Welcome back to the launch of our Fall Season 2009
David Zieroth and Marguerite Pigeon
with a special introduction by Vancouver's Poet Laureate Brad Cran
Thursday September 10th, 2009, 7pm
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
The Fly in Autum, David Zieroth's eighth poetry collection, is a nuanced work that constantly shifts between the inane and the macabre, between black humour and self-mockery. There is an absurdist twist to this collection in which the landscapes are sometimes recognizably our own but often, eerily irrevocably altered by water-light. From North Vancouver sleet and fog to palominos and Baghdad, from the inevitability of death to the cockiness of flight, from Dick and Jane readers to insurance clerks, The Fly in Autumn willingly, knowingly, risks the reader's unease by going beyond the usual contemporary mode into language that is both penetrating and tender.
Inventory is a collection of 58 object poems. Taking as a starting point the reciprocal relation between subjects and objects, Marguerite Pigeon explores the unique way that objects appear in an individual consciousness. Each object in this inventory exists on its own and also reflects the author's experience, from the mundane stapler and tea bag, to the mysterious, extinct dodo bird, to entities that blur the line between person and thing. In this way, the collection highlights the often hidden dimensions of the objects we encounter, including their temporal, political, locational and psychic aspects. It offers an opportunity for readers to reconsider their own investments in what, by dictionary definition, should be static categories.
Marguerite Pigeon appears courtesy of The Canada Council of the Arts through The Writers' Union of Canada.
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Robson Reading Series at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
presents
Rita Wong
Thursday September 24th, 2009, 1:00-2:00pm
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Room 301
Point Grey
Campus, 1961 East Mall
Rita Wong is the author of three books: Sybil Unrest (co-authored with Larissa Lai,
LINEbooks, 2008), forage (Nightwood Editions, 2007), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998). Her poems have
appeared in numerous anthologies including Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's
Poetry and Poetics, A Verse Map of Vancouver, RockSalt: An Anthology of
Contemporary BC Poetry, and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural
Literature. Wong received the 2008 Dorothy Livesay Poetry
Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award and was a finalist for the 2008 Asian American Literary
Award. An assistant professor at Emily Carr, she is currently researching the
poetics of water.
The Robson Reading Series is proud to partner with the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on the Point Grey campus on Vancouver's West Side to present a series of monthly afternoon readings. All events are free and open to the public.
Robson Reading Series at Robson Square
presents
David Chariandy and Ameen
Merchant
Thursday September 24th, 2009, 7pm
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
David Chariandy's first novel, Soucouyant (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), is titled after an evil
spirit of Caribbean folklore, which within the novel evolves as a symbol of the unspoken past that haunts a mother with dementia
and her Canadian-born son. The novel was nominated for several prizes and awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin
Award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award, a Commonwealth Best First Book Prize, the ReLit Award, the
City of Toronto Book Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. David's second
novel, Brother, is forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart. David lives in Vancouver and teaches in the Department of
English at Simon Fraser University.
Ameen Merchant was born in Bombay and raised in Madras, India. His first novel, The Silent Raga
(Douglas&McIntyre, 2007) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book. It follows the stories of two
sisters from a middle-class Tamil Brahmin family. In confident prose that resembles the rhythms and progression of an
Indian raga, Ameen captures in rich detail the world of these Brahmin women, a world restricted by caste and cultural rules
but also wrested apart by decisions which eschew tradition and set the tabloids on fire. Ameen now lives in Vancouver,
where he is working on his next novel and programming a new Bollywood audio channel for the CBC.
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Rachel Rose in conjunction with the Robson Reading Series presents
Cross Border Pollination - an evening of readings and discussion
with authors from the U.S. and Canada
featuring Nancy Mauro, Brenda Miller,
Peter Pereira, and Shannon Stewart
Friday October 9th, 2009, 7pm
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
Nancy Mauro's debut
novel, New World Monkeys (Shaye Areheart Books, Sept. 2009), is one of the most highly anticipated titles on Crown's
fall list. Publisher's Weekly named it "a galley to grab" at this year's Book Expo America. Nancy has worked as a creative director and copywriter in both Canada and the U.S. and is a recent Fellow and
graduate of the MFA program at UBC. Nancy's fiction and non-fiction have appeared in several literary magazines, newspapers,
and anthologies and her work has been recognized by the Canada Council for the Arts. She lives in New York City and is currently at work on her second novel.
Brenda Miller
is the author of Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002) which was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book
Award in Creative Nonfiction, and Blessing of the Animals (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009). She has
received five Pushcart Prizes, and her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Fourth Genre,
Creative Nonfiction, The Sun, Utne Reader, The Georgia Review, and Witness. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill,
2004), and she serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review.
Peter Pereira is a family physician in Seattle, and was a founding editor of Floating Bridge Press. His
poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review,
Journal of the American Medical Association, and have been anthologized in 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for
Everyday, and the 2007 Best American Poetry. They have also been featured online at "Verse Daily" and "Poetry
Daily", as well as on National Public Radio's "The Writer's Almanac". His books include The Lost Twin (Grey Spider
2000), Saying the World (Copper Canyon, 2003) and most recently What's Written on the Body (Copper Canyon
2007), which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.
Shannon Stewart's
first book, The Canadian Girl (Nightwood Editions, 1998), was a finalist for the Milton
Acorn People's Poetry Award and Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Book of
Poetry. Her second collection, Penny Dreadful, (Véhicule Press Signal Editions, 2008) contains poetry of great
psychological risk-taking that track the missing women of
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Shannon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the
University of British Columbia. She has been the poetry editor of PRISM
international, and was included in Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets. She
lives in Vancouver, BC.
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An Evening of Poetry and Short Fiction with Two of Canada's Most Critically Acclaimed Emerging Literary Talents
Chris Hutchinson and Pasha
Malla
Monday October 19th, 2009, 7pm
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
Pasha Malla burst onto the Canadian literary scene with the publication of his debut short story collection The Withdrawal Method
(House of Anansi Press, 2008), which was longlisted for the Giller Prize and won the 2008 Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the 2009 Trillium Book Award. It was also selected as one of the Globe and Mail's Top 100 Books of 2008. Pasha is the author of a book of poems, All our grandfathers are ghosts (Snare Press, 2008), as well as being a regular contributor to McSweeney's. His first novel, People Park, will be published by
House of Anansi Press in 2010. Pasha spent the summer of 2009 as the writer-in-residence at the Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, and is currently
on faculty at the University of Toronto and the Banff Centre's Wired Writing Studio. Originally from St.John's, Newfoundland, he now lives in Toronto.
With imagination, wit, and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson's poetry
negotiates and renegotiates the shifting no-man's-land between self and
others, introspection and public life. His second collection of poems Other People's Lives has just been released by Brick Books.
Poems from his debut poetry collection, Unfamiliar Weather (The Muses' Company, 2005) have been translated into Chinese and have appeared in numerous Canadian and U.S. publications. Chris was born in Montreal and has lived in Victoria, Edmonton, Vancouver, Tempe, AZ, and most recently Kelowna, BC where he teaches English
at Okanagan College.
Chris Hutchinson appears courtesy of The Canada Council of the Arts through
The Writers' Union of Canada.
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Robson Reading Series at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
presents
Patti Gully
Thursday October 22nd, 2009, 2:00-3:00pm
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Room 301
Point Grey
Campus, 1961 East Mall
Patti Gully is the author of the non-fiction
work Sisters of Heaven: China's Barnstorming Aviatrixes: Modernity, Feminism, and Popular Imagination in Asia and the
West (Long River Press, 2008). In the late 1930s, as the world moved closer to war, three vivacious Chinese women defied
gender perceptions by becoming pilots. Driven by a fierce independent spirit, they realized their dream of flying, completed
barnstorming goodwill exhibitions across the Western Hemisphere, and captured the imagination of all those whose lives they
touched. In a story almost forgotten to history, Patti Gully's exhaustive research delves into the personal lives of these
women, uncovering their fascinating personalities, loves, passions, and above all their overwhelming sense of patriotism and
duty. In a time when few Chinese women could even drive a car, these aviatrixes used flight as a metaphor for their own
freedom as well as a symbol of empowerment.
Patti Gully holds a B.A. from the University of Winnipeg in English, Religious Studies, and Classics, and a Master of
Library and Information Studies degree from UBC. In addition to Sisters of Heaven, Gully is the co-author of the two
-volume book, Overseas Chinese from the Five Counties and Chinese Aviation History (wu yi huaqiao yu zhongguo
hangkong), and has recently completed Time Flies, a biography of the Chinese-American aviator, General Art Lym. She
is currently engaged in creating a documentary film of the life of General Lym. Patti Gully lives in Vancouver, BC.
The Robson Reading Series is proud to partner with the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on the Point Grey campus on Vancouver's West Side to present a series of monthly afternoon readings. All events are free and open to the public.
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Celebrate Learning: Readings from The Journey Prize Stories 21
with authors Daniel Griffin, Paul Headrick, Sarah L. Taggart, Yasuko Thanh
and editor Lee Henderson
Thursday October 29th, 2009, 7pm
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
As part of UBC's Celebrate Learning Week,
please join us for a special reading and discussion from The
Journey Prize Stories 21 with contributing authors Daniel Griffin, Paul Headrick, Sarah L. Taggart, Yasuko Thanh, and editor Lee Henderson.
For more than two decades, The Journey Prize Stories has been Canada's most celebrated annual fiction
anthology, presenting the best stories published each year by some of the most exciting emerging writers. This year
the stories were selected by renowned authors Camilla Gibb, Lee Henderson, and Rebecca Rosenblum.
The stories are contenders for the $10,000 Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for which the winner will be announced in fall 2009.
Contributing Authors:
Daniel Griffin's short stories have appeared in numerous literary
magazines across North America. Along with Rachel Rosenblum and Alice Petersen, he was featured in Coming
Attractions '08. In addition, his work was published in The Journey Prize Stories in both 2004 and 2009.
Paul Headrick's first novel That Tune Clutches My Heart was short-listed for the 2009 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. His previous work has been published in numerous journals, including The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, and Image. Paul teaches literature and creative writing at Langara College. He lives in Vancouver with his partner, novelist Heather Burt.
Sarah L. Taggart is a graduate of the University of Victoria Writing
Program and is now a Master of Publishing candidate at Simon Fraser
University. Earlier this year, Sarah's story "Deaf" won The Malahat
Review's Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for Fiction. Sarah lives in East Vancouver with
her partner, Metal Steve.
Yasuko Thanh has lived in Germany, Mexico, and Central America. Her
stories have been published in numerous literary journals, and
in addition to fiction, her nonfiction has appeared in publications as
diverse as Island Parent Magazine and subTerrain. A finalist for the
Hudson Prize, the Millenium Award, and the David Adams Richards Award,
she is currently a Masters' Candidate and Academic Assistant at UVic.
Editor:
Lee Henderson's highly anticipated first novel The Man Game was published in 2008 to rave reviews and won the 2009 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Henderson's short story collection The Broken Record Technique (Penguin Canada, 2002) won the 2003 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. He has published fiction and art criticism in numerous periodicals and co-organizes "Father Zosima Presents", a monthly night of sound performances in Vancouver.
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New BC Poets Series: Poetry - Translations - Interviews - Poetics
Readings from 4 Poets featuring Daniela Elza, Peter Morin, Al Rempel,
and Onjana Yawnghwe
Thursday November 12th, 2009, 7pm
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
4 Poets, is the first book in a new series by Mother Tongue Publishing which brings
emerging and established BC poets together in a fresh format that explores the broader scope of the poet's work. This first collection includes over a dozen new
poems by Daniela Elza, Peter Morin, Al Rempel, and Onjana Yawnghwe, as well as writing drafts, interviews, poetics, short biographies and author photographs, and translations of select poems into French, Thai, Bulgarian and Tahltan.
Daniela Elza is a PhD student in Philosophy of Education who poeticizes
philosophy and philosophizes poetry, and hopes to bring them both to bear
on school reform and cultural ferment: Philo-poesis not just as a
practice, a more courteous way of being in the world, but as a vehicle for
transforming consciousness. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Capilano Review, CV2, Van Gogh's Ear, Vallam,
Rocksalt Anthology, A Verse Map of Vancouver, and Poetic Inquiry.
To date she has released well over a hundred poems into
the world.
Peter Morin is of the Crow clan of the Tahltan Nation of Telegraph Creek, BC. Peter spent 4 years working with the Redwire Native Youth Media Society and Redwire Magazine, as a community educator and advocate for youth, through media, writing, and art. As a visual and performance artist, Peter's work looks deeply into issues of identity, family, and healing. His performance work includes "Team Diversity Bannock, the World's Largest Bannock Attempt", "7 Suits for 7 Days of Colonialism", and "Stop, Drop and Bingo". Peter currently lives and works in Victoria, BC.
Al Rempel is currently a teacher in Prince George, BC
where he lives with his wife and daughter. His poems have been
published in The Malahat Review and GRAIN; the on-line journals
Reflections on Water and stonestone; and anthologized in Rocksalt,
Half in the Sun, Forestry Diversification Project, and Down in
the Valley.
Although her family is originally from Shan State in Burma, Onjana
Yawnghwe was born in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and came to Canada at the age
of seven. She grew up in Vancouver and Coquitlam, and received both a
Bachelor and Master's degree in English from UBC. She has been
published in various literary journals and anthologies, and dabbles
occasionally in book design. She is also the co-editor of Xerography, a
6x6 literary journal, and the co-founder of Fish Magic Press, a
micropress that specializes in unique, hand-made chapbooks. She currently
lives in Burnaby, BC.
Robson Reading Series at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
presents
Jean Barman
Thursday November 26th, 2009, 2:00-3:00pm
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Room 301
Point
Grey Campus, 1961 East Mall
Jean Barman's ten
books and numerous articles on British Columbian and Aboriginal history have won awards from the Canadian Historical Association, Canadian Committee on the History of Sexuality, Coalition for Western Women's History in the U.S., British Columbia Historical Federation, and the City of Vancouver. Her prize-winning The West beyond the West: A History of
British Columbia recently appeared in a third edition. Her latest book, British Columbia: Spirit of the People (Harbour Publishing, 2008), was commissioned by the provincial government to celebrate the 150th birthday of the naming of British Columbia. This masterful work is enhanced by images selected from the province's most talented photographers, including David Nunuk, Chris Cheadle, and Vance Hannah. Jean is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She lives in Vancouver, BC.
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Robson Reading Series at Robson Square
presents
Sonja Greckol and Rebecca
Hendry
Thursday November 26th, 2009, 7pm
UBC Library/Bookstore at Robson Square
"A gorgeous, intelligent churner of a debut," writes Margaret Christakos of Sonja Greckol's first
collection of poetry, Gravity Matters, launched from Inanna Publications in April 2009. Sonja's previous work has appeared in
Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, Dalhousie Review, CV2, Canadian Women's
Studies, The Fiddlehead, and Matrix. She coordinates poetry for Women and Environments
International Magazine. She has taught college and university, studied order and disorder in jokes, done human
rights and gender-based research and consulting, and does local activism while she writes. Her long poem, "Emilie
Explains Newton to Voltaire", was short-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2008. Newspaper headlines spin on their
heads in her next poetry project, Skin of the Day. Sonja lives in Toronto. ON.
Rebecca Hendry was born in Ottawa and grew up in Brockville, Vancouver, Peterborough, Montreal, and Yellowknife before settling on the Sunshine Coast at age eleven. Her fiction writing has appeared in the Windsor Review, Dalhousie Review, Artistry, Wascana Review, Event, paperplates, and Room of One's Own. Rebecca's short story "The Woman Across the Way" was longlisted for the 2005 Writers' Union of Canada short prose competition and her short story "Jesse Beautiful" was nominated for the 2003 Journey Prize. Her debut novel, Grace River (Brindle & Glass, Feb. 2009), is set in a tight-knit smelter town in the interior of British Columbia. It is a powerful and courageous story told from the perspective of four friends which explores the reasons why people continue to stay in harmful situations and asks us to think about the damage we all do, not only to the environment, but also to the ones we love the most. Rebecca has worked in film, theatre and on music videos, and has taught creative writing to children. She lives in Roberts Creek, BC.
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Coming Soon to the Robson Reading Series:
December 10, 7pm at the UBC Library/Bookstore Robson Square: Hope in Shadows Anthology: 2010 Calendar sale and readings by Helen Hill, Tom Quirk, Russ Zillman, and more.
January 14, 2010, 2-3pm at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre: Ian Ferguson.
January 14, 2010, 7pm at the UBC Library/Bookstore Robson Square: Ian Ferguson and Mark Leiren-Young.
January 28, 2010, 7pm at the UBC Library/Bookstore Robson Square: Billeh Nickerson and Craig Boyko.
March 25, 2010, 7pm at the UBC Library/Bookstore Robson Square: Nairne Holtz.
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Our address in sunny downtown Vancouver:
UBC Library/Bookstore - Robson Square
Plaza Level, 800 Robson St. (between Howe and Hornby St.)
Vancouver, BC Canada V6Z-3B7
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