Latest News / Nouvelles
Wednesday, April 5, 2023
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Samantha Jones & Matthew Weigel
Mark your calendars for a Brown Bag Lunch Reading by poet Samantha Jones, followed by a conversation between Jones and poet Matthew James Weigel on the relationship between art and science! Join us Wednesday, April 5 from 12 to 1 p.m. MDT in Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17), or join via Zoom.
Click HERE to register to attend the reading via Zoom!
Samantha Jones (she/her) is a poet, scientist, and editor based in Calgary, Alberta on Treaty 7 territory. Her writing appears in THIS, Room, Grain, CV2, GeoHumanities, Arctic, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, Site Orientation (2022), is available from the Blasted Tree. Sam has a background in geology and is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary studying inorganic carbon cycling in the Canadian Arctic. Her poem, “Ocean Acidification,” first published in Watch Your Head, was developed into a multimedia clip with science and policy partners and featured in the COP26 Virtual Ocean Pavilion (2021). In 2022, she worked with the Marine Environmental Observation, Prediction and Response Network (MEOPAR) to develop Science-Art Symbiosis, a UN Ocean Decade endorsed activity, to inspire researchers to explore intersections of science and art in their work. She is an alumna of the Banff Centre Spring Writers Retreat and the Iceland Writers Retreat. Sam is white settler and Black Canadian, and is the founder and facilitator of the Diverse Voices Roundtable for BIPOC Writers at the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society in Calgary.
Matthew James Weigel is a Dene and Métis poet and artist born and raised in Edmonton. Currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Alberta, he holds a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences. He is the designer for Moon Jelly House press and his words and art have been published by people like Arc Poetry Magazine, Book*Hug, The Polyglot, and The Mamawi Project. His public art can be found at several places around Edmonton. Matthew is a Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize finalist, National Magazine Award finalist, Nelson Ball Prize finalist, Betsy Warland Between Genres Award finalist, Cécile E. Mactaggart award winner, and winner of both the 2020 Vallum Chapbook Award and 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award for his chapbook "It Was Treaty / It Was Me". His debut full-length collection Whitemud Walking recently won the Alcuin Society Award for book design, and is available now from Coach House Books.
le vendredi 31 mars 2023
Atelier d'écriture avec Chloé Savoie-Bernard
Le 31 mars (13h-14h30), venez écouter et ainsi mieux connaître l’écrivaine, traductrice et éditrice, Chloé Savoie-Bernard! Grâce à la Writers Guild of Alberta, cet atelier gratuit est ouvert au public. Chacun d’entre vous y est donc cordialement invité!
Pour vous inscrire à cet atelier, il vous suffit d’aller sur:
https://ualberta-ca.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYtf-2grTkvEtVbXOiaEBLGn9fN4lOhcWyJ
Chloé Savoie-Bernard occupe un poste de professeure de littérature à l’Université Queen’s. Ses intérêts de recherche comprennent les féminismes contemporains, la littérature des femmes au Québec, les études noires et la recherche-création. Elle a écrit plusieurs livres, dont Des femmes savantes (nouvelles, Triptyque, 2016, finaliste au Prix littéraire des collégiens et mention d’honneur du Prix Adrienne-Choquette de la nouvelle) et Sainte Chloé de l’amour (2021, Hexagone). Chez Triptyque, elle a aussi dirigé le collectif Corps (2018). Elle est également éditrice de poésie chez l’Hexagone, chroniqueuse au quotidien Le Devoir et traductrice littéraire.
Monday, February 6, 2023
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Rita Wong & Tasha Beeds
Don’t miss our hybrid event featuring poet Rita Wong in conversation with scholar and Water Walker Tasha Beeds! This Brown Bag Lunch Reading will take place from 12 to 1 p.m. on Monday, February 6. Join us in person in Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17), or watch via Zoom.
Click HERE to register to attend the reading via Zoom!
Rita Wong lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories, also known as Vancouver, where she attends to questions of water justice, decolonization, ecology and climate justice. Co-editor of the anthology downstream: reimagining water (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2017, with Dorothy Christian), Wong is the author of current, climate (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2021), beholden (Talonbooks, 2018, with Fred Wah), undercurrent (Nightwood, 2015), perpetual (Nightwood, 2015, with Cindy Mochizuki), sybil unrest (Line Books, 2008, with Larissa Lai), forage (Nightwood, short-listed for the 2008 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, winner of Canada Reads Poetry 2011), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998). She has received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award.
Dr. Tasha Beeds is an Indigenous scholar of nêhiyaw, Scottish-Metis, and Caribbean ancestry from the Treaty 6 territories of Saskatchewan. She activates from connected roles: as a mother, kôhkom, creative artist, poet, Water Walker, and a Midewiwin iskwêw from Minweyweywigaan Lodge out of Roseau River First Nations and Wiikwemkoong Unceded Reserve. Her creative, academic, and grassroots work highlights and celebrates Indigeneity while promoting Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty, as well as care and protection of the Land and Waters based on carrying Indigenous Ancestral legacies forward for the generations to come.
Dr. Beeds was the Ron Ianni Fellow at the University of Windsor for two years where she worked with the Indigenous Legal Orders (ILO) Institute. She continues with the ILO team as a guest term lecturer. She was also the inaugural visiting Indigenous Scholar at the Ānako Indigenous Research Institute at Carleton University. Mentored under the late Josephine Mandamin, in addition to Shirley Williams and Liz Osawamick, Dr. Beeds has walked approximately 8000 kms for the Water, all around the Great Lakes, the Kawartha Lakes and most recently for the Saskatchewan River.
Friday, January 20, 2023
Podcast midis littéraires du CLC avec Marjorie Beaucage & Marie-Andrée Gill
Écoutez un nouvel épisode des midis littéraires du CLC avec la vidéaste activiste Métis Marjorie Beaucage et la poète Innue Marie-Andrée Gill. Dans l’épisode 11, c’est deux écrivaines renommées parlent de leur expérience formative—grandir dans le bois (Beaucage) et passer une adolescence au lac (Gill)—et la façon que ses expériences les ont aidées à développer un sens non seulement pour la justice social, mais aussi la justice pour les éléments.
Marjorie Beaucage est une aînée franco-métisse originaire de Vassar, au sud-est du Manitoba. Le partage est au cœur de la vie et du parcours de cette raconteuse, artiste et éducatrice. Son parcourt professionnel débute comme éducatrice. Marjorie utilise l’art de raconter des histoires pour apporter des changements sociaux. Elle produira plus d’une trentaine d’œuvres cinématographiques pendant plus de trente ans. Son travail donne une voix aux groupes et aux individus marginalisés, aux femmes, aux peuples autochtones, et aux causes environnementales plus particulièrement. En 2021 et 2022 à l’âge de 74 ans, Marjorie commence une marche pour l’eau de inspirée par Josephine Mandamin. La marche Saskatchewan River Water Walk a pour but d’aider la rivière, en péril. Leur parcours de plus d’un mois débute dans les montagnes Rocheuses en Alberta, et se termine à la fourche près de Prince Albert. La marche reprend l’été suivant, tout au long de la rivière Saskatchewan Sud.
Marie-Andrée Gill est autrice, poète, scénariste, animatrice de balados décolonisants (Laisser-nous raconter : l’histoire crochie, Les mots de Joséphine ) de la communauté des Pekuakamiulnuatsh. Elle possède également une maitrise en lettres et enseigne la littérature autochtone à l’université. Elle a publié trois recueils de poésie aux éditions La Peuplade ainsi que dans de nombreux collectifs. Son écriture cotoie l’intime, la relation aux éléments et à la quotidienneté comme guérison ainsi que le rapprochement bienveillant entre les nations.
Introducing the 2023 CLC Kreisel Lecture with Wayde Compton
We are thrilled to announce the 2023 CLC Kreisel Lecture with Wayde Compton! Please mark your calendars for March 8, 2023 (7:30 p.m. at the TIMMS CENTRE for the ARTS).
Register HERE to attend the lecture!
Compton is a poet, historian, graphic novelist, essayist, short story writer, anthologist, sound poet, and (with David Chariandy and Karina Vernon) the co-founder of Commodore Books—the first Black Canadian literary press in Western Canada. His lecture, “Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics,” promises to probe Canada’s myths about race and multiculturalism and expand how we think about the role writers play in creating anti-racist imaginaries.
Wayde Compton's writing is as deeply theoretical as it is funny. For example, The Outer Harbour, a work of speculative fiction, traces the fate of Pauline Johnson Island, a volcanic island that suddenly bubbles up off the shore of West Vancouver. In tracing the evolution of the island—from ecological reserve, to condominium development, to prison complex—Compton's writing refutes the characterization of colonization as a historical act. Instead, Compton imagines how ongoing colonial practices might manifest if 'new land' were to materialize. —Kristine Smitka, incoming Acting Director
Wayde Compton has written five books and has edited two literary anthologies. His collection of short stories, The Outer Harbour, won the City of Vancouver Book Award in 2015 and he won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 2011. His work has been a finalist for two other City of Vancouver Book Awards as well as the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2006 Compton co-founded Commodore Books, western Canada’s first Black Canadian literary press. Compton has been writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, Green College at the University of British Columbia, and the Vancouver Public Library. From 2012-18, he administrated the Creative Writing Program in Continuing Studies at SFU, including the award-winning Writer’s Studio. He is currently working on a re-imagining of The Argonautika by Apollonius of Rhodes as surrealist slave narrative set on the west coast of North America in the 18th century. Compton is currently the chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC.
Photo credit: Roger Hur
Friday, December 16, 2022
CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast with Moni Brar & Randy Lundy
Tune in to Episode 10 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast! Randy Lundy and Moni Brar take us deep into their attachments to land and water, the complexities of which—for both poets—stem from childhoods spent in industrial towns. Their poetry shows us, through acts of noticing, how the land and water become kin and teacher.
Moni Brar (she/her) was born in rural India, raised in northern British Columbia, and now gratefully divides her time between the unceded territories of the Treaty 7 signatories and Métis Nation Region 3 (Calgary) and the Syilx Okanagan Nation (Oliver). She has multiple nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, was the winner of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, and has received writing awards and honours from PRISM international, Room Magazine, SAAG, Blood Orange Review, and Subnivean. Her creative work explores the interrelation of place, time and identity in the immigrant experience, diasporic guilt, and religious violence. She has been published in Best Canadian Poetry, The Literary Review of Canada, The New Quarterly, Passages North, Prairie Fire, and Hobart, among others. She is an alum of Tin House and The Banff Centre. She believes art contains the possibility of healing.
Randy Lundy is Cree, Irish, and Norwegian and a member of the Barren Lands First Nation, Brochet, Manitoba, in Treaty 10 territory. He is the author of four award-winning full-length books of poetry, most recently Field Notes for the Self (2020) and Blackbird Song (2018), as well as the chapbook In the Dark Times (2022). Randy grew up in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan and lived for more than twenty years in Treaty 4 territory, also in Saskatchewan. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, where he resides as companion to two female dogs. He is the Editor of the Oskana Poetry & Poetics series at University of Regina Press.
2023 CLC Poetry Contest: "Land and Water"/« La terre et l'eau »
The Canadian Literature Centre, MacEwan University, and Athabasca University are once again teaming up to bring you the 2023 CLC Poetry Contest! We’re looking for the best poem in English or in French from a University of Alberta, MacEwan University, or Athabasca University student on the theme of “Land and Water.”
Entrants should submit their poem in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format, without any identifying information in the document, to clccomm@ualberta.ca by March 13, 2023. Please include name, email address, phone number, mailing address, and departmental and university affiliation in the body of the email, and use the subject line: “Last Name: CLC Poetry Contest."
Le Centre de littérature canadienne de l’Université de l’Alberta (CLC), en collaboration avec l’Université MacEwan et l’Université Athabasca, vous invite à participer à son Concours de poésie 2023. Nous sommes à la recherche du meilleur poème en français ou en anglais écrit par un étudiant ou une étudiante de l’une des trois institutions, qui porte sur le thème « La terre et l'eau. »
Chaque participant devra soumettre leur poème dans un seul fichier anonymisé de format .doc, .docx ou .pdf et l’envoyer à clccomm@ualberta.ca au plus tard le 13 mars 2023. Veuillez inclure votre nom, courriel, numéro de téléphone, adresse postale et affiliation départementale ou universitaire dans votre courriel, puis utilisez la formule suivante dans le sujet du message : « VOTRE NOM DE FAMILLE: Concours de poésie du CLC. »
Monday, November 7, 2022
CLC Masterclass with Bänoo Zan
We are pleased to announce our upcoming virtual masterclass with the University of Alberta's Writer-in-Residence, Bänoo Zan! Join us Monday, November 7, 2022 at 7 p.m. MST via Zoom. We welcome writers of all genres and levels of experience.
Click HERE to register for free!
Bänoo Zan is a poet, librettist, translator, teacher, editor, and poetry curator, with more than 250 published poems and poetry-related pieces as well as three books, including Songs of Exile and Letters to My Father. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Canada’s most diverse poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012), a brave space that bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, poetic styles, voices, and visions. Currently, Bänoo is Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta.
Friday, October 21, 2022
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Kit Dobson
On October 21, 2022, the Canadian Literature Centre and LitFest will host a Brown Bag Lunch Reading with Calgary-based writer and scholar Kit Dobson. Kit’s new book of essays, Field Notes on Listening, “bears witness to a world in ecological distress at a time of profound change.” Join us at noon in Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17) for this second event in our Land & Water Series.
Kit Dobson lives and works in Calgary / Treaty 7 territory in southern Alberta. His previous books include Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada and he is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. He grew up in many places across Canada, but returned again and again to the landscapes of northern Alberta where his family members settled—and that continue to animate his thinking.
Wednesday, October 5, 2022
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Waubgeshig Rice
The CLC is delighted to announce our first in-person Brown Bag Lunch Reading since 2020! On October 5, 2022, we will hear from Waubgeshig Rice, acclaimed author of Moon of the Crusted Snow, Midnight Sweatlodge, and other works of fiction and nonfiction. Waub will read and answer questions in Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17) from 12 to 1 p.m. MDT. This event kicks off our Land & Water Series!
Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay. He has written three fiction titles, and his short stories and essays have been published in numerous anthologies and periodicals. His most recent novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow, was published in 2018 and became a national bestseller. He graduated from the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2002, and spent most of his journalism career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video journalist and radio host. He left CBC in 2020 to focus on his literary career. His forthcoming novel, Moon of the Turning Leaves, will be published in 2023. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his wife and two sons.
2022 CLC Poetry Contest Announcement
The CLC, MacEwan, and Athabasca University extend our heartfelt congratulations to Meghan Eaker, whose poem “nitohtamok êkwa wiya manâpekiswek” was selected as the winner of the 2022 CLC Poetry Contest!
Meghan Eaker (she/her) is an amiskwaciywâskahikan-based poet, registered nurse, and beading artist of mixed european and nehiyaw ancestry and is a member of the Woodland Cree First Nation in treaty 8 territory. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Alberta studying storysharing as a practice towards miyo pimatisiwin (a good life).
Read the winning poem HERE and on the Edmonton Poetry Festival website.
Plus, listen to Meghan give a reading!
The contest judges, Professors Marla Epp (MacEwan), Jocelyne Le Ber (Athabasca), and Michael O'Driscoll (University of Alberta) wrote: “This is a beautifully constructed poem that is at once economical, powerful, and compelling. The poem's precise and evocative verse focuses on listening as an intergenerational experience that produces a collective triumph of song and poetry, expressed through metaphors of musical collaboration and the author's humble contribution as a 'magpie voice.' The Cree title and speaker's address to 'nimosompan,' or grandfather, contributes to the poem's inspiring assertion of voice and community.”
Congratulations also to Mikayla Bortscher, whose poem "CPR for a Heterotroph" received an honourable mention.
