The 22nd session of The Tartan Turban Secret Readings was curated by Hannah Brown at Barrett and Welsh on Friday, October 25th, 2019 and featured Hannah herself, Faith Arkorful, Sofia Mostaghimi, Jess Taylor and Sanchari Sur.
Born in Hastings County, Hannah Brown currently lives in Toronto’s Beach community. She has two degrees in film from York University and won awards for her screenplays. After happily teaching English and film at the college and collegiate levels, she recently returned to writing full time, with work published in several North American literary journals. Her short story “On Any Windy Day” published in Superstition Review is used by translator Emily Wilson’s grad students, and her short story “The Happiness” was (parenthetical) magazine’s entry for the 2016 Journey Awards. Her debut novel Look After Her had its launch at the Ben McNally bookstore, and will be available soon online and in stores. She will be reading for the Pivot, Bright Lit, Big City, and Draft series in Toronto, and in November be reading in Halifax at the Central Library. She has accepted an invitation to participate in the Leeds UK International Festival.
Sofia Mostaghimi is a Toronto-based fiction writer, teacher, and editor. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead (forthcoming), Journey Prize Stories 30, The Unpublished City Anthology, The Puritan, Joyland Magazine, and as a digital short for Platypus Press, among others. She is currently working on completing her first novel.
Faith Arkorful has had her work published in GUTS Magazine, Peach Magazine, PRISM International, Hobart, without/pretend The Puritan, and Canthius Magazine, amongst other places. She was a semi-finalist in the 2019 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides.
Jess Taylor is a Toronto writer and poet. Her second collection, Just Pervs, was released by Book*hug in Canada in September 2019. Recently, a short story from that collection, Two Sex Addicts Fall in Love, was long-listed for The Journey Prize and included in The Journey Prize Anthology 30. The title story from her first collection, Pauls (BookThug, 2015), Paul, received the 2013 Gold Fiction National Magazine Award. Jess believes that collaboration and helping other writers is an important part of her writing practice and continues to organize events in the community. She is currently working on a novel, Play, and a continuation of her life poem, Never Stop.
Sanchari Sur (she/they) was a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow, and a 2019 recipient of a Banff Centre residency (with Electric Literature). Their work can be found in The Unpublished City (2017), PRISM international, Humber Literary Review, Room, Arc Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral candidate in English at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the curator/co-founder of Balderdash Reading Series (est. Jan 2017).
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings 