An Afternoon of Poetry: Robyn Sarah at Motel Chelsea
2026-05-24 14:00 - 15:00 (America/Toronto) | Motel Chelsea, 1418 Rte 105, Chelsea, QC, Canada
Come on out to Motel Chelsea, where Robyn Sarah, author of We’re Somewhere Else Now: Poems 2016–2024, will be joined by Ken Victor for an afternoon of poetry reading.
The event will take place on Sunday, May 24 at 2PM ET.
More details here!
Grab We’re Somewhere Else Now here!
ABOUT WE’RE SOMEWHERE ELSE NOW
Poet, writer, literary editor, and musician, Robyn Sarah has lived in Montreal since early childhood. Her writing began to appear in Canadian literary magazines in the 1970s while she completed studies at McGill University and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. As well, she has published two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon (2021), that interweaves her youth as a professional-track clarinetist with her return at fifty-nine (after a lapse of thirty-five years) to the piano teacher who was her life mentor. From 2010 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books.
ABOUT ROBYN SARAH
A California Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2025
In her first collection of new poems in a decade, Robyn Sarah chronicles the pandemic years with quiet wisdom and her flair for meshing the familiar with the numinous.
We’re Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.

SILVER LAKE: Toronto Launch
2026-06-01 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Toronto) | Flying Books, 371 Queen St W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2A4, Canada
Join us in Toronto for the launch of Alex Pugsley’s Silver Lake, the third installment in his Aubrey McKee series. Alex will be reading from the novel, and books will be available for sale and signing.
The launch will take place at Flying Books on Monday, June 1 at 6:30PM.
Grab a copy of Silver Lake here!
Check out the previous Aubrey McKee books here.
ABOUT SILVER LAKE
It was on a fully dark February night when I went to the Communist’s Daughter to meet a friend who never showed that my life in movies began.
So begins the third installment in a series of standalone novels about the life and travels of Aubrey McKee. Set in Toronto and Silver Lake, a creative neighbourhood in Los Angeles, the novel chronicles with infectious élan Aubrey’s journey from broken-hearted derelict to B-movie production assistant, comedy writer, and science-ﬁction screenwriter, all the way up to feature ﬁlm director. Along the way, he encounters long-ago childhood friends, manic producers, NHL players turned talk show hosts, Victoria’s Secret models, impulsive movie stars . . . and his own rising destiny.
ABOUT ALEX PUGSLEY
Alex Pugsley has worked on over 185 produced episodes of television, writing for performers such as Lauren Ash, Scott Thompson, Dan Aykroyd, and Michael Cera. He wrote and directed the feature ﬁlm Dirty Singles which won for him the Irving Avrich Emerging Filmmaker Award at TIFF. Following the publication of his first novel, Aubrey McKee, he was named one of CBC’s Writers to Watch. His ﬁrst story collection, Shimmer, was nominated for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, and his most recent novel, The Education of Aubrey McKee, was long listed for the Toronto Book Awards. His next book, The Hungarian Ballroom, an Aubrey McKee novella, is forthcoming from Biblioasis. More information can be found at www.alexpugsley.com.

Don Gillmor at TIFA: Uncovering Hidden Fractures
2026-06-06 14:00 - 15:00 (America/Toronto) | Victoria College Chapel, 91 Charles St W, Toronto, ON, M5S 2C7, Canada
Don Gillmor, author of Cherry Beach, will be appearing at TIFA for the panel ‘Uncovering Hidden Fractures’. Don will be joined by Lilja Sigurðardóttir for a conversation on building atmosphere in modern crime fiction. The event will be moderated by Steven Beattie, and a book signing will follow.
The event will take place on Saturday, June 6 at 2PM. A festival pass is required.
More details here.
Get Cherry Beach here!
ABOUT CHERRY BEACH
A brutal murder exposes secret real estate deals, a corrupt police force, and the dark heart of a city simmering with unrest.
When two girls are found murdered in a rundown Toronto highrise, Jamieson Abel and his partner are first on the scene. Abel is a law school dropout turned police detective chronically at odds with his colleagues and perpetually on the brink of being terminated, and Davis is the department’s only female officer of colour. Both understand their being partnered as a form of banishment, but when the details of the murder go public at the start of an excruciatingly hot summer, they find themselves thrust into the centre of a front page investigation that will bring to a head the city’s long history of shady real estate deals and racist disenfranchisement.
Intricately plotted and brilliantly layered, Cherry Beach is a gripping literary crime novel that examines class, race, and corruption in the most multicultural city in the world.
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 five novels, Cherry Beach, 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, 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.

