Draft 17.4 November 27th
Draft is back on November 27th, 3 p.m. on zoom with another wonderful lineup of authors sharing new and unpublished work.
Readings by Taylor Marie Graham, Helen Akey, Aaron Schneider, Robin Pacific, Priya Ramsingh, Elizabeth Ruth, Jia Qing Wilson-Yang, and Banoo Zan.
Please register on eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/draft-174-tickets-433670007667
Helen Akey is an upcoming poet and creative writer. As a young girl, Helen would journal everything that was happening in her life as a form of therapy. In Grade 12, spoken word artist and activist, Faduma Mohamed, introduced her to poetry and different performance styles to further express physical, mental, and emotional journeys. As Helen continuously gains exposure and guidance from others in the field of creative writing, she would like to share her knowledge, skills, and stories with future generations to inspire and encourage them to use their voice and speak their truth as they navigate in their journey of life⎼⎼openly.
Taylor Marie Graham (she/her) is an award winning theatre artist, writer, and educator living in Cambridge, Ontario / Haldimand Tract. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and is a PhD Candidate in the School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph. Currently, Taylor teaches at Western University and is writing a new play supported by the Waterloo Region, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council, and Lyth Arts Centre in Scotland. Both her creative and scholarly work explores rural feminist identities and the decolonization of bodies in space.
Robin Pacific has produced artworks in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, video, installation, performance, web-based projects and numerous community-based collaborations. For her last performance, I Married My Work, in 2020, she created a wedding dress with headdress, 10’ train and a bridal bouquet, all made out of pages from forty years of working notebooks. Skater Girl, her memoir-in-essays, will be published in spring, 2024, by Guernica Editions. Robin is also a practicing Spiritual Director.
Priya Ramsingh is the author of Brown Girl in the Room, a novel that was published by Tightrope Books in 2017. Her short story, Pies for Lunch, was shortlisted for best short fiction in 2021, by The Caribbean Writer, an annual literary journal published by the University of the Virgin Islands. She is a former writer for Metroland Media and occasionally writes op-eds for the Toronto Star. Priya was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and came to Toronto when she was five. She has a BA in English literature from Carleton University. Priya is reading from her latest manuscript titled, The Elevator, a fiction story about eating disorders, transgender emergence, and online dating in Toronto’s West end.
Elizabeth Ruth is the author of the novels, Matadora, Smoke, Ten Good Seconds of Silence, and the forthcoming novel, Semi-Detached. She has also published a novella in plain language for literacy learners entitled Love You To Death and edited the anthology, Bent On Writing, contemporary queer tales. Elizabeth’s work has been recognized by the Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize, Amazon.ca/Best First Novel Award, The City of Toronto Book Award and One Book One Community. Elizabeth Ruth teaches creative writing U of T, SCS.
Aaron Schneider is a Founding Editor at The /tƐmz/ Review. His stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, Filling Station, The Puritan, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Pro-Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, BULL, Long Con, The Malahat Review and The Windsor Review. His stories have been nominated for The Journey Prize and The Pushcart Prize. His novella, Grass-Fed, was published by Quattro Books in Fall 2018. His collection of experimental short fiction, What We Think We Know (Gordon Hill Press) was published in Fall 2021, and his novel, The Supply Chain (Crowsnest Books), is forthcoming.
Jia Qing Wilson-Yang is a Canadian writer. Her debut novel, Small Beauty, was published in 2016. She was awarded an honour of distinction from the Dayne Ogilvie Prize in 2016, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction at the 29th Lambda Literary Awards in 2017. Her writing has also appeared in the anthologies Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet and Letters Lived: Radical Reflections, Revolutionary Paths, and in the literary magazine Room.
Bänoo Zan is a poet, librettist, translator, teacher, editor and poetry curator, with more than 250 published poems and poetry-related pieces as well as three books including Songs of Exile and Letters to My Father. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Canada’s most diverse poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012), a brave space that bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, poetic styles, voices and visions. Bänoo is the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta, Canada, Sept 2022-May 2023.
Many thanks to Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Council through the Playwrights’ Guild of Canada as well as our generous audiences for funding this reading.