Lisa Alward at the Lorenzo Society Reading Series
2025-01-30 19:00 - 21:00 (America/St_Johns) | Oland Hall, Room 104, University of New Brunswick, NB, Canada
Lisa Alward, author of Cocktail, will be featured in the UNB Lorenzo Society’s Reading Series, hosted by Gemma Marr.
The reading will take place on Thursday, January 30 at 7PM.
More details to come here.
Grab a copy of Cocktail here!
ABOUT COCKTAIL
Winner of the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • Winner of the New Brunswick 2023 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction • One of the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall” • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2023 • A Tyee Best Book of 2023
A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he’s made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life’s watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.
ABOUT LISA ALWARD
Lisa Alward’s short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize and twice in Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, has been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, an honourable mention in the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and been featured on numerous other long lists, including for the CBC Story Prize and Prism International’s Jacob Zilber Prize (three times). She was born and grew up in Halifax and completed an English degree at the University of Toronto and an MA at Queen Mary College in London, England. In the eighties and early nineties, she worked in book publishing in Toronto, before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where at fifty she began to write stories. Cocktail (Biblioasis), which received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, is her debut collection.

Question Authority: Mark Kingwell at Vanier College
2025-02-05 13:30 - 15:00 (America/Toronto) | Vanier College, Vanier Auditorium A-103, 821 avenue Sainte-Croix, Montréal, QC, H4L 3X9, Canada
Mark Kingwell will be the keynote speaker at the Vanier College Humanities Symposium, with a talk on his new book Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations. Mark will discuss how to reclaim the democratic spirit of questioning authority and thinking.
The talk will take place on Wednesday, February 5 at 1:30PM. Presentations will take place in the Vanier Auditorium, A-103.
More details here.
Grab Question Authority here!
ABOUT QUESTION AUTHORITY
Philosopher Mark Kingwell thinks about thinking for yourself in an era of radical know-it-all-ism.
“Question authority,” the popular 1960s slogan commanded. “Think for yourself.” But what started as a counter-cultural catchphrase, playful in logic but serious in intent, has become a practical paradox. Yesterday’s social critics are the tone-policing tyrants of today, while those who claim “colourblindness” see no need to engage with critical theory at all. The resulting crisis of authority, made worse by rival political factions and chaotic public discourse, has exposed cracks in every facet of shared social life. Politics, academia, journalism, medicine, religion, science—every kind of institutional claim is now routinely subject to objection, investigation, and outright disbelief. A recurring feature of this comprehensive distrust of authority is the firm, often unshakeable, belief in personal righteousness and superiority: what Mark Kingwell calls our “addiction to conviction.”
In this critical survey of the predicament of contemporary authority, Kingwell draws on philosophical argument, personal reflection, and details from the headlines in an attempt to reclaim the democratic spirit of questioning authority and thinking for oneself. Defending a program of compassionate skepticism, Question Authority is a fascinating survey of the role of individual humility in public life and illuminates how we might each do our part in the infinite project of justice.
ABOUT MARK KINGWELL
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Mark Anthony Jarman at the Florence Writers Workshop
2025-02-08 10:30 - 13:00 (Europe/Zurich) | St. Mark’s Church, Via Maggio 16, Firenze, Italy
Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man: Selected Stories will guide this workshop on Beginnings and Endings with focus on short stories, although his lessons can be applied to other works too. Mark will lead participants through inspiring models and handy techniques from well-known short-story authors. Sponsored by Florence Literary Society, this is a free ticketed event.
The workshop will take place at St. Mark’s Church in Firenze, on Saturday, February 8 at 10:30AM. Tickets available here.
Note: due to space limitations, only ticket-holders will be admitted. Should the event be sold-out, a waitlist will be available. The first 30 minutes will be a meet and greet, with time to learn more about Florence Literary Society and/or sign up for a membership.
Grab Burn Man here!
ABOUT BURN MAN
A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024
Drawing together the best of his short fiction published over the last four decades, Burn Man: Selected Stories showcases Mark Anthony Jarman’s sharply observed characters and acrobatic, voice-driven prose in stories that walk the tightrope between the commonplace and the mystical. With an insightful introduction from John Metcalf, this revelatory selection highlights one of the most spirited and singular masters of the short story form.
ABOUT MARK ANTHONY JARMAN
Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. He was an acquisitions editor for Oberon Press, and introduced many new writers through the Coming Attractions series. He is also the editor of Best Canadian Stories 2023. His novel Salvage King Ya!, is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey ﬁction. Widely published in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia, Jarman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the University of New Brunswick, where he has been ﬁction editor of The Fiddlehead literary journal since 1999. He is also co-editor of literary journal CAMEL.