Vancouver Double Launch: DECADENCE and WHAT ENDURES
2026-08-06 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Vancouver) | Upstart & Crow, 1387 Railspur Alley, Granville Island
Join the fine folks at Upstart & Crow for the launch party of two Biblioasis books: Decadence by Richard Kelly Kemick and What Endures by Pauline Holdstock! This will be a night of joyful readings and conversation between the two authors. Books will be on hand for sale and signing.
This event is free, but capacity is limited, so please RSVP here!
Get Decadence here!
Get What Endures here!
ABOUT DECADENCE
“The genre of memoir is bullshit (as I humbly posit). No one actually lives like they are moving along some grand Freytag’s triangle. Rather, we live within isolated instances, specific struggles and victories, which, when compiled, form a narrative.”—Richard Kelly Kemick
In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick’s “accidental memoir of a sort,” the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions—volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high school plays, Christmas villages, love—out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminiscent of the three Davids—Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace—these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life—quiet and desperate as it may at times be—worth celebrating.
ABOUT RICHARD KELLY KEMICK
Richard Kelly Kemick is an award-winning poet, journalist, and fiction writer. His debut collection of short stories, Hello, Horse, was published by Biblioasis in 2024. He is also the author of I Am Herod (available on audiobook), the poetry collection Caribou Run, and the stage play Amor De Cosmos: A Delusional Musical. Richard’s limited series podcast, Natural Life, is an intimate and unexpectedly honest documentary on his cousin, who is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan.
ABOUT WHAT ENDURES
“Funny and serious, with a subtle power that accumulates like a shoplifter adding coat upon coat.”—Mark Anthony Jarman
The stories in What Endures range through and respond to a clickbait world evolving at terrifying speed, revealing the absurd and ridiculous nature of everyday life. What does it mean to endure in a world starving for truth and connection, what makes life worth living, what can be discovered and preserved from the onrush of experience—vicarious and actual—that comes at us? With bracing wit, Pauline Holdstock’s stories move back and forth through time and circumstance to unpack what it is that saves us from despair, each of them pointing in their own magical way to that one, fragile thing that has the power to endure and to live on in others.
ABOUT PAULINE HOLDSTOCK
Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist. Her novels have been shortlisted for a number of awards, among them the Best First Novel Award, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Her novel Beyond Measure was the winner of the BC Book Prizes Ethel Wilson Award for Fiction. Her novels The Hunter and the Wild Girl and Confessions With Keith have each been awarded the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.

Garth Martens: Watershed Press Cumberland Readings
2026-08-16 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Vancouver) | Masonic Lodge, 2687 Dunsmuir Ave, Cumberland, BC, Canada
Come on out for a summer poetry reading in Cumberland, where Garth Martens will be reading from his latest poetry collection, Who Else in the Dark Headed There. He’ll be joined by fellow writer Robert Bringhurst who will launch his book Buying the Ghosts a Drink.
More details here!
Grab a copy of Who Else in the Dark Headed There here.
ABOUT WHO ELSE IN THE DARK HEADED THERE
In his first collection since the Governor General’s–nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour.
A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming.
Beneath this waking world is another world, of the overheard, of the unsaid. To enter is to find a lyricism finely wrought and hallucinatory, a depth of feeling and fidelity to metaphor in all its guises—but most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood’s rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a “muscled concentration” that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.
ABOUT GARTH MARTENS
Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence and Who Else in the Dark Headed There. For his first book, he was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry appears in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is also a member of Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. He lives in Victoria, BC.