The judges commented: "This poem offers the reader a wonderful process of discovery, as the sensuous details of the scene gradually come into focus with a synaesthetic richness that merges colour and sound, mimicking the gradual convergence of human and natural time and experience. The striking colours of the poem--synthetic red lipstick and chlorophyll green--sound as much as they show this encounter that demonstrates a profound attunement to the non-human world. Formally, the poem's rhythm, internal rhymes, and visual prosody are evidence of an accomplished poetic that accentuates the poem's evocative imagery."
Thank you to all who submitted to the contest this year, as well as to our partners: MacEwan, Athabasca University, Edmonton Poetry Festival, University of Alberta Press, NeWest Press, & Athabasca University Press.
2022 CLC Kreisel Lecture with Cherie Dimaline: "An Anthology of Monsters: How Story Saves Us from Our Anxiety"
On April 21, 2022, we were honoured to welcome Georgian Bay Métis author Cherie Dimaline to the stage of the TIMMS Centre to deliver the 16th annual Kreisel Lecture, titled "An Anthology of Monsters: How Story Saves Us from Our Anxiety."
Watch the lecture on the CLC YouTube Channel!
Told from the viewpoint of someone with life-long anxiety (who also happens to be an author), this lecture/essay focuses on the stories we tell ourselves—both the very excellent and the very horrible.
The Rougarou as both belonging and responsibility, witches as empowerment and fear—using examples like these from her own published and forthcoming work, Cherie Dimaline examines the ways in which we empower, crush, survive, and succeed all through stories. We’ll also hear about ways to collect and curate these stories so that we don’t end up buried in an ‘edit reel’.
Basically, this is the tale of an intricate dance with anxiety and how story can help reshape the ways in which we think, the ways we cope, and the very choreography of that dance. And yes, this is largely biographical."
Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves shot to the top of the bestseller lists when it was published in 2017, and has stayed there. It won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, and was a fan favourite in CBC’s Canada Reads (2018). It was also a Book of the Year on numerous lists including National Public Radio, the School Library Journal, the New York Public Library, Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and the CBC. Pressure from her young fans spurred Dimaline to write Hunting by Stars, the 2021 sequel to The Marrow Thieves. This new novel has been described as “lush, devastating, and hope-filled” (Kirkus Reviews). Dimaline’s adult novel, Empire of Wild, was an Indigo #1 Best Book of 2019.
From the Georgian Bay Métis Community, she lives in Midland, Ontario.
Photo credit: Adrien Guyot
Midis littéraires du CLC avec Chloé Savoie-Bernard et Lorrie Jean-Louis
Le 24 mars 2022, écoutez un nouvel épisode des midis littéraires du CLC avec les écrivaines renommées, Chloé Savoie-Bernard et Lorrie Jean-Louis!
Cliquez ICI!
Chloé Savoie-Bernard est née à Montréal, où elle vit toujours. Elle a écrit plusieurs recueils de poésie, dont le dernier en lice est Sainte Chloé de l’amour (octobre 2021, Hexagone). Chez Triptyque, elle a publié le recueil de nouvelles Des femmes savantes (Triptyque, 2016) et dirigé le collectif Corps (2018). Mémoire d’encrier a fait paraitre sa première traduction littéraire de l’anglais, Anatomie de ma honte, de Tessa McWatt, en 2021. Après avoir soutenu une thèse sur la littérature féministe au Québec, elle est désormais stagiaire postdoctorale en recherche-création à l’Université Sherbrooke. Elle travaille de surcroit comme éditrice de poésie chez l’Hexagone et comme membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Estuaire.
Née à Montréal, Lorrie Jean-Louis publie en 2020 son premier recueil, La femme cent couleurs qui remporte le prix des Libraires en 2021. Elle a également une maîtrise en littérature. Elle publie son premier album jeunesse, Philibert, le garçon qui pliait son cœur en août 2021. L’album est illustré par Nahid Kazemi. Elle est aussi bibliothécaire. Elle se consacre à l’écriture.