Republic of Consciousness Prize (US/CAN) Virtual Longlist Party
2025-02-19 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | BC
Celebrate the Republic of Consciousness Prize (US/CAN) longlisting of Your Absence Is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, translated by Philip Roughton, at this virtual longlist party! The celebration is free and open to the public, and will feature the six judges as hosts, representatives from the longlisted presses as well as authors and translators reading from their works. There will also be a Q&A period.
The virtual celebration will take place over Zoom on February 19, at 6PM CT / 7PM EST. Zoom link here.
Grab Your Absence Is Darkness here.
ABOUT YOUR ABSENCE IS DARKNESS
Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness US and Canada Prize • A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2024 • A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2024
A spellbinding saga about the inhabitants and inheritors of one rural community, by one of Iceland’s most beloved novelists.
A man comes to awareness in a cold church in the Icelandic countryside, not knowing who he is, why he’s there or how he arrived, with a stranger staring mockingly from a few pews back. Startled by the man’s cryptic questions, he leaves—and plunges into a history spanning centuries, a past pressed into his genes that sinks him closer to some knowledge of himself. A city girl is drawn to the fjords by the memory of a blue-eyed gaze, and a generation earlier, a farmer’s wife writes an essay about earthworms that changes the course of lives. A pastor who writes letters to dead poets falls in love with a faraway stranger, and a rock musician, plagued by cosmic loneliness, discovers that his past has been a lie. Faced with the violence of fate and the effects of choices, made and avoided, that cascade between them, each discovers the cost of following the magnetic needle of the heart.
Incandescent and elemental, hope-filled and humane, Your Absence Is Darkness is a comedy about mortality, music, and the strange salve of time, and a spellbinding saga of death, desire, and the perfect agony of star-crossed love.
ABOUT JON KALMAN STEFANSSON
Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s novels have been nominated three times for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, and his novel Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night received the Icelandic Prize for Literature in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Award. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels (longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) and The Heart of Man (winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize). A subsequent novel, Fish Have No Feet, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017.
ABOUT PHILIP ROUGHTON
Philip Roughton is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous writers including Halldór Laxness. He was the winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man, and shortlisted for the same prize for About the Size of the Universe.

Ira Wells at the Toronto Public Library
2025-02-25 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St, Toronto, ON, M4W 2G8, Canada
As part of Freedom to Read Week, Toronto Public Library presents critic, essayist, and associate professor at the University of Toronto, Ira Wells to celebrate the publication of his new title On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy, in conversation with host Charles Foran.
The culture wars have found fertile ground within public schools and libraries. We’re witnessing a notable increase in book challenges and attempts to remove titles from bookshelves across North America and, as we know, this is nothing new. In On Book Banning, Ira Wells argues that conservatives and progressives alike are teaching our children that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright censorship. How might we collectively push back and help reinforce our personal freedom to read? And how do we ensure that our democratic spaces continue to be welcoming spaces for all viewpoints?
The event is free, and will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 7PM in the Jack Rabinovitch Reading Room at the Toronto Reference Library.
More details here.
Grab On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

On Book Banning: Ira Wells at the Centre for Free Expression
2025-02-26 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Toronto) | BC
Join Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, in a Freedom to Read Week conversation with Centre for Free Expression Director James L. Turk, at this time when censorship is becoming popular and pervasive. The event is co-sponsored by Canadian School Libraries, Edmonton Public Library, PEN Canada, Toronto Public Library, Vancouver Public Library.
This free virtual event will take place on Wednesday, February 26 at 7pm EST. Zoom link to event: torontomu.zoom.us/j/91941276567
More details here.
Grab On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

