SARA TILLEY, who is currently the Writer in Residence in the English department at the University of Calgary, will be visiting us on Tuesday March 18. She will be giving a reading of her work at 3.30pm. This is part of our annual exchange: we host their WIR, they host ours (Erin Moure, will be visiting Calgary on that day).
Here is part of the write-up the English department at Calgary has posted on their website:
Sara Tilley's work bridges writing, theatre, and Pochinko Clown Through Mask technique, with each discipline informing the others. After graduating with a BFA in Acting from York University in 2001, Sara founded the feminist theatre company She Said Yes! and received the Rhonda Payne Theatre Award in 2006, which acknowledges the contribution of a woman working in theatre in Newfoundland and Labrador. She's written, co-written, or co-created ten plays, and has had stories, poems, and essays published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Skin Room, her first novel (Pedlar Press, 2008), won both the Newfoundland and Labrador Percy Janes First Novel Award and the inaugural Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers, and was shortlisted for the Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland Writing as well as the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize. Of Skin Room, Shane Nielson wrote "...this debut book is really about one thing: the possibility of prose performance. Sara Tilley has crafted an internally consistent novel that has linguistic pizazz, cuffs language upside the head, achieves poetry without the obliqueness that often clogs the arteries of prose in this country, all without losing sight of delivering a good yarn…I think Sara Tilley might be the next big thing - bona fide - from Newfoundland" (The Fiddlehead).
Please come and welcome Sara Tilley on the 18th. It promises to be an exciting event.