Growing Room Festival presents The Struggle is Real: Writing about Mental Health, with panelists Alessandra Naccarato, author of Re-Origin of Species, Emma Hansen, Addie Tsai, and Rebecca Salazar. Moderator: Lucia Misch. Discussions around mental health and illnesses might have become marginally less stigmatized than before, but haven’t become any less challenging to navigate. In this […]

Growing Room Festival presents Fear in Fiction, with panelists Shani Mootoo, author of Polar Vortex, Mallory Tater, Zalika Reid-Benta, Rebecca Fisseha, and Rhea Tregebov. Moderated by Doretta Lau. Five celebrated novelists and short story writers discuss how to channel fear in fiction, sharing their secrets to transforming a protagonist’s rock-bottom moments into compelling stories. By […]

Growing Room Festival presents Accessing Ourselves: Crip Poetics And Writing Our Desires, with panelists Alessandra Naccarato, author of Re-Origin of Species, Amanda Leduc, and cast members Kat Norris, Caroline Hébert, and Sandra Pronteau from the production Unsettled. Moderator & Event Curator: Aimee Louw. Join disabled, Deaf, mad, crip, ill, tired, traumatized artists who write ourselves […]

Growing Room Festival presents Not Your Sidekick: Queer Characters, with panelists Alex Leslie, author of We All Need to Eat, Tanya Boteju, Tash McAdam, and Addie Tsai. Moderated by Jen Currin. Queer identities aren’t plot devices for straight folks’ character development. Queer folks are  protagonists of their own individual stories, and they circumnavigate queer narrative […]

Growing Room presents Transmuting Trauma, with panelists Alessandra Naccarato, author of Re-Origin of Species, Maneo Mohale, Addie Tsai, Corinne Manning. Moderator: Mercedes Eng. There is no linear nature to healing. Our journeys carry us back to our homelands, into the depths of personal legend, and even beyond, into the farthest imagined expanses of our own […]

Growing Room presents The Limit Does Not Exist: Boundless Forms, with panelists Alex Leslie, author of Vancouver for Beginners, Aisha Sasha John, Aimee Louw, and Carleigh Baker. Moderator: Phay Moores. Memoir in verse, autofiction, kinetic sculpture, lyric essays, performance poetry, music installations. Hybrid forms twist and shape traditional forms of storytelling in startling and revelatory […]

The Axton Reading Series presents a Reading with Kristen Renee Miller, translator of Spawn by Marie-Andree Gill.

An evening with Shani Mootoo (Polar Vortex), Moez Surani (Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real), and Book*hug Co-Publisher Jay MillAr (I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You: New and Selected Poems, Anvil Press).

The Axton Reading Series presents a Workshop with Kristen Renee Miller, translator of Spawn by Marie-Andree Gill.

Writers Read at Concordia University presents Shani Mootoo, author of Polar Vortex, and Helen Humphries: A Reading and Discussion in Conversation with Sina Queyras.