Mark Kingwell at the Toronto Public Library
2025-02-27 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St, Toronto, ON, M4W 2G8, Canada
Mark Kingwell will be discussing his new book Question Authority at the Toronto Public Library, in conversation with host Randy Boyagoda.
The event is free, and will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 7PM in the Jack Rabinovitch Reading Room at the Toronto Reference Library.
More details here.
Grab Question Authority here!
ABOUT QUESTION AUTHORITY
Philosopher Mark Kingwell thinks about thinking for yourself in an era of radical know-it-all-ism.
“Question authority,” the popular 1960s slogan commanded. “Think for yourself.” But what started as a counter-cultural catchphrase, playful in logic but serious in intent, has become a practical paradox. Yesterday’s social critics are the tone-policing tyrants of today, while those who claim “colourblindness” see no need to engage with critical theory at all. The resulting crisis of authority, made worse by rival political factions and chaotic public discourse, has exposed cracks in every facet of shared social life. Politics, academia, journalism, medicine, religion, science—every kind of institutional claim is now routinely subject to objection, investigation, and outright disbelief. A recurring feature of this comprehensive distrust of authority is the firm, often unshakeable, belief in personal righteousness and superiority: what Mark Kingwell calls our “addiction to conviction.”
In this critical survey of the predicament of contemporary authority, Kingwell draws on philosophical argument, personal reflection, and details from the headlines in an attempt to reclaim the democratic spirit of questioning authority and thinking for oneself. Defending a program of compassionate skepticism, Question Authority is a fascinating survey of the role of individual humility in public life and illuminates how we might each do our part in the infinite project of justice.
ABOUT MARK KINGWELL
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Freedom to Read Week with Ira Wells (On Book Banning)
2025-02-27 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Halifax) | BC
In celebration of Freedom to Read Week in Canada, join Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy, for thought-provoking online conversation Dr. Shannon Murray, held by Bookmark Bookstores.
This virtual event will take place on Thursday, February 27 at 7PM ADT. Reserve your free ticket today here, and you will be emailed a Zoom link on the morning of the event to the email you include with your registration.
More details here.
Grab On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

On Book Banning: Ira Wells at Words Festival
2025-03-04 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Toronto) | BC
Join Ira Wells as he speaks about his new book On Book Banning, a lively, accessible survey of the pressing question of literary censorship in our times of crisis and change, in this virtual event with the Words Festival. Ira will be speaking in conversation with host Josh Lambier.
This free virtual event will take place on Tuesday, March 4 at 7pm EST over Zoom.
More details and event link here.
Grab On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

On Book Banning: Windsor Launch!
2025-03-06 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Biblioasis Bookshop, 1520 Wyandotte St E, Windsor, ON, N9A 3L2, Canada
Join us in celebrating the Windsor launch of On Book Banning by Ira Wells! Ira will be interviewed about his new book, followed by an audience Q&A. Books will be available for sale and signing, and snacks and drinks will be provided for this evening of lively discussion.
This event will take place at Biblioasis Bookshop on Thursday, March 6 at 7PM EST.
Grab On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

UNMET: stephanie roberts at Ottawa VerseFest
2025-03-29 17:00 - 18:00 (America/Toronto) | The Manx, 370 Elgin St, Ottawa, ON, K2P 1N1, Canada
stephanie roberts, author of the forthcoming poetry collection UNMET, will be at the Ottawa VerseFest! stephanie will be part of the Plan 99 Reading Series, and will be joined by fellow poets Bridget Huh and Sara Berkeley.
The event will take place at the Manx Pub on Saturday, March 29 at 5PM.
More details here.
Preorder UNMET here!
ABOUT UNMET
This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.
ABOUT STEPHANIE ROBERTS
stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

On Book Banning & Barfly: Ira Wells & Michael Lista at Biblio Bash
2025-04-03 17:30 - 19:00 (America/Toronto) | Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge St, Toronto, ON, M4W 2G8, Canada
Join Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, and Michael Lista, author of Barfly, for this Biblio Bash at the Toronto Reference Library!
This event will take place on Thursday April 3 at 5:30PM EST.
More details to come.
Grab On Book Banning here!
Get Barfly here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.
ABOUT BARFLY
We’re in love, but we’re still Millennials. / What’s wrong with our hearts is congenital.
In Barfly, the poet comes back to haunt himself, and us. In this incomparable third collection, his first in a decade, Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry with humour, pugnacity, and a deeply singular voice. Splicing Byronic rhymes and Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.
ABOUT MICHAEL LISTA
Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet. He has worked as a book columnist for the National Post and as the poetry editor of The Walrus. He is the author of four books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The Scarborough; Strike Anywhere, a collection of his writing about literature, television and culture; and The Human Scale: Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems, a book of longform journalism. His essays and investigative stories have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus, Canadaland, and Toronto Life. He is a contributing editor at Toronto Life and Maclean’s. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Awards for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story “The Sting” is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey into a television series for Apple TV+.

Ripper: Ottawa Launch
2025-04-05 07:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | St. John the Evangelist, 154 Somerset Street West, Ottawa, ON, K2P 0H8, Canada
Join us in Ottawa for the launch of Mark Bourrie‘s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre! Mark will be reading from his new book, along with a discussion with host Sean Wilson. Books will be available for sale and signing, courtesy of Perfect Books.
The launch will take place at St. John the Evangelist Church on Saturday, April 5 at 7PM.
Order a copy of Ripper here!
ABOUT RIPPER
As Canada heads towards a pivotal election, bestselling author Mark Bourrie charts the rise of Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and considers the history and potential cost of the politics of division.
Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.
Pierre Poilievre has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. In Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, bestselling author Mark Bourrie, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.
ABOUT MARK BOURRIE
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, and the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia.

Ripper: Virtual Talk with Mark Bourrie & The Tyee
2025-04-10 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Vancouver) | BC
Mark Bourrie, author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, will be interviewed by David Beers, founding editor of The Tyee, for this special online author talk hosted by Upstart & Crow.
The launch will take place on Zoom on Thursday, April 10 at 6:30PM PST / 9:30PM EST.
Ticket options and more details here.
Order a copy of Ripper here!
ABOUT RIPPER
As Canada heads towards a pivotal election, bestselling author Mark Bourrie charts the rise of Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and considers the history and potential cost of the politics of division.
Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.
Pierre Poilievre has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. In Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, bestselling author Mark Bourrie, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.
ABOUT MARK BOURRIE
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, and the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia.

Luke Hathaway at Steeple Green Books
2025-04-13 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Toronto) | Steeple Green Books, 26 East Petpeswick Rd., Musquodoboit Harbour, NS, Canada
Join poet Luke Hathaway for a reading at Steeple Green Books! Luke, author of several collections including The Affirmations and Years, Months, and Days (recently released in its 2nd edition), will be reading from his works and books will be available for sale and signing.
The event will take place on Sunday, April 13 at 3PM.
Grab a copy of The Affirmations here and Years, Months, and Days here!
ABOUT YEARS, MONTHS, AND DAYS
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018
A transfiguration of Mennonite hymns into heartbreaking lyric poems, Years, Months, and Days is a moving meditation on the possibility of translation. Bridging secular spirituality and holy reverence with the commonalities of life, death, love, and hope, Luke Hathaway explores the connection between hymn and poem. The sparse and tender phrasing of Years, Months, and Days is an offering of words to music, made in the spirit of a shared love—for life, for a particular landscape and its rhythms—that animates poem and prayer alike.
ABOUT THE AFFIRMATIONS
Shortlisted for the 2023 J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award • Winner of the 2021 Confederation Poets Prize • One of The Times’ Best Poetry Books of 2022 • A CBC Best Poetry Book of 2022 • Nominated for the 2023 ReLit Award for Poetry
The mystics who coined the phrase ‘the way of affirmation’ understood the apocalyptic nature of the word yes, the way it can lead out of one life and into another. Moving among the languages of Christian conversion, Classical metamorphosis, seasonal transformation, and gender transition, Luke Hathaway tells the story of the love that rewired his being, asking each of us to experience the transfiguration that can follow upon saying yes—with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul, with all one’s mind, with all one’s strength … and with all one’s body, too.
ABOUT LUKE HATHAWAY
Luke Hathaway is an internationally-acclaimed poet, lyricist/librettist, and theatre-maker. Of his 2022 book The Affirmations, Times critic Graeme Richardson writes: “Mainstream poetry counts as non-conformist compared with popular culture, but it nevertheless develops its own conformities . . . Luke Hathaway, a Canadian trans poet, offers . . . a point of difference. Influenced by John Donne and George Herbert, and above all by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Hathaway constructs small marvels of what one poem here calls ‘loving jugglery’: a feast of transformations.” Hathaway is a co-creator of the immersive opera Eurydice Fragments (re:naissance opera, 2024), the song-cycle The Sign of Jonas (Milltown Records, 2024), and many other performance works. He teaches English and creative writing at Saint Mary’s University.

On Book Banning: Flying Books Author Social
2025-04-14 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Flying Books, 371 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A4, Canada
Join us in Toronto for an author social at Flying Books, featuring On Book Banning by Ira Wells! Ira will be in conversation with fellow author Russell Smith. Books will be available for sale and signing.
This event will take place on Monday, April 14 at 7:30 PM.
More details here.
Grab On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

UNMET: stephanie roberts at the Third Thursday Reading Series
2025-04-17 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Best Western Cobourg Inn, 930 Burnham St, Cobourg, ON, Canada
stephanie roberts, author of the poetry collection UNMET, will be a reader for Cobourg’s Third Thursday Reading Series! stephanie will be joined by Nathanael Jones and Laila Malik for this reading series hosted by James Pickersgill.
The event will take place in the Northumberland Room at the Best Western Cobourg Inn on Thursday, April 17 at 7:30PM. Admission is PWYC (Pay What You Can).
More details here.
Order UNMET here!
ABOUT UNMET
This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.
ABOUT STEPHANIE ROBERTS
stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

Ripper: Almonte Book Signing and Meet & Greet
2025-04-19 10:00 - 12:00 (America/Toronto) | Mill Street Books, 52 Mill St, Almonte, ON, K0A 1A0, Canada
Come out and meet Mark Bourrie, the author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre! Mark will be signing copies of the new political biography at Almonte’s Mill Street Books on Saturday, April 19 at 7PM.
Check out Ripper here!
ABOUT RIPPER
As Canada heads towards a pivotal election, bestselling author Mark Bourrie charts the rise of Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and considers the history and potential cost of the politics of division.
Six weeks into the Covid pandemic, New York Times columnist David Brooks identified two types of Western politicians: rippers and weavers. Rippers, whether on the right or the left, see politics as war. They don’t care about the destruction that’s caused as they fight for power. Weavers are their opposite: people who try to fix things, who want to bring people together and try to build consensus. At the beginning of the pandemic, weavers seemed to be winning. Five years later, as Canada heads towards a pivotal election, that’s no longer the case. Across the border, a ripper is remaking the American government. And for the first time in its history, Canada has its own ripper poised to assume power.
Pierre Poilievre has enjoyed most of the advantages of the mainstream Canadian middle class. Yet he’s long been the angriest man on the political stage. In Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, bestselling author Mark Bourrie, winner of the Charles Taylor Prize, charts Poilievre’s rise through the political system, from teenage volunteer to outspoken Opposition leader known for cutting soundbites and theatrics. Bourrie shows how we arrived at this divisive moment in our history, one in which rippers are poised to capitalize on conflict. He shows how Poilievre and this new style of politics have gained so much ground—and warns of what it will cost us if they succeed.
ABOUT MARK BOURRIE
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, and the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia.

Kev Lambert and Donald Winkler at Blue Metropolis Festival: Translation Bliss
2025-04-26 11:30 - 13:00 (America/New_York) | Hôtel 10 – Salle Jardin, 10 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H2X 4C9, Canada
Author Kev Lambert and translator Donald Winkler (May Our Joy Endure, Querelle of Roberval, You Will Love What You Have Killed) will be attending the Blue Metropolis Festival! They will be joining a discussion on the art of translation with author Anne Michaels and translator Dominique Fortier, moderated by Katia Grubisic. How to read a novel? How to make a voice heard in another language? What subtle dialogue does translation create?
The event will take place on Saturday, April 26th at 11:30 AM.
More details here.
Get May Our Joy Endure here!
ABOUT KEV LAMBERT
Born in 1992, Kev Lambert grew up in Chicoutimi, Quebec. May Our Joy Endure won the Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. Their second novel, Querelle de Roberval, was acclaimed in Quebec, where it was nominated for four literary prizes; in France, where it was a finalist for the Prix Médicis and Prix Le Monde and won the Prix Sade; and Canada, where it was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Their first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, also widely acclaimed, won a prize for the best novel from the Saguenay region and was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. Lambert lives in Montreal.
ABOUT DONALD WINKLER
Donald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-to-English translation. He lives in Montreal.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me: AfterWords Spring Foreword
2025-04-26 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Halifax) | Park Place Theatre, 5480 Point Pleasant Drive, Halifax, NS, B3H 0B4, Canada
Mélikah Abdelmoumen, author of Baldwin, Styron, and Me (trans. Catherine Khordoc), will be a part of the AfterWords Spring Foreword event! Mélikah will be in conversation with Vinh Nguyen and host Fazeela Jiwa. Books will be available courtesy of King’s Co-op Books.
The event will take place at Park Place Theatre on Saturday, April 26 at 6PM.
More details here.
Grab Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!
ABOUT BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME
An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.
Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.
ABOUT MÉLIKAH ABDELMOUMEN
Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. She lived in Lyon, France, from 2005 to 2017. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the Université de Montréal and has published many articles, short stories, novels, and essays, including Les désastrées (2013), Douze ans en France (2018), and Petite-Ville (2024). She worked as an editor with the Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature in Montreal until 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, a Québec literary magazine, from 2021 to 2024. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is her tenth book (and the first to be translated).

Lisa Alward at the Frye Festival
2025-04-27 13:00 - 14:30 (America/Moncton) | Aberdeen Cultural Centre, 140 rue Botsford, Moncton, NB, Canada
Come on out to this year’s Frye Festival, where Lisa Alward, author of Cocktail, will be doing a Flash Frye reading of the collection for the panel ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ The panel, which features books that wrestle with bodily autonomy and the impossible expectations that come with being a woman, will be moderated by Alisa Arsenault and features a discussion between Shashi Bhat and Siobhan Gallagher.
The event will take place at the Aberdeen Cultural Centre on Sunday, April 27 at 1PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab Cocktail here!
ABOUT COCKTAIL
Winner of the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction • Winner of the New Brunswick 2023 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for Fiction • One of the Globe and Mail’s “Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall” • Listed in CBC Books Fiction to Read in Fall 2023 • A Miramichi Reader Best Book of 2023 • A Tyee Best Book of 2023
A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he’s made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life’s watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.
ABOUT LISA ALWARD
Lisa Alward’s short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize and twice in Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, has been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, an honourable mention in the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and been featured on numerous other long lists, including for the CBC Story Prize and Prism International’s Jacob Zilber Prize (three times). She was born and grew up in Halifax and completed an English degree at the University of Toronto and an MA at Queen Mary College in London, England. In the eighties and early nineties, she worked in book publishing in Toronto, before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where at fifty she began to write stories. Cocktail (Biblioasis), which received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, is her debut collection.

Best Canadian Poetry 2025: Toronto Launch
2025-04-29 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | Queen Books, 914 Queen St E, Toronto, ON, M4M 1J5, Canada
Join us at the end of National Poetry Month to celebrate Best Canadian Poetry 2025! This reading will feature a number of poets from the anthology, including Cassidy McFadzean, Molly Peacock, Shannon Quinn, Ronna Bloom, Pauline Peters, and Fareh Malik, and will be hosted by longtime series editor Anita Lahey. Books will be available for sale and signing from Queen Books.
The event will take place on Tuesday, April 29 at 6:30PM.
Grab a copy of Best Canadian Poetry 2025 here!
Check out the full series, with Essays and Stories, here!
ABOUT BEST CANADIAN POETRY 2025
Selected by editor Aislinn Hunter, the 2025 edition of Best Canadian Poetry showcases the best Canadian poetry writing published in 2023.
Featuring:
Hollie Adams • George Amabile • Erin Bedford • Billy-Ray Belcourt • Bertrand Bickersteth • Elisabeth Blair • Ronna Bloom • Alison Braid-Fernandez • Robert Bringhurst • Emily Cann • Anne Carson • Molly Cross-Blanchard • Lorna Crozier • Kayla Czaga • Evelyna Ekoko-Kay • Kate Genevieve • Susan Gillis • Sue Goyette • Catherine Graham • Henry Heavyshield • Gerald Hill • Alexander Hollenberg • Kim June Johnson • Eve Joseph • Evelyn Lau • Y. S. Lee • D. A. Lockhart • Fareh Malik • David Martin • Domenica Martinello • Cassidy McFadzean • Carmelita McGrath • Erín Moure • Tolu Oloruntoba • Catherine Owen • Molly Peacock • Miranda Pearson • Pauline Peters • Amanda Proctor • Shannon Quinn • Armand Garnet Ruffo • Anne Simpson • Carolyn Smart • Karen Solie • Catherine St. Denis • Owen Torrey • Michael Trussler • Sara Truuvert • Rob Winger • Jaeyun Yoo

On Oil: Don Gillmor at Words Festival
2025-04-29 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Toronto) | BC
Join Don Gillmor as he speaks about his new book On Oil, a searching reconsideration of our long, complex, tortured relationship with oil, in this virtual event with the Words Festival. Don will be in conversation with host and Words Director Josh Lambier.
This free virtual event will take place on Tuesday, April 29 at 7pm EST over Zoom.
More details and event link here.
Grab On Oil here!
ABOUT ON OIL
A journalist, and former roughneck, considers our long, complex, tortured relationship with oil.
Oil has dominated our lives for the last century. It has given us warmth, progress, and life-threatening pollution. It has been a gift and is now a threat. It has started wars, ended wars, and infiltrated governments—in some cases, effectively become the government. And now oil’s enduring mythology is facing a messy, complicated twilight.
In On Oil, Don Gillmor, who worked as a roughneck on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta, looks at how the industry has changed over the decades and illustrates the ways our dependence on oil has led to regulatory capture, in Canada and elsewhere, and contributed to armed conflict and war across the world. Gillmor documents the myriad ways that oil companies have misdirected environmental action and misinformed the public about climate concerns and illuminates where we went wrong—and how we might yet change course.
ABOUT DON GILLMOR
Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. He is the author of three novels, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata, a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at The Walrus, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me: Montreal Launch
2025-05-02 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | Librairie Bertrand, 430 Rue St. Pierre, Montreal, QC, H2Y 2M5, Canada
Join us in Montreal to celebrate the launch of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc! Mélikah will be reading from her new book at the event, and copies will be available for sale and signing.
The launch will take place at Librairie Bertrand on Friday, May 2 at 5PM.
Grab Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!
ABOUT BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME
An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.
Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.
ABOUT MÉLIKAH ABDELMOUMEN
Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. She lived in Lyon, France, from 2005 to 2017. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the Université de Montréal and has published many articles, short stories, novels, and essays, including Les désastrées (2013), Douze ans en France (2018), and Petite-Ville (2024). She worked as an editor with the Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature in Montreal until 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, a Québec literary magazine, from 2021 to 2024. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is her tenth book (and the first to be translated).

On Oil: Don Gillmor at Ottawa Writers Festival
2025-05-03 16:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0N4, Canada
Join Don Gillmor as he speaks at the Ottawa Writers Festival about his new book On Oil, in which the journalist and former roughneck considers our long, complex, tortured relationship with oil.
This event, hosted by Jennifer Baker, will take place on Saturday, May 3 at 4PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab On Oil here!
ABOUT ON OIL
A journalist, and former roughneck, considers our long, complex, tortured relationship with oil.
Oil has dominated our lives for the last century. It has given us warmth, progress, and life-threatening pollution. It has been a gift and is now a threat. It has started wars, ended wars, and infiltrated governments—in some cases, effectively become the government. And now oil’s enduring mythology is facing a messy, complicated twilight.
In On Oil, Don Gillmor, who worked as a roughneck on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta, looks at how the industry has changed over the decades and illustrates the ways our dependence on oil has led to regulatory capture, in Canada and elsewhere, and contributed to armed conflict and war across the world. Gillmor documents the myriad ways that oil companies have misdirected environmental action and misinformed the public about climate concerns and illuminates where we went wrong—and how we might yet change course.
ABOUT DON GILLMOR
Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. He is the author of four novels, Breaking and Entering, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata, a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at The Walrus, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.

On Book Banning: Ira Wells at Ottawa Writers Festival
2025-05-04 02:30 - 03:30 (America/New_York) | BC
Join Ira Wells as he speaks about his new book On Book Banning, a lively, accessible survey of the pressing question of literary censorship in our times of crisis and change, with host Adrian Harewood at the Ottawa Writers Festival. Book will be available for purchase from Perfect Books.
This event will take place on Sunday, May 4 at 2:30PM.
Tickets and more details here.
Grab On Book Banning here!
ABOUT ON BOOK BANNING
The freedom to read is under attack.
From the destruction of libraries in ancient Rome to today’s state-sponsored efforts to suppress LGBTQ+ literature, book bans arise from the impulse toward social control. In a survey of legal cases, literary controversies, and philosophical arguments, Ira Wells illustrates the historical opposition to the freedom to read and argues that today’s conservatives and progressives alike are warping our children’s relationship with literature and teaching them that the solution to opposing viewpoints is outright expurgation. At a moment in which our democratic institutions are buckling under the stress of polarization, On Book Banning is both rallying cry and guide to resistance for those who will always insist upon reading for themselves.
ABOUT IRA WELLS
Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is Norman Jewison: A Director’s Life. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.

UNMET: Montreal Launch
2025-05-06 17:30 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | L’Euguelionne, 1426 Rue Beaudry, Montreal, QC, H2L 3E5, Canada
Come out and celebrate the launch of stephanie roberts new poetry collection UNMET! stephanie will be reading from her collection at L’Euguelionne, with additional readings by poets Sarah Burgoyne and Leslie Roach. Books will be available for sale and signing.
The launch will take place on Tuesday, May 6 at 5:30PM.
Get a copy of UNMET here!
ABOUT UNMET
This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.
ABOUT STEPHANIE ROBERTS
stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me: Ottawa Launch
2025-05-16 20:00 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0N4, Canada
Join author Mélikah Abdelmoumen and translator Catherine Khordoc for the Ottawa launch of Baldwin, Styron, and Me, in partnership with the Ottawa Writers Fest. Host Peter Schneider will sit down with Mélikah and Catherine for a discussion on their acclaimed book. Copies will be available for sale and signing from Perfect Books.
The launch will take place at Library and Archives Canada on Friday, May 16 at 8PM.
Free tickets are required to attend in person. The event will live-stream from this page. No ticket required to watch online.
Grab Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!
ABOUT BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME
An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.
Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.
ABOUT MÉLIKAH ABDELMOUMEN
Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. She lived in Lyon, France, from 2005 to 2017. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the Université de Montréal and has published many articles, short stories, novels, and essays, including Les désastrées (2013), Douze ans en France (2018), and Petite-Ville (2024). She worked as an editor with the Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature in Montreal until 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, a Québec literary magazine, from 2021 to 2024. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is her tenth book (and the first to be translated).

UNMET: stephanie roberts at the Halifax Public Library
2025-05-18 14:00 - 15:30 (America/Halifax) | Halifax Public Library, 5440 Spring Garden Rd, Halifax, NS, B3J 1E9, Canada
Come out for an afternoon of poetry with stephanie roberts, who will be reading from her new poetry collection UNMET! Local poet Annick MacAskill will join the event. Books will be available for sale and signing by King’s Co-op.
The event will take place at the Halifax Central Library on Sunday, May 18 at 2PM.
More details here.
Get a copy of UNMET here!
ABOUT UNMET
This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.
ABOUT STEPHANIE ROBERTS
stephanie roberts is the author of rushes from the river disappointment, a Quebec Writers’ Federation finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018, a recipient of the Sage Hill Writing award for Black Excellence, and a Canada Council of the Arts grantee. Her work has been critically praised and featured in well over one hundred periodicals and anthologies, in print and online, throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a citizen of Canada, Panama, and the US, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.

Lazer Lederhendler at the French-American Translation Awards Ceremony!
2025-06-25 18:00 - 22:00 (America/New_York) | New York Society Library, 53 E 79th St, New York, NY, 10075, United States
Lazer Lederhendler, whose translation of Christophe Bernard’s The Hollow Beast won the French-American Translation Prize for Fiction will be honored at the annual Awards Ceremony in New York, along with Nonfiction winner John Lambert and the finalists. Following an opening cocktail hour, the event will begin with a special conversation featuring keynote speaker Paul LeClerc.
The spotlight will then turn to the winners, who will receive their awards from members of the jury, present their translations, and take questions from the audience. Join this a lively evening and raise a glass to the art of translation, and the channels of French-American cultural exchange it serves to open!
This event, which will take place on June 25 at 6PM at the New York Society Library, is free with RSVP. Seating is limited and first-come, first-served.
More details and RSVP here.
Grab The Hollow Beast here!
