Tuesday, March 24, 2022
Podcast midis littéraires du CLC
avec Chloé Savoie-Bernard & Lorrie Jean-Louis
Le 24 mars 2022, écoutez un nouvel épisode des midis littéraires du CLC avec les écrivaines renommées, Chloé Savoie-Bernard et Lorrie Jean-Louis!
Cliquez ICI!
Chloé Savoie-Bernard est née à Montréal, où elle vit toujours. Elle a écrit plusieurs recueils de poésie, dont le dernier en lice est Sainte Chloé de l’amour (octobre 2021, Hexagone). Chez Triptyque, elle a publié le recueil de nouvelles Des femmes savantes (Triptyque, 2016) et dirigé le collectif Corps (2018). Mémoire d’encrier a fait paraitre sa première traduction littéraire de l’anglais, Anatomie de ma honte, de Tessa McWatt, en 2021. Après avoir soutenu une thèse sur la littérature féministe au Québec, elle est désormais stagiaire postdoctorale en recherche-création à l’Université Sherbrooke. Elle travaille de surcroit comme éditrice de poésie chez l’Hexagone et comme membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Estuaire.
Née à Montréal, Lorrie Jean-Louis publie en 2020 son premier recueil, La femme cent couleurs qui remporte le prix des Libraires en 2021. Elle a également une maîtrise en littérature. Elle publie son premier album jeunesse, Philibert, le garçon qui pliait son cœur en août 2021. L’album est illustré par Nahid Kazemi. Elle est aussi bibliothécaire. Elle se consacre à l’écriture.
Friday, February 18, 2022
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Karina Vernon & Bertrand Bickersteth
We are excited to announce that on Friday, February 18, the CLC will host poet, playwright, and essayist Bertrand Bickersteth in conversation with literary scholar Karina Vernon. Vernon’s The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology features poetry by Bickersteth, for whom Alberta is at once a “central source of inspiration” and an “unwilling muse.” Introduced by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, they will join us from 2 to 3 p.m. MST via Zoom.
Click HERE to watch the event on YouTube!
Karina Vernon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, Black aesthetics, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous solidarities. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2020 and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. With Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) she is working on a book project on the politics and aesthetics of relation of Black Canadian cultural achievement, including writing, music, film, and visual art.
Bertrand Bickersteth is a poet, playwright, essayist and educator who was born in Sierra Leone, raised in Alberta, partly educated in the U.K., and completely resident in the U.S. for several years. In 2021, CBC named him a Black writer to watch. His collection of poetry, The Response of Weeds, was a finalist for multiple awards and won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, and the 2021 High Plains Book Award in the category of First Book. He has been a contributor/columnist for CBC’s The Next Chapter as well as the CBC project Black on the Prairies. His most recent work was published in The Walrus (poetry) and The Sprawl (essay). His TEDx talk is called The Weight of Words. He is currently working on a new collection of poems highlighting the history of Black cowboys in western Canada. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and writes about Black identity on the Prairies.
Thursday, January 27, 2022
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Cornel Bogle, Jumoke Verissimo & Uche Umezurike
All three of these writers and scholars are current students or graduates of the University of Alberta! Join them for a Brown Bag Lunch Reading via Zoom on January 27 at 12 p.m. MST.
Click HERE to watch the event on YouTube!
Cornel Bogle is a Jamaican-born PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Their research interests include Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian writing, auto/biography studies, diaspora studies, and contemporary poetics. Their doctoral project comprises a collection of lyric and found poetry that inquire into Caribbean Canadian literatures, epistolary practices, cross cultural poetics, literary friendships, and masculinities. Their writing has been published in The Journal of West Indian Literature, Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, sx salon, Moko Magazine, and Pree: Caribbean Writing.
Jumoke Verissimo is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, I am Memory and A Birth of Illusion. Her most recent work, A Small Silence, was awarded the Aidoo-Synder Prize in 2020 and was also nominated for the Ondaatje Prize in 2020. Her poems and novel have been translated into Italian, French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish, Japanese, and a number of other languages. Her latest work is a children’s book, Aduke and the Secret in the Moon (Cassava Republics, 2021).
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike holds a PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada. An alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), Umezurike has published his critical writing in Journal of African Cultural Studies, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, Postcolonial Text, and Cultural Studies. His research interests include postcolonial and Black diaspora literatures, gender, sexuality, and cultural studies. Umezurike is a co-editor of Wreaths for Wayfarers, an anthology of poems. His books Wish Maker (a children’s book) and Double Wahala, Double Trouble (a short story collection) are forthcoming from Masobe Books, Nigeria and Griots Lounge Publishing, Canada, respectively, in fall 2021.
Thursday, January 13, 2022
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Ifeoma Chinwuba
Join us January 13 for a Brown Bag Lunch Reading with our very own award-winning Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta, Ifeoma Chinwuba! Introduced by writer and PhD candidate Jumoke Verissimo, Ifeoma will read and answer questions via Zoom, from 12 to 1 p.m. MST.