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Karina Vernon & Bertrand Bickersteth
We are excited to announce that on Friday, February 18, the CLC will host poet, playwright, and essayist Bertrand Bickersteth in conversation with literary scholar Karina Vernon. Vernon’s The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology features poetry by Bickersteth, for whom Alberta is at once a “central source of inspiration” and an “unwilling muse.” Introduced by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, they will join us from 2 to 3 p.m. MST via Zoom.
Click HERE to watch the event on YouTube!
Karina Vernon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, Black aesthetics, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous solidarities. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2020 and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) she is working on a book project on the politics and aesthetics of relation of Black Canadian cultural achievement, including writing, music, film, and visual art.
Bertrand Bickersteth is a poet, playwright, essayist and educator who was born in Sierra Leone, raised in Alberta, partly educated in the U.K., and completely resident in the U.S. for several years. In 2021, CBC named him a Black writer to watch. His collection of poetry, The Response of Weeds, was a finalist for multiple awards and won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, and the 2021 High Plains Book Award in the category of First Book. He has been a contributor/columnist for CBC’s The Next Chapter as well as the CBC project Black on the Prairies. His most recent work was published in The Walrus (poetry) and The Sprawl (essay). His TEDx talk is called The Weight of Words. He is currently working on a new collection of poems highlighting the history of Black cowboys in western Canada. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and writes about Black identity on the Prairies.
Virtual Book Launch: The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields
Lovers of Carol Shields won't want to miss the virtual launch of The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields edited by U of A Professor Emerita Nora Foster Stovel and introduced by CLC Director Sarah Krotz!
Watch the dynamic event below.
Carol Shields, best known for her fiction writing, received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. But she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging from the early 1970s to Shields’s death in 2003.
In a detailed introduction and commentary, Nora Foster Stovel contextualizes these poems against the background of Shields’s life and oeuvre and the traditions of twentieth-century poetry. She demonstrates how poetry influenced and informed Shields’s novels; many of the poems, which constitute miniature narratives, illuminate Shields’s fiction and serve as the testing ground for metaphors she later employed in her prose works. Stovel delineates Shields’s career-long interest in character and setting, gender and class, self and other, actuality and numinousness, as well as revealing her subversive feminism, which became explicit in Reta Winter’s angry (unsent) letters in Unless and in the stories of poet Mary Swann and Daisy Goodwill in Swann and The Stone Diaries. The first complete collection of her poetry, this volume is essential for all readers of Carol Shields. Stovel’s detailed annotations, based on research in the Carol Shields fonds at Library and Archives Canada, reveal the poems in all their depth and resonance, and the dignity and consequence they afford to ordinary people.
Carol Shields (1935-2003) was an American-born Canadian award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, and poet.
Nora Foster Stovel is professor emerita, University of Alberta, and the author and editor of several books including Divining Margaret Laurence and Recognition and Revelation: Margaret Laurence’s Short Nonfiction Writings.
Thursday, January 27, 2022
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Cornel Bogle, Jumoke Verissimo & Uche Umezurike
All three of these writers and scholars are current students or graduates of the University of Alberta! Join them for a Brown Bag Lunch Reading via Zoom on January 27 at 12 p.m. MST.
Click HERE to watch the event on YouTube!
Cornel Bogle is a Jamaican-born PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Their research interests include Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian writing, auto/biography studies, diaspora studies, and contemporary poetics. Their doctoral project comprises a collection of lyric and found poetry that inquire into Caribbean Canadian literatures, epistolary practices, cross cultural poetics, literary friendships, and masculinities. Their writing has been published in The Journal of West Indian Literature, Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, sx salon, Moko Magazine, and Pree: Caribbean Writing.
Jumoke Verissimo is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, I am Memory and A Birth of Illusion. Her most recent work, A Small Silence, was awarded the Aidoo-Synder Prize in 2020 and was also nominated for the Ondaatje Prize in 2020. Her poems and novel have been translated into Italian, French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish, Japanese, and a number of other languages. Her latest work is a children’s book, Aduke and the Secret in the Moon (Cassava Republics, 2021).
