29th session of The Tartan Turban Secret Readings Curated by Kateri Lanthier and featuring Shane Book, Bardia Sinaee, Joseph Dandurand, Jennifer Hosein and Isabelle Zhu.

Writers reading their work will be participating via Google Meet. Attendees will be able to join the event by clicking [link to come] on the day of the reading during the hours scheduled.

Featured writers

Curator Kateri Lanthier’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Fiddlehead, Event, Hazlitt, Green Mountains Review, Arc, Grain, Best Canadian Poetry 2014, The Walrus, the Literary Review of Canada, and The Night Heron Barks (forthcoming). She won the 2013 Walrus Poetry Prize and third prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, 2016. She holds a BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto, where she is a Mentor in the MA in Creative Writing. Her books are Reporting from Night (Iguana, 2011) and Siren (Signal Editions, Véhicule Press, 2017), longlisted for the 2018 Pat Lowther Award. Her essay appeared in Against Death (Anvil Press, 2019; Montaigne Medal finalist) and her poems have been included in five anthologies.

Joseph A. Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation located on the Fraser River about 20 minutes east of Vancouver. He resides there with his 3 children Danessa, Marlysse, and Jace. Joseph is the Director of the Kwantlen Cultural Center. Joseph received a Diploma in Performing Arts from Algonquin College and studied Theatre and Direction at the University of Ottawa. His recently published books are I WANT (Leaf Press, 2015) and HEAR AND FORETELL ( BookLand, 2015) and The Rumour, (BookLand 2018). SH:LAM (The Doctor) (Mawenzi House 2019) was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize in 2020 and his latest book, The East Side of it All (Nightwood Editions 2020) has just been shortlisted for the 2021 Dorothy Livesay Prize and the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Shane Book’s first collection, Ceiling of Sticks, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America Selection. His second volume, Congotronic, won the Archibald Lampman Award and was a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award, Ottawa Book Award, and Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also a filmmaker whose work has screened at film festivals on five continents and on television. He was educated at New York University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. An Associate Professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria, his third poetry collection, All Black Everything, will be published in 2022.

Bardia Sinaee was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives in Toronto. His poems have appeared in magazines across Canada and in several editions of Best Canadian Poetry. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, where he was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal. His first book is Intruder (House of Anansi, 2021).

Jennifer Hosein is a Toronto-based, Montreal-born writer, visual artist, and educator. Her debut collection of poetry, A Map of Rain Days, published by Guernica Editions, has been longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets 2021 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her poems, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and a play have been published in magazines in Canada, as well as translated into Hungarian for the anthology Crystal/Kristálykert. Her artwork has appeared on book covers, in magazines, and in solo and group exhibitions in Toronto; it is also featured on the cover of A Map of Rain Days.

Isabelle Zhu lives in Toronto. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English at the University of Toronto. She is working on her first poetry manuscript entitled The Butterfly Effect, which considers the improbabilities and limitations within diasporic connections.
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