Click HERE to watch the event on YouTube!
Before moving to Canada, Ifeoma Chinwuba worked in the Foreign Service of her native country, Nigeria. As a diplomat, she travelled to over sixty countries. These travels, she says, were really field trips. Ifeoma encounters cultures and civilizations "much like a botanist in the wild encounters species. An Igbo proverb has it that a traveller knows more than the homebound white hairs."
In Nigeria, Ifeoma grew up with story-telling. "In the absence of electricity and technology, adults regaled us children with tales of yore, entertaining and inculcating culture and good behaviour at the same time."
She is now the author of five books, made up of novels, poetry in dialogue, and a juvenile novella. Her books Merchants of Flesh and Waiting for Maria each won the Prose Prizes of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), while Waiting for Maria was on the Longlist of The Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2008.
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
CLC Brown Bag Lunch with Cheryl Foggo
Join us November 24 for a virtual Brown Bag Lunch Reading with acclaimed author, filmmaker, screenwriter and playwright, Cheryl Foggo! Foggo’s award-winning film, John Ware Reclaimed, explores and restores nuance to the life of John Ware, an iconic Black cowboy who settled in southern Alberta in the 1880s. The event will take place from 2 - 3 PM MST.
If you can, please watch the film (free on nfb.ca) before the event. We look forward to seeing you there!
Cheryl Foggo is a multiple award winning playwright, author and filmmaker, whose work over the last 30 years has focused on the lives of Western Canadians of African descent. 2020 saw the release of her NFB feature documentary John Ware Reclaimed, as well as the 30th anniversary edition of her book Pourin’ Down Rain: A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West. In 2019 she wrote and directed the film Kicking Up a Fuss: The Charles Daniels Story. Her play The Sender can be viewed as part of Obsidian Theatre’s 21 Black Futures. Recently produced at the Citadel Theatre, her play Heaven is also scheduled for Lunchbox Theatre’s 2022 season. Cheryl is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Outstanding Artist Award, The Doug and Lois Mitchell Outstanding Calgary Artist Award and the Arts, Media and Entertainment Award from the Calgary Black Chambers, all in 2021.
Monday, November 15, 2021
CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast with Jael Richardson & Téa Mutonji
Catch Jael Richardson and Téa Mutonji in conversation on Episode 8 of the CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast!
Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey. The Stone Thrower was adapted into a children’s book in 2016 and was shortlisted for a Canadian picture book award. Richardson is a book columnist and guest host on CBC’s q. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Brampton, Ontario where she founded and serves as the Executive Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutter Child is a dystopian story of courage and resilience and arrives January 2021 with HarperCollins Canada.
Born in Congo-Kinshasa, Téa Mutonji is a poet and fiction writer. Her debut collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty, is the first title from Vivek Shraya’s imprint, VS. Books. It was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (2019), and won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award (2020) and the Trillium Book Award (2020). Mutonji is the recipient of the Jill Davis Fellowship at NYU.
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
CLC and LitFest Present: Omar Mouallem
On October 20, 2021, don't miss this virtual CLC Brown Bag Lunch Reading with local filmmaker, writer and journalist Omar Mouallem!
Omar Mouallem is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Maclean’s, WIRED, and more. He coauthored the national bestseller Inside the Inferno: A Firefighter’s Story of the Brotherhood that Saved Fort McMurray, and codirected Digging in the Dirt, a documentary about mental health in the Alberta oil patch. In 2020, he founded Pandemic University School of Writing. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta, with his family. Follow him on Twitter @OmarMouallem and find him at OmarMouallem.com. Visit PrayingtotheWest.com for more information.
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
VIRTUAL CLC Brown Bag Lunch Reading with Kaie Kellough
Our first Brown Bag Lunch Reading of the season features Griffin Poetry Prize-winning author Kaie Kellough, introduced by U of A PhD candidate and writer CJ Bogle!
Kaie Kellough is a novelist, poet, and sound performer. His work emerges at a crossroads of social engagement and formal experiment. From western Canada, he lives in Montréal and has roots in Guyana, South America. His books include Dominoes at the Crossroads (short fiction, Véhicule 2020), Magnetic Equator (poetry, McClelland and Stewart 2019), and Accordéon (novel, ARP 2016).
Kaie’s writing has been awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and the QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. It has been listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, the Amazon/Walrus Foundation First Novel Award, and several other prizes.
Kaie’s vocal performance, recorded audio, and electronic narrative explore migration and the suspension of arrival. He creates mixed media compositions with saxophonist and synthesist Jason Sharp, and graphic designer Kevin Yuen Kit Lo. Their collaborative audio-visual performances have been filmed and broadcast by jazz festivals across Europe and Canada.
Kaie’s work has traveled to the UK, Australia, Asia, the Caribbean, and continental Europe. He continues to craft new passages.