Date and Time
7:00 – 9:30 PM EST, June 23rd, 2022. Add to Calendar
Curator
Sheniz Janmohamed was born and raised in Tkaronto with ancestral ties to Kenya and India. A poet, nature artist and arts educator, she visits schools and community organizations to teach and perform. Her nature art has been featured across Turtle Island, including the National Arts Centre and the Art Gallery of Mississauga. She has performed her work in venues across the world and has three poetry collections by Mawenzi House: Bleeding Light (2010), Firesmoke (2014) and Reminders on the Path (2021). She recently served as the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus (Winter/Spring 2022). She is the founder and facilitator of Owning our Stories, the first writing circle of its kind for South Asian women in Ontario. Follow her at shenizjanmohamed.com
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Featured writers
Founder and facilitator of Poets & Pancakes, a monthly brunch for writers, Ashley Hynd believes in building and fostering community. She sits on the editorial board for Canthius Literary Journal and was consecutively longlisted for The CBC Poetry Prize (2018 & 2019). Her work has appeared in several publications, including Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press), Changing the Face of Canadian Literature (Guernica Editions) and Best Canadian Poetry 2020 (Biblioasis). When she is not writing, Ashley can be found in the gardens growing food for the community, trampling the patriarchy, and avoiding doing the dishes. Follow her on Twitter: @ashley_hynd
Whitney French is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is a self-described Black futurist, middle child- trouble maker committed to centring stories from Black women and QTBIPOC communities around memory, loss, technology and nature. Her writing has appeared in the Carousel Magazine, ARC Poetry, GEIST, WATER Magazine, CBC Books and Quill and Quire. Whitney French is the founder of the multi-city workshop series Writing While Black as well as the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter. Additionally, she is the co-founder of the Black queer feminist press Hush Harbour. Whitney French currently lives in Tkaronto.
Samantha Jones (she/her) lives and writes on Treaty 7 territory in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary), Alberta. Her heritage is mixed, she is white settler and Black Canadian and grew up on the east coast in Nova Scotia. Sam is a magazine and journal enthusiast with writing in THIS, Room, Grain, CV2, Watch Your Head, Arctic, GeoHumanities, and elsewhere. Her visual OCD poetry chapbook, Site Orientation, was published by the Blasted Tree in the spring of 2022. Sam has a background in geology and is currently a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Calgary studying carbon cycling in the Canadian Arctic. She’s on Twitter and Instagram at @jones_yyc, and on the web at https://linktr.ee/JonesYYC. Here’s a link to Site Orientation, which can be ordered via the Blasted Tree website: http://www.theblastedtree.com/site-orientation
Rhiannon Ng Cheng Hin is a writer and environmental chemist. Her work has appeared in Brick Literary Journal, The Malahat Review, Grain, PRISM International, The Walrus (forthcoming) and elsewhere. She was selected for the 2019 Writers’ Trust of Canada Mentorship in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2021 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize. She currently serves as associate poetry editor for Plenitude Magazine. Her debut collection, Fire Cider Rain, will be released in September by Coach House Books.
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist originally from Pakistan and now settled in Canada. She works as Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, and is Digital Content Editor for Canthius. She is a member of Ottawa-based collaborative writing group VII. Her debut poetry collection is MONUMENT (Brick Books).
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Open mic
Kaberi Das Chatterjee and Gavin Barrett.
The ambience at our readings is intimate, extremely informal and very supportive. Open mic readers are given 4 minutes in total, including a brief introduction to themselves and their work. They may read any form of creative writing (fiction/poetry/drama/ screenplay) – or a work of reportage or creative non-fiction. The Tartan Turban Secret Readings is not a lecture or motivational speaking series, so no academic or self-help works, please.
There are detailed open mic guidelines posted in our FB group.
Open mic readers who have published works they would like to offer for sale are free to mention it on finishing their readings
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings 