2014. Her poetry has appeared in Canadian and International journals. She is currently at work on a third collection of poems.
TALYA RUBIN is a poet and performance maker, her poetry won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. In 2011, she was short-listed for the Winston Collins/Descant prize for Best Canadian poem and was a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She won the Battle of the Bards at Harbourfront and was invited to attend IFOA in 2015. Talya holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and currently lives in Montreal with her husband and son. Her first book of poetry, Leaving the Island, was published with Véhicule Press in April 2015. She also runs an interdisciplinary performance company, Too Close to the Sun.
July 18th, 2016 - 8pm
SHANNON PAGE
KYP HARNESS
JACOB MCARTHUR MOONEY
SHANNON PAGE has recently completed the MA program in Creative Writing at University of Toronto. Her essays and stories have appeared in Untethered, The Scattered Pelican, and elsewhere.
KYP HARNESS has put out 13 albums of original songs, had his compositions covered by Mary Margaret O’Hara and Ron Sexsmith, has opened for Elvis Costello and been called “the most vital, essential Canadian singer-songwriter out there” (Calgary Straight), “the creator of a songbook that should rightly be hailed as a national treasure” (Exclaim!), and identified as “my favourite songwriter” by Sexsmith. Originally from Sarnia, Ontario, Harness is the author of ‘The Art of Laurel and Hardy’ (2006) and ‘The Art of Charlie Chaplin’ (2007), published by McFarland in the US. He is also the creator of the daily ‘Mortimer the Slug’ webcomic. As well, his novel ‘Wigford Rememberies’ will be published by Nightwood Editions in May 2016.
JACOB MCARTHUR MOONEY's books are The New Layman's Almanac, Folk, and this year's Don't be Interesting. His work has won the Arc Poem of the Year prize and been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award and the Trillium Book Award in Poetry. He is the host and director of the Pivot Reading Series and was the editor of Best Canadian Poetry in English 2015.
June 20th, 2016 - 8pm
Special Translation Edition of Common Readings, featuring Translam segment!
Join us for featured readings by translators Beatriz Hausner (translating Peruvian poet César Moro), Jessica Moore (translating French novelist Maylis de Kerangal) and Lida Nosrati (translating Iranian poet Shahram Sheydayi).
And then... stay for the Translam, which features audience members reading their translations of excerpts/poems by authors Malcolm Sutton, Claire Caldwell and Éric Charlebois. This means you! Everyone is encouraged to attempt a translation into the language of their choice.. emphasis being on the vastness of the array of possible outcomes. Excerpts are posted here on the event page. The evening will include short readings by the authors as well, and an open discussion about the joys and sorrows and trials and travails of translating/being translated.
May 16th, 2016 - 8pm
RICHARD KELLY KEMICK
VINCENT COLISTRO
MICHAEL PRIOR
RICHARD KELLY KEMICK's poetry and prose have been published in literary magazines and journals across Canada and the United States, most recently in The Walrus, Maisonneuve, and The Fiddlehead. His debut collection of poetry, Caribou Run, was published March 2016 by Goose Lane Editions.
VINCENT COLISTRO's poems have appeared in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Geist, Arc and elsewhere. He was a prize-winner in the 2012 Short Grain contest, and was nominated for National Magazine Award for Poetry in 2014. Late Victorians (Signal Editions, 2016) is his first book. He lives in Toronto.
MICHAEL PRIOR's poems have appeared in many publications across North America and the UK. Winner of The Walrus's Poetry Prize, Matrix Magazine’s LitPop Award, Grain’s Short Grain Contest, Magma Poetry’s Editors' Prize and Vallum’s Poetry Prize, Michael currently resides in Ithaca, New York, where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at Cornell University.
May 16th, 2016 - 8pm
JESSICA MOORE
DANNY JACOBS
AARON TUCKER
MIKE SAUVE
JESSICA MOORE is an author and translator. Her translation of Mend the Living, the moving and unusual story of a heart transplant by French author Maylis de Kerangal, was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Jessica's collection of poems, Everything, now (Brick Books), has been called “a powerful journey through love and loss – serving, ultimately, to unsettle any notion of a boundary between them.” The book is partly a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy (Talonbooks), a poetic novel by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN America Translation Award. Jessica is currently working on a story in poetic fragments called “The Whole Singing Ocean” and translating various and sundry literary texts.
DANNY JACOBS’ poems, essays, and reviews have been published in a variety of journals across Canada. He is the author of Songs that Remind Us of Factories (Nightwood, 2013) and Loid (Frog Hollow Press, 2016). Danny won Grand Prize in PRISM International’s 2016 Creative Nonfiction Contest. His poem “Fatberg” won The Malahat Review’s 2016 P. K Page Founders’ Award for Poetry. Danny lives with his wife in Riverview, NB and works as the librarian in the village of Petitcodiac.
AARON TUCKER’s first book of poetry punchlines was released by Mansfield Press in Spring of 2015 and his collection of essays Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in July of 2014. As well, he is the co-creator of the ChessBard, an app that translates chess games into poems that can be found at chesspoetry.com and is one of the co-contributors on Loss Sets, a project that transaltes poems into 3D sculptures. He is currently a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University.
MIKE SAUVE has written non-fiction for The National Post, Variety, and HTML Giant. His fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Feathertale, Filling Station, and elsewhere. His novel The Wraith of Skrellman is available now. His novel The Apocalypse of Lloyd is forthcoming from from Montag Press.
April 18th, 2016 - 8pm
ALEXANDRA OLIVER
SHERYDA WARRENER
CARA-LYN MORGAN
ALEXANDRA OLIVER was born in Vancouver, BC. Her last collection, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (Biblioasis 2013) received the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and was named a Canadian Poetry Book of the Year by The National Post. Oliver is the co-editor (with Annie Finch) of Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Random House/Everyman Pocket Poets 2015) as well as the co-editor (with Pino Coluccio) of Toronto-based formalist journal The Rotary Dial. Having recently launched her second trade collection Let the Empire Down, Oliver is currently preparing to begin her PhD in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University this September.
SHERYDA WARRENER is the author of two poetry collections, Floating is Everything (Nightwood Editions 2015) and her debut Hard Feelings (Snare/Invisible, 2010). Her work has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, the Arc Magazine Poem of the Year, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and was a runner-up for Lemon Hound’s inaugural poetry contest. She lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia.
CARA-LYN MORGAN lives and works in the Toronto area. Her debut collection of poems, What Became My Grieving Ceremony was released in 2014 and recently received the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, and her second book-length collection is due for release next year.
April 9th, 2016 - 8pm
Halifax Satellite Book Launch Event
EVA BRANNEN
KATE WRIGHT
DANNY JACOBS
JENNIFER HOULE
DANIEL KINCADE RENTON
EVA BRANNEN is an artist who lives in a magical village by the sea in Nova Scotia with her two dogs and a fine cat.
KATE WRIGHT was born in Saint John, New Bruswick. After studying English at UNB, she moved to Halifax to teach, feast and make pinatas. Her writing has previously been featured in Vox, The Tempest, Hard Times, The Cormorant Reading Series and scrawled on walls across the Maritimes.
DANNY JACOBS’S poems have been published in a variety of journals across Canada, including Arc, Grain, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, Event, Riddle Fence, Hazlitt, and Partisan. His essays and reviews have appeared in Vallum, Maisonneuve, Partisan, and Hamilton Arts and Letters. His first book, Songs That Remind Us of Factories (Nightwood, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2014 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. A chapbook, Loid, came out with Frog Hollow Press in early 2016. Danny lives with his wife in Riverview, NB and works as the librarian in the village of Petitcodiac.
JENNIFER HOULE grew up in Shediac, New Brunswick. Her first book, The Back Channels, is out with Signature Editions in Spring 2016. Her work has won several awards, including The Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick’s Alfred G. Bailey Prize for best poetry manuscript. A lifelong East Coaster, she now lives in Hanwell, just outside of Fredericton, with her husband and two sons.
Born in Saint John, NB, DANIEL KINCADE RENTON has been published in Prism International, Hazlitt, CV2, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and The Fish Quill Poetry Boat 2010-13. His poem, Sundowning, was shortlisted for the Basil Bunting Prize in the UK in 2015. Daniel hosts The Common Reading Series at the Bell Jar Cafe in Toronto while completing a PhD on Derrida, poetics, and Hypercritical Faith at York University. Frog Hollow Press published his debut chapbook, Milk Teeth, in late 2015.
March 21st, 2016 - 8pm
DANE SWAN
ANDRÉ FORGET
D.D. MILLER
DANE SWAN's second collection with Guernica Editions, A Mingus Lullaby is out now. He recently started MXTP_CLTRS, a collective that combines contemporary performance art, poetry, and music. Born in Bermuda, Dane currently resides in Toronto.
ANDRÉ FORGET's work has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Winnipeg Review, and The Puritan. He lives in Toronto.
D.D. MILLER is a Toronto-based writer and college English instructor whose writing has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies across North America. His first book, a collection of stories called David Foster Wallace Ruined My Suicide (A Buckrider Book), was released in 2014.
Miller’s latest book, Eight-Wheeled Freedom: The Derby Nerd’s Brief History of Flat Track Roller Derby (Wolsak and Wynn, June 2016), provides a history of the modern revival of roller derby as a competitive sport.
