welcome to
common readings
2015
December 14th, 2015 - 8pm
AMY CARLBERG
SUZANNE ALYSSA ANDREW
JESS TAYLOR
AMY CARLBERG was born and raised in Toronto. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She likes to read poems and also play music for people with her band Mazola. They are playing a show on December 29th at Penny's at Bloor and Lansdowne. It's free, so please attend! Also watch out for a poem she is very proud of in The Puritan in February.
SUZANNE ALYSSA ANDREW is the author of the novel Circle of Stones (Dundurn Press, spring 2015) which was praised in the National Post, Vancouver Sun, Quill & Quire and The Georgia Straight and named one of the books of the year by the 49th Shelf. She's also the associate editor for the beloved Canadian literary magazine Taddle Creek, and a story director and writer for digital media productions such as Long Story Game and The Defector Interactive. For fun she plays bass. She grew up on Vancouver Island and now lives and writes in Toronto.
JESS TAYLOR is a writer and poet based in Toronto, Ontario. She is the founder of the Emerging Writers Reading Series and is the fiction editor of Little Brother Magazine. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers, including This Magazine, CNQ, and The National Post. Her first pamphlet chapbook, And Then Everyone (Picture Window Press) was released in April 2014, followed by her first full-length chapbook, Never Stop (Anstruther Press) in October 2014. Jess also received the Gold 2013 National Magazine Award in Fiction for her short story, “Paul.” This October, BookThug will be publishing her debut short story collection, Pauls. http://www.jesstaywriter.com/
November 16th, 2015 - 8pm
KATE CAYLEY
HUGH THOMAS
DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL
DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL is the author of three books of poetry, Fauxccasional Poems (icehouse 2015), The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Tightrope 2010), and Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006), and the poetry textbook The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (Oxford University Press 2014). Predicting received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007), the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006), and the John V. Hicks Award (2005). He is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough. In 2012, the UTSC student newspaper, The Underground, named him one of their four “Professors of the Year.”
HUGH THOMAS lives in Montreal, where he teaches mathematics at UQAM. His most recent chapbook, "Six Swedish Poets," published last summer by above/ground press, records his attempts to translate poems by six Swedish poets while knowing no Swedish.
KATE CAYLEY’s short story collection, How You Were Born, published by Pedlar Press, won the 2015 Trillium Book Award and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. She has also written a collection of poetry, When This World Comes to an End (Brick Books), which was shortlisted for the ReLit Award, and a young adult novel, The Hangman in the Mirror (Annick Press), which won the Goeffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction. She has been a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre since 2009, and has written two plays for Tarragon, After Akhmatova and The Bakelite Masterpiece.
October 19th, 2015 - 8pm
JAMES LINDSAY
ANDREW BATTERSHILL
MAX LAYTON:
JAMES LINDSAY is the co-owner of Pleasence Records. His poetry has appeared in Taddle Creek, Prairie Fire and the Humber Literary Review. His first collection of poetry, Our Inland Sea, was recently published by Wolsak and Wynn's Buckrider Books.
ANDREW BATTERSHILL is a writer and teacher currently living in Columbus, Ohio. A graduate of the University of Toronto's MA in creative writing program, he was the fiction editor and co-founder Dragnet Magazine. Pillow is his first novel.
MAX LAYTON: The eldest son of Canadian poet Irving Layton, Max left his Montreal home at the age of 16 and, since then, has worked as everything from tobacco picker, logger, and apprentice auto mechanic, to vice president of a bank. Along the way, he was one of the founders of Toronto’s Book City bookstore and earned a Master’s degree in Eng. Lit. from the University of Toronto. A published novelist and short story writer, Max went legally blind ten years ago and during that difficult period he recorded his first CD of original songs, Heartbeat Of Time. His eyesight eventually restored thanks to the miracle of modern science, Max feels he has been given a second chance. His first book of poems, When The Rapture Comes, was published in 2012 by Guernica Editions and his second CD, 2 The Max, was released the same year. Of Max's third and latest CD, It’s A Mystery To Me, Leonard Cohen said: "This is a terrific record! Can't praise it highly enough!" Now 69 years old, Max is celebrating Guernica's publication of another book of poems, In The Garden Of I Am.
More info about Max at www.maxlayton.com
September 21st, 2015 - 8pm
ANN SHIN
KEVIN HARDCASTLE
HEIDI REIMER
HEIDI REIMER's short stories and essays have appeared in Chatelaine, Little Fiction, Literary Mama, Stealing Time, Hip Mama, The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, and Outcrops: Northeastern Ontario Short Stories. She is the winner of the 2015 Write for Chatelaine creative non-fiction contest. She is currently querying a completed novel, writing an uncompleted one, and putting together a collection of personal essays.
KEVIN HARDCASTLE is a fiction writer from Simcoe County, Ontario. He studied writing at the University of Toronto and at Cardiff University. Hardcastle was a finalist for the 24th annual Journey Prize in 2012, and his short stories have been published in journals including The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, The New Quarterly, EVENT, PRISM international, Joyland, Shenandoah, The Walrus, and The Journey Prize Stories 24 & 26. He also has short fiction forthcoming in This Magazine, and Best Canadian Stories 15. Hardcastle’s debut short story collection, Debris, is published by Biblioasis. His novel, In the Cage, will also be published by Biblioasis in fall 2016.
Raised on a farm in BC’s Fraser Valley, ANN SHIN now lives in Toronto. Her latest book of poetry, The Family China, published by Brick Books in May 2013, won the Anne Green Award and was shortlisted for the ReLit Awards and the Acorn-Plantos People’s Award. Her previous book, The Last Thing Standing, was published by Mansfield Press in 2000. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in anthologies and magazines in Canada and the US. Also an award-winning filmmaker, Ann recently directed and produced the documentaries Defector: Escape from North Korea and My Enemy My Brother.
August 17th, 2015 - 8pm
NICOLE GRIMALDI
BEN LADOUCEUR
ERIC BENNETT
NICOLE GRIMALDI is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing MA program. She is a philosophy podcast addict and the poetry editor of UofT’s graduate arts journal, echolocation. She has published reviews, interviews, and poems in various places and is working on a series of short stories. She is also completing a poetry chapbook entitled Prohibition Hooch.
BEN LADOUCEUR wrote Otter (Coach House 2015), a book of poems about which the Globe and Mail and the National Post said nice things.
ERIC BENNETT is a Toronto-based human being who is interested in things like poetry, music and hamburgers. Acclaimed film director Paul Haggis once described him as "lazy...but exceptionally bright"
July 20th, 2015 - 8pm
RICHARD GREENE
VINCENT PAGE
MARC DI SAVERIO
RICHARD GREENE is the author of four books of poetry. His collection Boxing the Compass won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in 2010. His most recent volume, Dante’s House, was published in 2013, and its long title poem in terza rima was described by the poet and critic George Elliott Clarke as "a masterpiece." Greene's poem, "You Must Remember This" published in Hazlitt won the National Magazine Award Gold for 2015. Greene is the author of an internationally acclaimed biography of Edith Sitwell, and is now writing an authorized biography of Graham Greene. He is a professor of English and director of the MA in the Field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.
VINCENT PAGE's most recent work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Event, and The Feathertale Review, among other journals. He has poems forthcoming from Geist and Prism.
MARC DI SAVERIO hails from Hamilton, Ontario. His poetry and translations have appeared in such outfits as The Dalhousie Review, Misunderstandings, Modern Haiku, Haiku Scotland and Maisonneuve Magazine. Recently, Simply Haiku named him one of “the top ten world’s finest living English haiku poets for 2011”. In September of this year, he published his debut collection, Sanatorium Songs, with Palimpsest Press.
June 15th, 2015 - 8pm
Jean Marc Ah-Sen,
Kate Sutherland,
Rebecca Salazar,
Malcolm Sutton.
Jean Marc Ah-Sen is a Toronto based writer. He is the author of Grand Menteur, a novel (forthcoming fall 2015) about Mauritian street-gangs, and is working on a second book called The Last Norman. He lives with his wife and son.
Kate Sutherland is the author of two collections of short stories, Summer Reading (winner of a Saskatchewan Book Award for Best First Book) and All In Together Girls. These days, she's mostly writing poems. Her work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines including Grain, The New Quarterly, Taddle Creek, The Puritan, and Lemon Hound. She lives in Toronto.
Rebecca Salazar is originally from Sudbury, Ontario. She currently lives in Fredericton, where she is a poetry editor for The Fiddlehead and managing editor of Qwerty Magazine. She was recently awarded The Malahat Review’s Open Season poetry prize, and her writing also appears or is forthcoming in Lemon Hound, Poetry is Dead, and CV2.
Malcolm Sutton is Fiction Editor at BookThug Press and author of the forthcoming novel Job Shadowing.
May 18th, 2015 - 8pm
JEFF LATOSIK
NIKI KOULOURIS
BRUCE MEYER
JEFF LATOSIK is the author of Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, a collection that won the Trillium Book Award for poetry. He is the poetry editor of The Humber Literary Review and teaches a poetry workshop at the University of Toronto’s Continuing Studies program. His second collection, Safely Home Pacific Western, was released in early March with the Ice House imprint of Goose Lane.
NIKI KOULOURIS was born in Melbourne, Australia. Her poetry and prose has appeared in The Cortland Review, Space, Metro Magazine, Subtext Magazine and The Age. A beer enthusiast, she has been known to start spontaneous lists on napkins of her top India Pale Ales. Niki lives in Toronto. Shortlisted for the 2014 Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the ReLit Award, The sea with no one in it (The Porcupine's Quill) is her first book. http://nikikoulouris.ca/
BRUCE MEYER is author of 44 books of poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, and literary journalism including the national bestseller, The Golden Thread (2000). His recent books include Testing the Elements (Exile Editions), The Obsession Book of Timbuktu (Black Moss Press), The Seasons (Porcupine's Quill, winner of an IPPY Medal from the Independent Publishers' Association of America and a finalist for an Indie Fab Award from the Association of American Independent Booksellers), and the recent re-release of the first anthology of World War One Canadian literature since 1918, We Wasn't Pals: Canadian Poetry and Prose of the First World War (edited with Barry Callaghan with an afterword by Margaret Atwood). His forthcoming books including The Arrow of Time (Ronsdale Press), and the short fiction collection A Chronicle of Magpies (Tightrope Books). He is a professor of Communications and Creative Writing at Georgian College in Barrie, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. He was the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Barrie, and lives in Barrie, Ontario.
April 21st, 2015 - 8pm
BRECKEN HANCOCK
MICHELLE BROWN
ROBIN RICHARDSON
BRECKEN HANCOCK's poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Lemon Hound, The Globe & Mail, Hazlitt, Studies in Canadian Literature, and on the site Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. Her first book of poems, Broom Broom (Coach House, 2014), was named by The Globe & Mail's Jared Bland as a debut of the year and by the National Post as a top poetry collection of 2014. She lives in Ottawa.
MICHELLE BROWN has been published in journals such as cV2, The Malahat Review and Prism. She was recently shortlisted for cV2's Young Buck poetry prize. Happy to still be considered young, she's now spending all her free time on Snapchat like the other kids.
ROBIN RICHARDSON is the author of Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis and Grunt of the Minotaur. Her third collection of poems, Sit How You Want is forthcoming with Signal Poetry. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Tin House, Arc, The Malahat Review, Witness and may others. She was a finalist for the Walrus Poetry Prize, The ReLit award, The Lemon Hound Poetry Prize, and CBC Poetry Prize, and has won the John B. Santoianni Award (awarded by The Academy of American Poets) and the Joan t. Baldwin Award. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence, and lives in Toronto.
