The 32nd session of The Tartan Turban Secret Readings. Curated by Mariam Pirbhai and featuring Farzana Doctor, Lamees Al Ethari, Frances Robert Reilly and Ami Sands Brodoff.
Date and Time
7:00 – 9:30 PM EST, October 28th, 2021. Add to Calendar
How to book
Please book a spot on TTSR 32’s Eventbrite page. Tickets are free.
Venue
This is a virtual reading. Writers reading their work will be participating via Google Meet. Attendees will be able to join the event by clicking [here] on the day of the reading during the hours scheduled. (Please note: this link may change. Only those who have booked through Eventbrite will receive the update link.)
Curator
Mariam Pirbhai is Full Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she specializes in postcolonial and diaspora literatures and creative writing. She is the author of a short story collection, Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna), which won the IPPY Gold Medal and the American BookFest awards for multicultural fiction and the short story, respectively. She has also authored or edited several academic works on the global South Asian diaspora, and served as President of CACLALS (2017-19), Canada’s longest-running and oldest postcolonial studies association. Current projects include a first novel depicting Islamophobia as it impacts a diverse community of Muslim-Canadians settled in Toronto and Montreal.
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Featured writers
Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist and psychotherapist. She is the author of four novels, Stealing Nasreen (Inanna 2007) and Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn, 2011), All Inclusive (Dundurn, 2015) and Seven (2020), which have garnered prestigious literary awards and acclamations, including the Lambda Literary Prize and, most recently, a Trillium nomination for Seven. She is also looking forward to the 2022 release of a debut poetry collection, You Still Look The Same. Doctor curated the Brockton Writers Series from 2009-18, she has served as Writer in Residence at the Toronto Public Library, and she continues to mentor emerging and established writers as a writing coach, and with organizations such as Diaspora Dialogues, Mentorly, and The Writers Union of Canada.
Lamees Al Ethari holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Waterloo, where she has been teaching creative and academic writing and literature since 2015. She is the author of From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris (2018), and Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir (2019). Her poems have appeared in About Place Journal, The New Quarterly, The Malpais Review, and the anthology Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here. She is a consulting and nonfiction editor with The New Quarterly, and has also co-coordinated a 12-week creative writing workshop, The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop for Immigrant Women, which helps local women construct and perform their stories to a public audience.
Frances Roberts Reilly is an internationally recognized Romani/Gypsy poet and author, and the producer of Watershed Writers, a radio documentary series featuring writers of the Grand River region that airs on CKWR F98.5. Reilly also contributes to CBC network’s flagship documentary series, Ideas. Parramisha: A Romani Poetry Collection, is Reilly’s first poetic volume (Cinnamon Press), inspired by her mixed-race Welsh Romany/Gypsy English ancestry. Parramisha in Romanus means our story.
Ami Sands Brodoff is the author of three novels, Can You See Me, In Many Waters and The White Space Between, which won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction, as well as two short story collections, Bloodknots, and her latest, The Sleep of Apples (Inanna 2021). Ami leads creative writing workshops to teens, adults, and seniors and is a workshop leader in the newly launched StoryScaping Program, which provides creative writing classes for teens and seniors in underserved areas of Quebec. She has also taught writing to formerly incarcerated women and to people grappling with mental illness. Ami Sands Brodoff has been awarded fellowships in Canada, the United States and Malta.
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Open mic
Anyone attending is welcome to read or perform (if you are a musician) in our open mic sessions. If you are a writer or musician who would like to perform in the open mic session, we ask that you listen in to at least one session to get the flavour of the evening and join in on your next visit. To participate in TTSR #32, please contact series curators Gavin or Mayank or TTSR32 curator Mariam Pirbhai. This allows them to line up readers and manage the evening in a way that respects each writer’s work.
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 