March 12th, 2016 - 8pm
STEVIE HOWELL
SHANE NEILSON
SEAN LABRADOR Y MANZANO
ROBERT YERACHMIEL SNYDERMAN
Host: VINCENT COLISTRO!
Honourary Canadian Symbolic Representatives:
STEVIE HOWELL is an Irish-Canadian writer and worker. A first collection of poetry, Sharps, was released in 2014, and was a finalist for the 2015 Gerald Lampert Award. Poems have been anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry (2014 and 2015), and have appeared in The Walrus, Hazlltt, Maisonneuve, Eighteen Bridges, and Geist. When not writing, Stevie studies psychology and works as a psychometrist. www.steviehowell.ca
SHANE NEILSON is a physician, memoirist, and poet. His second trade book of poems, Complete Physical, was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Award. He edits for Frog Hollow Press and is a Vanier Scholar at McMaster University. He will read from his recent book On Shaving Off His Face (PQL, 2015).
Uber-talented Visiting American Poets:
SEAN LABRADOR Y MANZANO edited the print journal Conversations at the Wartime Café: a Decade of War 2001-2011; is founder of the reading series Mixer 2.0, an M.F.A.; curated the symposium "From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant-Garde;" and with Dillon Westbrook and Robert Woodcock, he performs as José Rizal in the ninety-minute jazz choreo-poem, “Das Kapital, Volume 4: Elimination of the Industrial Phase and the Accumulation of Debt,” which was excerpted at the SF Jazz Poetry Festival, 2014. This year he did a whirlwind tour of conferences (ALA Boston, North American Review bicentennial, and Berkeley Poetry Conference) discussing a range of topics from Mark Twain's Anti-Imperialist Writings to the Asian Avant Garde. He was selected for the Best American Poetry in 2004. So in response to the Best American Poetry 2015 controversy, on behalf of the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies, he will be moderating a roundtable on "Yellowface" at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco in 2016.
ROBERT YERACHMIEL SNYDERMAN is a poet, playwright and itinerant farm worker whose efforts to recuperate the neglected writings of late nomadic poet, besmilr brigham, led him to enter doctoral work in poetics and indigenous studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He holds an MFA in Literary Art from Brown University where he wrote and directed “Voice Graffiti”, a community-built street performance which ritualized an abandoned parking lot. New poems from the working project, ANA, are forthcoming in Past Simple, The Volta, Open House, and The Colorado Review.
February 15th, 2016 - 8pm
ANDRÉ BABYN
AUTUMN GETTY
KAREN SOLIE
ANDRÉ BABYN is the Fiction Editor of The Puritan. His stories have previously appeared in Maisonneuve, Grain, Hobart, PANK, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing up his final year of the University of Toronto MA in Creative Writing program, editing a killer novel.
AUTUMN GETTY is the author of two books of poetry published by Nightwood Editions. Reconciliation won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Hamilton and Area Arts Council Award for poetry and was nominated for the Trillium Award for Poetry. The Winnipeg Free Press named her second book, Repose, one of the top ten books of poetry published in Canada in 2008. She has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature and been nominated for the Premier's Award for Excellence in the Arts as an Emerging Writer in the Literature category. Adam is currently at work on a novel, a book of poetry, and a collection of essays.
KAREN SOLIE was born in Moose Jaw and grew up in rural southwest Saskatchewan. Her fourth collection of poems, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, was published in 2015 in Canada by House of Anansi Press and in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. A volume of selected poems, The Living Option, was published in the U.K. by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. In 2010 her third book, Pigeon, received the Pat Lowther Award, the Trillium Prize for Poetry, and the Griffin Prize. She's the 2015 recipient of the Writers' Trust Latner Poetry Prize, and has worked for creative writing departments at York University, the University of Toronto, University of Guelph, and the University of British Columbia. She is an associate director for the Banff Centre's Writing Studio, and lives in Toronto.
January 18th, 2016 - 8pm
SARAH HENSTRA
EWAN WHYTE
EMMA HEALEY
SARAH HENSTRA is the author of the novels Mad Miss Mimic (Razorbill, 2015) and The Red Word (coming in 2017 from Grove Atlantic). She is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University, where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She grew up on the wild, wet coast of British Columbia, but now she lives in Toronto, Ontario with her two sons and a poodle named Nora.
EWAN WHYTE is a writer and translator. He has written for the Globe & Mail and The Literary Review of Canada. His essays, art criticism, poetry, and translations have been widely published in books, journals and magazines. He is the author of Entrainment a book of poetry and a translation of the ancient Roman poet Catullus.
EMMA HEALEY is the author of Begin With the End in Mind (Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2012). She is the Globe and Mail's poetry critic, and a regular contributor to the music blog Said the Gramophone. Her work has appeared in publications including the LA Review of Books, The Hairpin, the Toronto Star and the National Post.
