Welcome to the 46th Tartan Turban Secret Reading featuring Michael Mirolla, Jovan Shadd, Irene Marques and Koom Kankesan. Curated by Gavin Barrett.
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.
Our featured writers will be performing on-site and in person between 7–10 pm on August 29, 2025, at Barrett and Welsh, 577 Kingston Road, Suite #301, Toronto, ON M4E 1R3. The in-person event will be live-streamed and recorded for accessibility. A link will be provided to attendees who register for the live stream.
We do ask that you register if you plan to attend. Tickets are free and reserving a spot helps us track numbers and access funding. Book a free ticket now at Lu.Ma.
Featured writers
Michael Mirolla is a champion of diverse Canadian Literature at Guernica Editions. But Michael is also the author of more than two dozen novels, plays, film scripts and short story and poetry collections. His novella, The Last News Vendor was winner of the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award. He has won three Bressani Prizes for the novel Berlin; the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue; and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads. Michael’s latest poetry collection, At the End of the World, was short-listed for the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award and took second prize for the Di Cicco Poetry Award. A symposium on Michael’s writing was held in Toronto on May 25, 2023. What’s next for Michael? His novella, How About This …?, will be published in September 2025. From September 2024-June 2025, Michael served as the Writer In Residence for the Regina Public Library. Born in Molise, Italy, Michael makes his home (along with five dogs, a cat and sundry humans) on a farm outside the town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands area of Ontario.
Jovan Shadd is a Black queer poet residing in North York. Lately, their poetry tends to revolve around the politics of the imagination in contrast with the politics of the real world. “I think poetry first came to me as a learning tool. A way of reframing lessons and queries about the world so that I might understand them better, or at least understand better that I don’t know enough yet to come to an answer,” Jovan shares. “I’ve made use of poetry this way for the length of my memory.”
Irene Marques is a bilingual writer (writing in English and Portuguese) and Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University in the Department of English. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, a Master’s in French Literature and Comparative Literature, a BA in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto, and a Social Work degree from Toronto Metropolitan University. Her creative writing publications include the poetry collections The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet (Mawenzi House, 2024), The Circular Incantation: An Exercise in Loss and Findings (Guernica Editions, 2013), The Perfect Unravelling of the Spirit (Mawenzi House, 2012) and Wearing Glasses of Water (Mawenzi House, 2007), the novels Uma Casa no Mundo (Imprensa Nacional, 2021) and Daria (Inanna Publications, 2021), and the collection of short stories Habitando na Metáfora do Tempo (Edium Editores, 2009). Uma Casa no Mundo won Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro Prize in Portugal. She is also the author of the academic manuscript Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender and Cultural Identity (Purdue University Press, 2011) and numerous academic articles in international journals or scholarly collectives. Irene Marques was born and raised in Portugal and moved to Canada at the age of 20. For more information about her work, visit https://www.irenemarques.net/
Koom Kankesan is the author of The Panic Button, The Rajapaksa Stories, and The Tamil Dream. His other interests include film and comics, about which he writes in Comicon.com. He has interviewed comics practitioners for The Deconstructing Comics Podcast. He spoke briefly to Global TV Vancouver about Killing Shakespeare in a four-minute segment here: https://globalnews.ca/video/11329056/palmas-picks-travelling-back-in-time/
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 #46, please contact series curator Gavin Barrett. This allows us 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 four 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 