News / Nouvelles
Virtual Book Launch: Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics, Literature, and Art
For more information about the book and for purchase options from ֱ Press, .
Date: Monday, May 26, 2025
Time: 10:00 - 11:00 AM (MDT)
Registration is required for this event, which will be streamed via Zoom.
About the Book:
This transdisciplinary collection investigates relations of “living and learning with” as compelling forms of engagement and care between humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans. Through academic and creative writings, contributors address the need for sustainable relationships between various feminist positions, focussing on Indigenous and Black knowledges, queer and trans artistic interventions, and anti-racist methodologies. They pursue crucial conversations on intersecting oppressions, intersubjectivities, voices, and positionalities. Rooted in feminist literary and artistic practices, the volume explores urgent ongoing transnational issues and benefits scholars in literature, Indigenous studies, intercultural studies, and gender studies.
Contributors: Kim Anderson, Alexandre Baril, Sissel M. Bergh, Marie Carrière, Élise Couture-Grondin, Junie Désil, Amanda Fayant, Mylène Yannick Gamache, Libe García Zarranz, Dominique Hétu, Larissa Lai, Amina Lalor, Sheri Longboat, Brittany Luby, Stephanie Oliver, Anne Quéma, Veronika Schuchter, Erin Soros, Erin Wunker.
A New Recorded Conversation: Jami Reimer & shalan joudry
From the CLC Readings and Conversations series comes a new podcast episode featuring interdisciplinary composer Jami Reimer, who discusses her bioacoustic opera based on the metamorphic life of a frog, and Mi’kmaw storyteller shalan joudry, whose multilingual experimental work reflects on “grief, truth-seeking, and communal healing.”
Sharing recordings of their fabulous work, Reimer and joudry discuss the power of collective attention and voice; the stickiness and softness of communication; and how we can attune ourselves to languages other than our own, including the beautiful choruses of frogs.
To listen to the recording, and for full biographies, check out our Podcast page or our
Jami Reimer (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba. From choral music to field recording practices, Jami explores voice—human and otherwise.
shalan joudry is an award-winning multi-disciplinary storyteller. She is an oral storyteller, theatre and film director, drummer/singer, poet, podcaster, and ecologist. Using her theatrical background, shalan brings eco-cultural stories to a new generation of listeners, as well as recounting personally crafted narratives that follow diverse storying methodologies.
Congratulations to the Winners of the 2025 CLC Poetry Contest!
The CLC congratulates Alexis De Villa and Teren Hazzard as joint first-place winners of our 2025 Student Poetry Contest!
Read the winning poems here and get to know a little bit about the poets.
with Teren and Alexis about their interpretation of the contest theme.
Thank you to this year's contest jury--Ryan Fitzpatrick (Writer-in-Residence, U of A), Gabriel Proulx (Athabasca), Lisa Martin (MacEwan), and Kelly Shepherd (NAIT)--as well as to our contest partners and sponsors: Athabasca University, MacEwan University, NAIT, Athabasca University Press, NeWest Press, ֱ Press, and the Edmonton Poetry Festival.
Thank you to all the students who submitted poems this year!
2025 Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture with David A. Robertson: Watch Now!
Author Photo Credit: Amber Green
On Wednesday, March 12, 2025, David A. Robertson presented the 19th annual Kreisel Lecture, held at the TIMMS CENTRE for the ARTS. The lecture, titled "On Writing as Social Activism," was preceded by an introduction from Conor Kerr and followed by a Q & A with CLC Director Sarah Krotz. Attendees were then invited to join us for a reception and book signing.
the lecture and Q & A on YouTube.
About the lecture:
Writing as Social Activism
Writing stories imagines future readers,
and in so doing imagines a future influence by those stories.
-- Margaret Atwood
The road to reconciliation is paved with Story. The phrase "Truth & Reconciliation" means the two are inextricably linked. While the definition and understanding of what reconciliation means and what it entails are up for discussion — at its most basic, albeit still complex form, it is the act of building community — truth means what really happened, and what is still happening, on Turtle Island. For too long, our stories, as Indigenous peoples, have been told by others. Only recently, within the last fifteen years, we have been able to reclaim our truth and share it with others through Story. This storytelling resurgence has created a revolutionary change that has ripped apart the fabric of what we thought this country was, and has stitched together a new understanding of Canada. Every form of writing — from blog posts to novels — is distinct, but shares the goal of knowledge transfer. Story ought, as well, to motivate the reader to utilize the knowledge they have been gifted with to take meaningful action so that we can do better than has been done in the past. This is the work of social change: understanding what has been so we can clearly understand what can be.
David A. Robertson is a two-time Governor General's Literary Award winner and has won the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and the Writer's Union of Canada Freedom to Read Award. He has received several other accolades for his work as a writer for children and adults, podcaster, public speaker, and social advocate. He was honoured with a Doctor of Letters by the University of Manitoba in 2023 for outstanding contributions to the arts and distinguished achievements. Robertson’s memoir All the Little Monsters: How I Learned to Live with Anxiety was published in 2025 by Harper Collins. He is a member of Norway House Cree Nation and lives in Winnipeg. For more information about his work, .