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike holds a PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada. An alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), Umezurike has published his critical writing in Journal of African Cultural Studies, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, Postcolonial Text, and Cultural Studies. His research interests include postcolonial and Black diaspora literatures, gender, sexuality, and cultural studies. Umezurike is a co-editor of Wreaths for Wayfarers, an anthology of poems. His books Wish Maker (a children’s book) and Double Wahala, Double Trouble (a short story collection) are forthcoming from Masobe Books, Nigeria and Griots Lounge Publishing, Canada, respectively, in fall 2021.
Thursday, January 13, 2022
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Ifeoma Chinwuba
Join us January 13 for a Brown Bag Lunch Reading with our very own award-winning Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta, Ifeoma Chinwuba! Introduced by writer and PhD candidate Jumoke Verissimo, Ifeoma will read and answer questions via Zoom, from 12 to 1 p.m. MST.
Click HERE to watch the event on YouTube!
Before moving to Canada, Ifeoma Chinwuba worked in the Foreign Service of her native country, Nigeria. As a diplomat, she travelled to over sixty countries. These travels, she says, were really field trips. Ifeoma encounters cultures and civilizations "much like a botanist in the wild encounters species. An Igbo proverb has it that a traveller knows more than the homebound white hairs."
In Nigeria, Ifeoma grew up with story-telling. "In the absence of electricity and technology, adults regaled us children with tales of yore, entertaining and inculcating culture and good behaviour at the same time."
She is now the author of five books, made up of novels, poetry in dialogue, and a juvenile novella. Her books Merchants of Flesh and Waiting for Maria each won the Prose Prizes of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), while Waiting for Maria was on the Longlist of The Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2008.
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Cheryl Foggo
Join us November 24 for a virtual Brown Bag Lunch Reading with acclaimed author, filmmaker, screenwriter and playwright, Cheryl Foggo! Foggo’s award-winning film, John Ware Reclaimed, explores and restores nuance to the life of John Ware, an iconic Black cowboy who settled in southern Alberta in the 1880s. The event will take place from 2 - 3 PM MST.
If you can, please watch the film (free on nfb.ca) before the event. We look forward to seeing you there!
Cheryl Foggo is a multiple award winning playwright, author and filmmaker, whose work over the last 30 years has focused on the lives of Western Canadians of African descent. 2020 saw the release of her NFB feature documentary John Ware Reclaimed, as well as the 30th anniversary edition of her book Pourin’ Down Rain: A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West. In 2019 she wrote and directed the film Kicking Up a Fuss: The Charles Daniels Story. Her play The Sender can be viewed as part of Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures. Recently produced at the Citadel Theatre, her play Heaven is also scheduled for Lunchbox Theatre’s 2022 season. Cheryl is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Outstanding Artist Award, The Doug and Lois Mitchell Outstanding Calgary Artist Award and the Arts, Media and Entertainment Award from the Calgary Black Chambers, all in 2021.
Monday, November 15, 2021
CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast with Jael Richardson & Téa Mutonji
Catch Jael Richardson and Téa Mutonji in conversation on Episode 8 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast!
Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. The Stone Thrower was adapted into a children’s book in 2016 and was shortlisted for a Canadian picture book award. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC’s q. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and serves as the Executive Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutter Child is a dystopian story of courage and resilience and arrives January 2021 with HarperCollins Canada.
Born in Congo-Kinshasa, Téa Mutonji is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty, is the first title from Vivek Shraya’s imprint, VS. Books. It was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019), and won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award (2020) and the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji is the recipient of the Jill Davis Fellowship at NYU.
Friday, November 5, 2021
CLC Scholarly Lecture with Dr. Jody Mason
The “Creative Crusade”: Settler Colonial Antinomies and Books for Development in the Age of Three Worlds
Click HERE to watch the lecture!
