Biblioasis

stephanie roberts at the LOGOS Lecture Reading Series
2025-09-08 19:00 - 21:30 (America/New_York) | Lectures LOGOS Readings, 2741 Notre-Dame West, Montreal, QC, H3J 1N9, Canada
stephanie roberts, author of the poetry collection UNMET, will be a guest at the LOGOS Lecture Reading Series! stephanie will be joined by fellow guest readers Chanel Sutherland, Kelly Nora Drukker, Marlihan Lopez, Nathalie Batraville, Laura Doyle Péan and Uchenna Dike. There will be an open-mic session as well, with spaces for eight readers.
The event, hosted by H. Nigel Thomas, will take place on Sunday, September 8 at 7PM.
More details here.
Grab 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.

Mark Bourrie at Eden Mills Festival
2025-09-07 13:30 (America/Toronto) | Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, 19 Cedar Street, Eden Mills, Ontario, N0B 1P0, Canada
Join Mark Bourrie (author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre) as he speaks at the Eden Mills Writers Festival on the panel “The Kim Lang Set: True North Unsettled: A Conversation on Democracy.” Mark will be in conversation alongside David A. Robertson, Andrew Coyne, Ariel Sim, and Karin Wells, as well as host Jessica Johnson.
In a nation long mythologized as orderly and fair, what happens when our democratic assumptions and institutions begin to wobble? The cracks have always been there—widening now into fault lines that shape our politics, our laws, and our daily lives. In this conversation, journalists, a legal historian, an Indigenous organizer, and a civic thinker gather to ask how a democracy survives when its story no longer matches its reality. From federal failures to grassroots resistance, from the rights of rivers to the rights of women, they invite us to wrestle with the hardest questions: Whose democracy is it? And who gets to decide?
The conversation will take place at The Meadow on Sunday, September 7 at 1:30PM. More details here.
Grab Ripper here!
ABOUT RIPPER
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, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

Ira Wells: Controversy @ Noon 2025 - Banned Books: What's Next?
2025-08-26 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Edmonton) | NB
Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, will be joining this virtual event held by the Writers Guild of Alberta as a panelist, to discuss book banning in the Canadian literary community, particularly in Alberta where certain books are slated to be pulled from school shelves this Fall. What do these types of bans mean for writers and for readers, now and in the coming months? Years? What calls to action might help prevent the banning of books in the future?
Ira will be joined by fellow panelists Gail de Vos and Malcolm Azania, along with moderator Peter Midgley, as they explore the ramifications of banned books and more this August.
The virtual event will take place on Tuesday, August 26 at 12PM MT. The event is free to attend with registration here.
More details here.
Grab a copy of 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.

Caroline Adderson at Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts
2025-08-15 14:30 - 15:30 (America/Vancouver) | Rockwood Centre, 5511 Shorncliffe Ave, Sechelt, BC, V0N 3A7, Canada
Caroline Adderson will be appearing at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts to speak about her latest collection of short stories, A Way to Be Happy!
The event will take place on Friday, August 15 at 2:30 PM PST.
More details and tickets here.
Grab a copy of A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year
Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.
On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.
ABOUT CAROLINE ADDERSON
Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels (A Russian Sister, Ellen in Pieces, The Sky Is Falling, Sitting Practice, and A History of Forgetting), two previous collections of short stories (Pleased to Meet You and Bad Imaginings), as well as many books for young readers. Her award nominations include the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The recipient of three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, and the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement, Caroline lives and writes in Vancouver.

Ira Wells: Defending the Right to Read
2025-08-06 19:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York) | NB
Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, will be joining the virtual panel “Defending the Right to Read” alongside Authors Against Book Bans members Fin Leary, Padma Venkatraman, and Josh Cook. With Wells’ new book as a launching point, the panelists will discuss the current rise of book bans in schools and libraries, the history of previous cases of book censorship, and recent efforts of resistance against the oppression of literature.
The virtual event, organized by Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA, will take place on Wednesday, August 6 at 7PM. The event is free to attend with registration here.
More details here.
Grab a copy of 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.

Caroline Adderson at Denman Island Festival: Main Stage Discussion
2025-07-19 19:30 - 21:00 (America/Vancouver) | Denman Island, BC, V0R 1T0, Canada
Caroline Adderson (A Way to Be Happy) will be joining the discussion “Diving into Darkness to find our humanity/joy/compassion” on the Main Stage, alongside fellow writers Sarah Leavitt and Fiona Tinwei Lam.
The discussion will take place on Saturday, July 19 at 7:30PM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year
Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.
On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.
ABOUT CAROLINE ADDERSON
Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels (A Russian Sister, Ellen in Pieces, The Sky Is Falling, Sitting Practice, and A History of Forgetting), two previous collections of short stories (Pleased to Meet You and Bad Imaginings), as well as many books for young readers. Her award nominations include the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The recipient of three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, and the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement, Caroline lives and writes in Vancouver.

Caroline Adderson at Denman Island Festival: Workshop
2025-07-17 10:00 - 13:00 (America/Vancouver) | Denman Island, BC, V0R 1T0, Canada
Caroline Adderson (A Way to Be Happy) will be hosting a workshop at the Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival! The workshop, “Ending It All” will explore what makes a story ending successful, looking at planned vs. discovered endings, common pitfalls, and how plot and character arcs guide satisfying conclusions.
The workshop will take place on Thursday, July 17 at 10AM.
More details here.
Grab a copy of A Way to Be Happy here!
ABOUT A WAY TO BE HAPPY
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year
Short stories about disparate characters consider what it means to find happiness.
On New Year’s Eve, a pair of addicts robs a string of high-end parties in order to fund their own recovery. A recently separated woman relocates to a small northern town, where she receives a life-changing visitation, and a Russian hitman, suffering from a mysterious lung ailment, retrieves long-buried memories of his past. In the nineteenth century, a disparate group of women coalesce in the attempt to aid a young girl in her escape from a hospital for the insane. These are but some of the remarkable characters who populate these stories, all of them grappling with conflicts ranging from mundane to extraordinary. Caroline Adderson’s A Way to Be Happy considers what it means to find happiness—and how often it comes through the grace of others.
ABOUT CAROLINE ADDERSON
Caroline Adderson is the author of five novels (A Russian Sister, Ellen in Pieces, The Sky Is Falling, Sitting Practice, and A History of Forgetting), two previous collections of short stories (Pleased to Meet You and Bad Imaginings), as well as many books for young readers. Her award nominations include the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. The recipient of three BC Book Prizes, three CBC Literary Awards, and the Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement, Caroline lives and writes in Vancouver.

Steven Beattie at the Books & Brews Book Fair
2025-07-05 12:00 - 17:00 (America/Toronto) | Jobsite Brewery, 45 Cambria Street, Stratford, ON, Canada
Join Best Canadian Stories 2025 editor Steven Beattie at the Books & Brews Book Fair in Stratford! Beattie will be selling copies of the anthology at the fair, joined by a fun assortment of other small presses.
The book fair will take place at the Jobsite Brewery on Saturday, July 5 starting at 12PM.
More about Best Canadian Stories 2025 here!
ABOUT BEST CANADIAN STORIES 2025
Selected by editor Steven W. Beattie, the 2025 edition of Best Canadian Stories showcases the best Canadian fiction writing published in 2023.
Featuring:
Chris Bailey • Christine Birbalsingh • Cody Caetano • Kate Cayley • Lynn Coady • Caitlin Galway • Marcel Goh • Beth Goobie • Mark Anthony Jarman • Saad Omar Khan • Chelsea Peters • Kawai Shen • Liz Stewart • Glenna Turnbull • Catriona Wright • Clea Young
ABOUT STEVEN W. BEATTIE
Steven W. Beattie, a writer in Stratford, Ontario, spent twelve and a half years as Review Editor at Quill & Quire, Canada’s magazine of the publishing trade industry. His writing and criticism have appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the National Post, The Walrus, Canadian Notes & Queries, and elsewhere. He maintains the literary website That Shakespearean Rag.

Graeme Macrae Burnet at MOTIVE Festival
2025-06-28 14:00 - 16:00 (America/Toronto) | Emmanuel College, 75 Queen's Park Crescent, Rm 119, Toronto, ON, M5S 1K7, Canada
Come on out to MOTIVE Festival in Toronto, where Graeme Macrae Burnet will be appearing for the “Small Towns, Big Secrets” panel! Burnet will be discussing his recent book, A Case of Matricide, and will be joined by fellow writers Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti for a conversation moderated by Samantha Bailey.
The event will take place on Saturday, June 28 at 2:15 PM.
More details here!
Grab a copy of A Case of Matricide here.
ABOUT A CASE OF MATRICIDE
From the Booker-nominated author of Case Study and His Bloody Project comes the next adventure of Inspector Gorski.
In the unremarkable French town of Saint-Louis, a mysterious stranger stalks the streets; an elderly woman believes her son is planning to kill her; a prominent businessman drops dead. Between visits to the town’s drinking establishments, Chief Inspector Georges Gorski ponders what connections, if any, exist between these events, all while grappling with his own domestic and existential demons.
With his signature virtuosity, in which literary sleight-of-hand meets piercing insight into human nature, Graeme Macrae Burnet punctures the respectable bourgeois façade of small-town life and unspools a spellbinding riddle that blurs the boundaries between suspect, investigator, writer, and reader.
ABOUT GRAEME MACRAE BURNET
Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, and now lives in Glasgow. His Bloody Project, his second novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016, won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2016, and was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Awards 2017. His fourth novel, Case Study, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 and was included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022. A Case of Matricide is his fifth novel, the third featuring Chief Inspector Georges Gorski.

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!

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.

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: 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.

On Book Banning: Ira Wells at Ottawa Writers Festival
2025-05-04 02:30 - 03:30 (America/New_York) | NB
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.

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.

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 Words Festival
2025-04-29 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Toronto) | NB
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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ripper: Virtual Talk with Mark Bourrie & The Tyee
2025-04-10 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Vancouver) | NB
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.

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.

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+.

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: 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.