Juno Award-Winning Dub Poet Lillian Allen Visits the CLC!
In collaboration with Dr. Michael A. Bucknor, Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies and Decolonial Practice, the CLC is hosting spoken word performer Lillian Allen, the current Poet Laureate of Toronto, for a visit to the ֱ.
Listen to and learn from Lillian's work by joining us for one or both of the following events:
Masterclass (Registration Required)
Date and Time: Wednesday, January 29, 2025, from 3:00-6:00 PM
Location: Additional details will be provided to successful registrants
Words in Motion: Language Dance Motion Meaning
Presenting your work to the public requires learning an additional set of skills than just writing! This workshop will engage poets and any kind of writers in exploring ways to bring their work alive and present it to a public. The workshop will provide opportunities for participants to develop their performance confidence, and to explore strategies and techniques for presenting a range of different works to an audience. Participants will gain tools to write for sound and the ear and understand how to cultivate emotive qualities of words and story. As writers, we will create at least one individually written piece, and possibly explore one collaboration, but do bring a piece of your older writing to try out some new techniques. Priority will be given to BIPOC emerging writers but we welcome others.
Registration for the Masterclass is now closed.
Reading, Conversation, Performance
Date and Time: Thursday, January 30, 2025, from 12:30-1:45 PM
Location: Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17), ֱ
Hosted by Dr. Michael A. Bucknor, Lillian will perform and speak about some of her work (which you can read more about below). Light refreshments will be served. No registration is required for this event.
Jamaican Canadian Lillian Allen is an internationally renowned poet, professor, journalist and artistic creator. She has served as Board Member and Advisor to several arts-based agencies (Toronto Council for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, National Film Board of Canada, UNESCO etc). Allen is the author of eight books of poetry and ten recording albums. She has also worked in radio and television. She was the host of a CBC programme on "Poetry and the Spoken Word” and co-produced and hosted WordBeat, a 13-part series for CBC Radio One (2003-05). Her poem “Unnatural Causes” was made into a film by the National Film Board of Canada (1989) and she also co-produced and co-directed Blakk Wi Blakk (1994), a film focused on the dub poet Mutabaruka. She has received numerous awards for both her published volumes and sound recordings. These awards include two Juno Awards from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for her albums Revolutionary Tea Party and Conditions Critical (1986 and 1988). She is widely regarded as the godmother of Canadian dub, rap and hip hop.
With origins in 1970s Jamaica, dub poetry is a type of performance poetry that is rooted in oral and music traditions from the Caribbean. Dub poets often talk about political and social change through their poetry. Lillian Allen is a well-known dub poet who, through poetry, challenges systemic social issues and political ideologies. Allen has talked about activism and feminism in her poetry.
Allen’s seminal work in the dub poetry and the spoken word genres has made her a legend in the creative circles. She employs what M. Norbese Philip calls a “demotic tongue” that has distinguished her work as recognizing the politics of language use, and has ensured the wider circulation of her Jamaican mother tongue in Canada. The recent release of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (2021) and appointment as Poet Laureate of Toronto reinforce her enduring significance.
For more information, visit .
The CLC and Writer-in-Residence Host Mercedes Eng for a Reading + Conversation Event
Join the CLC and Writer-in-Residence Ryan Fitzpatrick on Tuesday, January 14, for a Reading and Conversation with poet Mercedes Eng!
In conversation with 2024/25 Writer-in-Residence Ryan Fitzpatrick, Mercedes Eng will discuss and read from her most recent book, Cop City Swagger (Talonbooks, 2024). Cop City Swagger offers a poetic critique of police violence in Vancouver and elsewhere, asking how conceptions of safety and care run through the rhetoric and actions of policing. Cop City Swagger extends a socially-invested poetics that is grounded in the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown communities of Vancouver and that balances social investigation and political advocacy. Eng will discuss Cop City Swagger in the context of her ongoing work, her mixed-register approach to poetic form, and the ethics of writing about real people and communities.
No registration is required for this free event. Light refreshments will be served.
Date and Time: Tuesday, January 14, 2025, from 2:00-3:00 PM
Location: Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17), ֱ
Mercedes Eng is a prairie-born poet of Chinese and settler descent living in Vancouver on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ. She is the author of my yt mama, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (winner of the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) and Mercenary English. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, The Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review, The Abolitionist, and r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Survaillance, and M’aidez (Press Release). Mercedes was recently the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence and a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University. She is an assistant professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she organizes the On Edge reading series.
A Book Launch Afternoon
On Thursday, November 28, join the Centre for Literatures in Canada for an afternoon of readings from recently published books.
We are hosting two double book launches in Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17):
From 2:00-3:15 PM, Dorothy Thunder and Marilyn Dumont will read from and discuss their respective books This Land Is a Lullaby / cistomâwasowin ôma askiy and South Side of a Kinless River.
From 3:30-4:30 PM, Jaspreet Singh, with Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock, and Erina Harris, with Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead, will read from and talk about their new poetry collections.
Books will be available for purchase, courtesy of . Light refreshements will be provided and the events are open to the public. Come to one or both!