March 17th, 2015 - 8pm
CLAIRE CALDWELL
BLAIR TREWARTHA
STEVIE HOWELL
CLAIRE CALDWELL is a poet from Toronto, where she also edits Harlequin romances and runs rap-poetry workshops for kids. Her first collection, Invasive Species, was one of the National Post's top five poetry books of 2014. Claire was the 2013 winner of the Malahat Review's long poem prize, and she is a graduate of the University of Guelph's MFA program.
BLAIR TREWARTHA’s debut collection, Easy Fix, was published by Palimpsest Press in 2014. He is the author of two chapbooks, Break In (Cactus Press, 2010) and Porcupine Burning (Baseline Press, 2012). His poetry has appeared in Carousel, CV2, Prism, Event, and Existere. He currently lives and teaches in Toronto.
STEVIE HOWELL writes things and works in a hospital testing people, so anything you tell her is fair game. She published a poetry book last fall, called Sharps. She highly recommends it. She gets mistaken for a woman but is a small, half-Irish man who can run fast--like Tom Cruise, but without the crazy.
February 17th, 2015 - 8pm
JOHN WALL BARGER
SOFIA MOSTAGHIMI
JACOB SCHEIER
JOHN WALL BARGER’s poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, The Cortland Review, and The Montreal Prize’s Global Poetry Anthology, and are forthcoming in Subtropics, Lake Effect, and others. His third collection, The Book of Festus, is coming out with Palimpsest Press in the spring of 2015.
SOFIA MOSTAGHIMI is a middle school teacher by day and a fiction writer by night. She is also fiction curator for the Emerging Writers Reading Series. Most recently, her stories have appeared in Joyland Magazine, Echolocation, and Aestas Anthology 2014. She is currently working on her first novel.
JACOB SCHEIER is a poet, journalist and essayist. He is the author of two poetry collections, Letter from Brooklyn (ECW Press, 2013) and More to Keep us Warm (ECW Press), which won the 2008 Governor General's Award. He is also the author of the nonfiction ebook My Never Ending Acid Trip, published by the Toronto Star (2013) and is a regular contributor to Toronto's NOW Magazine. Jacob is currently working on a collection of personal essays. His essay "The Rabbi" is in the current issue of Brick. This spring he will be a Writer's Trust of Canada Pierre Berton House Writer-in-Resident in Dawson City, Yukon.
January 19th, 2015 - 8pm
Jim Johnstone,
Jane Hodgkinson,
Jacob Scheier
JIM JOHNSTONE is a Canadian writer, editor, and physiologist. He’s the author of four books of poetry including Dog Ear (Véhicule Press, 2014), and Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010). He’s the winner of several awards including a CBC Literary Award, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, Matrix Magazine’s LitPop Award and This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Currently, Johnstone is the Poetry Editor at Palimpsest Press, and an Associate Editor at Representative Poetry Online. He lives in Toronto.
JANE HODGKINSON is from Port Credit, Ontario. She took Creative Writing at York University and now lives and writes in Toronto. You can find her work in an upcoming issue of The Fiddlehead.
JACOB SCHEIER is a poet, journalist and essayist. He is the author of two poetry collections, Letter from Brooklyn (ECW Press, 2013) and More to Keep us Warm (ECW Press), which won the 2008 Governor General's Award. He is also the author of the nonfiction ebook My Never Ending Acid Trip, published by the Toronto Star (2013) and is a regular contributor to Toronto's NOW Magazine. Jacob is currently working on a collection of personal essays. His essay "The Rabbi" is in the current issue of Brick. This spring he will be a Writer's Trust of Canada Pierre Berton House Writer-in-Resident in Dawson City, Yukon