Don Gillmor: Heliconian Club Literary Lecture Series
2026-09-08 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Toronto) | Heliconian Club, 35 Hazelton Ave, Toronto, ON, M5R 2E3, Canada
Don Gillmor will be a featured author at the Heliconian Club’s Literary Lecture Series! The event will take place on Tuesday, September 8 at 7:30PM. Books will be available for sale and signing by Ben McNally.
More details TK.
Grab Cherry Beach here!
Check out Don Gillmor’s previous books here.
ABOUT CHERRY BEACH
“This is one of the best Canadian crime novels of this or any year . . . Toronto now takes its place with Los Angeles, New York, and Boston as a character in the action and it’s great.”—Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail
A brutal murder exposes secret real estate deals, a corrupt police force, and the dark heart of a city simmering with unrest.
When two girls are found murdered in a rundown Toronto high-rise, Jamieson Abel and his partner are first on the scene. Abel is a law school dropout turned police detective chronically at odds with his colleagues and perpetually on the brink of being terminated, and Davis is the department’s only female officer of colour. Both understand their being partnered as a form of banishment, but when the details of the murder go public at the start of an excruciatingly hot summer, they find themselves thrust into the centre of a front page investigation that will bring to a head the city’s long history of shady real estate deals and racist disenfranchisement.
Intricately plotted and brilliantly layered, Cherry Beach is a gripping literary crime novel that examines class, race, and corruption in the most multicultural city in the world.
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 five novels, Cherry Beach, 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, 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.

Garth Martens at WORD Vancouver
2026-09-19 11:00 - 12:00 (America/Vancouver) | UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson Street, Vancouver, BC, V6Z 3B7, Canada
Poet Garth Martens (Who Else in the Dark Headed There) will be at WORD Vancouver festival for the panel “The Art of Transformation.” Garth will be joined in conversation by Eve Joseph and Billeh Nickerson, moderated by Renée Sarojini Saklikar, as they each travel through very different landscapes: a mother’s disappearance, the haunted rooms of childhood, and a hospital stay that prompts reflections on mortality, luck, and survival. Through inventive and deeply attentive uses of language, each writer transforms lived experience into something unexpected, illuminating how memory reshapes the past, how imagination unsettles the ordinary, and how poetry can help us navigate uncertainty and change. Through loss, humour, wonder, and resilience, these poets reveal what endures and what becomes possible in the aftermath of transformation.
The event will take place on Saturday, September 19 at 11AM, at the Poetry Tent in UBC Robson Square.
More details here.
Get Who Else in the Dark Headed There here!
ABOUT WHO ELSE IN THE DARK HEADED THERE
In his first collection since the Governor General’s–nominated Prologue for the Age of Consequence, Martens adds an autobiographical lens to his concerns about class and labour.
A mother disappears. A son struggles to make sense of the life she left behind. Set against the stark northern Alberta of the 1980s and 90s, Who Else in the Dark Headed There follows a man reaching through time to find the child he was and the father he is becoming.
Beneath this waking world is another world, of the overheard, of the unsaid. To enter is to find a lyricism finely wrought and hallucinatory, a depth of feeling and fidelity to metaphor in all its guises—but most of all an urgent relationship with language. Here, in a reconstruction of childhood’s rooms, Garth Martens approaches the past not as a record but as a pressure, a “muscled concentration” that reorders, resuscitates, and redoubts.
ABOUT GARTH MARTENS
Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence and Who Else in the Dark Headed There. For his first book, he was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry appears in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is also a member of Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. He lives in Victoria, BC.