Dorothy Thunder is a first-language speaker of nehiyawewin/Plains Cree from Little Pine First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, and is a Professor of Cree at the ֱ. Recognizing that her command of the language is uncommon among members of her generation, she shares it at every opportunity: in classrooms, on-line teaching, and at land-based camps. Dorothy serves as a major contributor to contemporary Cree language reclamation and revitalization. Her personal experiences and land-based language camps have given her unique insights into the role of language in relationship to the land. As a nehiyaw iskwew (Plains Cree woman), she holds strong her relationship to kikâwînaw askiy (mother earth) and the gifts that the land has to offer and the importance of looking after the land (wâhkohtowin) and her strong connection to nehiyaw kehte-ayak (Elders).
Photo Credit: Nadya Kwandibens
Photo Credit: Evan Will
Public Lecture with Dr. Ian MacLaren
Separating Fact from Painted Fiction: An Examination of Paul Kane's Problematic Representations of Indigenous Peoples in North America
Ian MacLaren, U of A Professor Emeritus (History and Classics & English and Film Studies), is launching his four-volume Paul Kane's Travels in Indigenous North America: Writing and Art, Life and Times (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024).
To celebrate this significant work of scholarship, Dr. MacLaren will give a public lecture on Paul Kane's Travels at the Art Gallery of ֱ (AGA), sponsored by the Centre for Literatures in Canada and the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, and hosted by the AGA.
Time: 5:00-6:00 PM
Location: Main Hall of the Art Gallery of ֱ (2 Sir Winston Churchill Square)
This event is free and open to the public.
I.S. MacLaren taught in the History and Classics, and English and Film Studies departments and the Canadian Studies Program at the ֱ for more than thirty years (1985–2016). He was also an adjunct professor in the Canadian Circumpolar Institute. His recently published four-volume book Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America: Writings and Art, Life and Times aims to contribute to ethnohistory, book history, fur-trade history, and art history. The histories of national parks (especially Jasper) and of Arctic exploration, as well as the early literature of North America in English and the genre of travel literature 1600–present occupy his scholarly pursuits. Books that he has authored, co-authored, or edited include the following:
- Arctic Artist: The Journal and Paintings of George Back, Midshipman with Franklin 1819–1822
- The Ladies, the Gwich’in, and the Rat: Travels on the Athabasca, Mackenzie, Rat, Porcupine, and Yukon Rivers in 1926
- Mapper of Mountains: M.P. Bridgland in the Canadian Rockies 1902–1930
- Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park: Studies in Two Centuries of Human History in the upper Athabasca River Valley
Further Information
- The Champlain Society's podcast Witness to Yesterday features Ian MacLaren and Paul Kane's Travels in .
- An article about the book appeared in the of The Globe and Mail.
Paul Kane’s Travels in Indigenous North America rediscovers the primary fieldwork underlying Kane’s studio art and book and the process by which his sketches and field writings evolved into damaging stereotypes with significant authority in the nineteenth century.
McGill-Queen's University Press
Une nouvelle lecture et conversation, avec Louise Dupré et Evelyne Gagnon
Écoutez cette lecture et conversation entre deux poètes francophones qui nous invitent à considérer les poèmes comme des « exercices de joie », de compassion, et d’empathie. This conversation – tout en français – reminds us that writers can do much more than hold mirrors up to humanity’s darkness; in the words of Louise Dupré, elles peuvent nous offrir « les ouvertures vers la lumière ».
Louise Dupré a publié une trentaine de titres qui lui ont valu de nombreux prix et distinctions, dont deux fois le Prix de poésie du Gouverneur général du Canada (2011 et 2017). Elle collabore régulièrement avec des artistes d’autres disciplines. Ses livres ont été traduits dans plusieurs langues et son recueil de poésie Plus haut que les flammes a fait l’objet d’un long métrage réalisé par Monique LeBlanc et produit par l’Office National du Film du Canada.
Professeure au Département d’études littéraires de l’Université du Québec à Montréal de 1988 à 2008, elle consacre maintenant son temps à l’écriture. Elle est membre de l’Académie des lettres du Québec, de la Société royale du Canada et du Parlement des écrivaines francophones. En 2014, elle a reçu l’Ordre du Canada « pour son apport à la littérature québécoise en tant que poète, romancière, dramaturge, essayiste et professeure ».
Poète et essayiste, Evelyne Gagnon est professeure de littérature à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Spécialiste de la poésie, elle s’intéresse aussi aux formes de la mélancolie contemporaine et, notamment, à ses liens avec l’éco-anxiété et avec l’écoféminisme. Chercheuse affiliée au CLC, elle a fondé, en 2014, le Concours de poésie du Centre de littératures au Canada, ouvert chaque année depuis aux étudiants universitaires albertains. Ayant publié des études sur la poésie dans plusieurs ouvrages scientifiques au Canada, aux États-Unis et en France, Evelyne Gagnon a également reçu, en 2001, le Prix de poésie Clément-Marchand. Son recueil de poèmes, Incidents (et autres rumeurs du siècle), est paru aux Éditions du Noroît, à Montréal, en 2022.