Building on the work of scholars such as Frederick Cooper, who emphasizes the imperial genealogies of postwar development, this paper analyzes the book donation schemes created by Canada’s first NGO, the Overseas Book Centre / Centre du livre pour outre-mer (OBC / CLO), founded in Toronto in 1959 and still in existence today as the Canadian Organization for Development Through Education (CODE). I argue that the work of the OBC / CLO during the 1960s and 70s relied on a series of contradictions: while insisting on the unique ability of Canadian NGOs to act as “trusted brokers” in international development because of the nation’s own colonial lineage and while finding common cause at UNESCO with the decolonizing nations that were in this period pushing for transformations in the international communications order, OBC / CLO representatives were at the same time disavowing the racially differentiated status of Commonwealth members, as well as Canada’s ongoing colonization of Indigenous Peoples. At the same time, despite the attention in English Canadian and Quebecois nationalist circles by the late 1960s to the “colonized” status of the nation’s book cultures, OBC / CLO programs perpetuated neocolonial economic systems that failed to nourish local production capacities, shipping hundreds of tons of books annually to nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.
Jody Mason is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University (cross-appointed with the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies). She is the author of two books, Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures (U of Toronto P, 2013) and Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019). Recipient of the 2019 Gabrielle Roy Prize, Mason is currently undertaking SSHRC-funded research for a third book project that examines Canadian practices of book diplomacy and uses of books as foreign aid in the last half of the twentieth century.
Wednesday, October 20th, 2021
CLC & LitFest Present: Omar Mouallem
On October 20, 2021, don't miss this virtual CLC Brown Bag Lunch Reading with local filmmaker, writer and journalist Omar Mouallem!
Omar Mouallem is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Maclean’s, WIRED, and more. He coauthored the national bestseller Inside the Inferno: A Firefighter’s Story of the Brotherhood that Saved Fort McMurray, and codirected Digging in the Dirt, a documentary about mental health in the Alberta oil patch. In 2020, he founded Pandemic University School of Writing. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta, with his family. Follow him on Twitter @OmarMouallem and find him at OmarMouallem.com. Visit PrayingtotheWest.com for more information.
Wednesday, 20 October | 12 - 1 PM MDT | Via Zoom
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
VIRTUAL CLC Brown Bag Lunch Reading with Kaie Kellough
Our first Brown Bag Lunch Reading of the season features Griffin Poetry Prize-winning author Kaie Kellough, introduced by U of A PhD candidate and writer CJ Bogle!
Kaie Kellough is a novelist, poet, and sound performer. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and formal experiment. From western Canada, he lives in Montréal and has roots in Guyana, South America. His books include Dominoes at the Crossroads (short fiction, Véhicule 2020), Magnetic Equator (poetry, McClelland and Stewart 2019), and Accordéon (novel, ARP 2016).
Kaie’s writing has been awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. It has been listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, the Amazon/Walrus Foundation First Novel Award, and several other prizes.
Kaie’s vocal performance, recorded audio, and electronic narrative explore migration and the suspension of arrival. He creates mixed media compositions with saxophonist and synthesist Jason Sharp, and graphic designer Kevin Yuen Kit Lo. Their collaborative audio-visual performances have been filmed and broadcast by jazz festivals across Europe and Canada.
Kaie’s work has traveled to the UK, Australia, Asia, the Caribbean, and continental Europe. He continues to craft new passages.
Wednesday, 29 September | 12 - 1 PM MDT | Via Zoom
Congratulations to the University of Alberta Press!
The CLC Warmly Thanks Marie Carrière for a Decade as Director
After more than 10 years at the helm of the CLC, Marie Carrière is concluding her term as director and moving into a new position as Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts, while continuing to serve on the CLC’s Executive Board. The Centre has flourished under Marie’s passionate and talented leadership. Her development of a diverse and engaging program of Brown Bag Lunch readings, research seminars, scholarly lectures, international conferences, and high-profile literary events has enriched our community immeasurably. She created the web-based research initiative “Inside the Bag,” as well as the Centre’s postdoctoral fellowship. She brought the Kreisel Lecture series to a wider Canadian and International audience through partnerships with the CBC Radio programme, Ideas, and the University of Alberta Press, while nurturing a vibrant local community of readers and writers both in and beyond the University here in Edmonton. These are just a few of Marie’s many contributions to the vibrant life of this Centre. Through all of her initiatives, Marie made the CLC a warm and hospitable bilingual space connecting the many creative and scholarly communities that animate Canada’s literary culture. Merci, Marie; bonne chance and best wishes in your next adventure!