Curated by Dannabang Kuwabong. Featuring Linzey Corridon, Elizabeth Allua Vaah, Michael Fraser and Pamela Mordecai.
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings are variously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the League of Canadian Poets and The Writers’ Union of Canada.
Date and Time
7:00 – 9 PM EST, Friday, February 23, 2024. Book your free tickets now via Lu.Ma! Reserving a spot helps us track numbers and helps our writers get their grants.
Or just click here to attend via Google Meet, between 7 and 9 PM EST, Friday, February 23rd, 2024.
Curator
Dannabang Kuwabong is a Ghanaian-Canadian who teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. He is a poet, editor, and literary critic. He has published essays and poetry in academic books and literary magazines. His poetry includes Voices from Kibuli Country and Caribbean Blues & Love’s Genealogy ( Mawenzi House). Literary Studies: Myth Performance in African Diaspora Drama: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance, Mothers and Daughters, Mothering, Community & Friendship, (Demeter Press); Rhetoric of Resistance, Labor of Love: The Ecopoetics of Nationhood in the Poetry and Prose of Lasana M. Sekou, (Nehesi House). His latest poetry collection is Sargasso Sea Scrolls (Mawenzi House 2023). Kuwabong’s poetry adds a new dimension to the growing body of new voices that is expanding and redefining Canadian literature.
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Featured writers
Pamela Mordecai is a Jamaican-Canadian writer whose most recent books of poetry are de book of Joseph (Mawenzi House, 2022), which is one of two books by Jamaican-Canadian poets that were finalists for the OCM BOCAS Award in 2022, and A Fierce Green Place: New and Collected Poems (New Directions, 2022).She has published nine collections of poetry, five books for children, a short story collection(Pink Icing), a novel (Red Jacket) that was shortlisted for the Writer’s Trust Fiction Award in 2015. A veteran anthologist with a PhD in English, her collections, edited singly or with collaborators, focus on the writing of Caribbean and Caribbean/Canadian women. Her poetry is archived at https://mordecai.citl.mun.ca She lives in Toronto.
Elizabeth Allua Vaah, author of Maame, grew up in Bakanta, Western Ghana and moved to Canada in 2010. Allua calls herself a Maternal Health Migrant. She is co-founder of a Maternal Health advocacy group, an advocate of girl-child education and a strong environmentalist. She lives in Brampton with her family.
Michael Fraser has been published in various national and international journals and anthologies. His manuscript, The Serenity of Stone, won the 2007 Canadian Aid Literary Award Contest and was published by Bookland Press in 2008. He is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, the 2018 Gwendolyn Macewen Poetry Competition, and the League of Canadian Poets’ 2022 Lesley Strutt Poetry Prize. His latest collection, With My Eyes Wide Open, is published by Exile Editions.
Linzey S. Corridon is a Vanier Canada Scholar, educator, and writer. Born and raised in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, he now resides in Canada. As Mawenzi House says, West of West Indian constructs the Queer Caribbean experience as a simultaneously individual and collective one, embracing the language that continues to unsettle queer life. The collection is, at once, a summons and a love letter to familiar figures like the Bullerman, the Chichiman, the Funny man, and the Anty man. The poetry collects a distinctly queer Vincentian Canadian account of love and autonomy, and while it represents a written journey that demarcates queer pain, it is also an exhibition of pleasure flowing from the bodies and minds of the collection’s many subjects.
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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 #41, please contact series curators Gavin or TTSR41 curator Dannabang Kuwabong. 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. 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 these upon finishing their readings.
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings 