Please join us for a reading by Julie Paul and Harold Hoefle! We will have their books available for sale and signing, as well.

Our readers:
Julie Paul is the author of Meteorites, a collection of captivating stories that explore family dynamics and frailty, loss and atonement, faith and redemption, as well as two previous short story collections, The Jealousy Bone and The Pull of the Moon, and the poetry collection The Rules of the Kingdom. The Pull of the Moon won the 2015 Victoria Book Prize and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 book. She lives in Victoria, BC.

Harold Hoefle is most recently the author of The Night Chorus, a poetry collection from McGill Queen's University Press, and his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have been published in The Antigonish Review, Exile, Front & Centre, Grain, Matrix, and Telling Stories: New English Fiction from Québec. His debut novel The Mountain Clinic was published by Oberon Press and won praise for its “spare and elegant prose” (Malahat Review). He teaches in the English Department at John Abbott College.

 

Please join us for a reading by four wonderful LGBTQIA+ authors! We'll have copies of their books available for sale and signing, as well.

Our lineup:

Trebor Healey is most recently the author of Falling, a short story collection in which characters lose their way, figuratively and literally, and confront the profound displacement of modern life. He is the recipient of a Lambda Literary award, two Publishing Triangle awards and a Violet Quill award. He is the author of three novels, A Horse Named Sorrow, Faun and Through It Came Bright Colors; a book of poetry, Sweet Son of Pan; and two previous collections of stories, A Perfect Scar and Eros & Dust. He co-edited (with Marci Blackman) Beyond Definition: New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco and co-edited (with Amie M. Evans) Queer & Catholic.

Madelaine Caritas Longman is a poet and essayist living in Montreal. Her work has appeared in Room, filling station, Lemon Hound, and Prism. Her first book, The Danger Model, was released this fall from McGill-Queen's University Press.

Felice Picano is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction, and plays. His work has been translated into many languages and several of his titles have been national and international bestsellers. He is considered a founder of modern gay literature along with the other members of the Violet Quill. Picano also began and operated the SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. His first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he’s been nominated for and/or won dozens of literary awards. Picano teaches at Antioch College, Los Angeles.

Nicola Sibthorpe is Montreal born, and has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at Concordia University, focusing on the creation of identity through the intersections of neuro-divergenece and queerness. In 2017, she was the inaugural winner of the Quebec Young Writers Award, and has otherwise been published in Headlights, QWF Writes, and Carte-Blanche.

Please join us for the latest iteration of our Book Club with the Author, where a local Montreal author joins us to discuss their book! This time, we'll be discussing A Joy to be Hidden by author Ariela Freedman. As with all our book clubs, we recommend reading the book in advance, but you are welcome to attend as long as you are all right with spoilers.

About the author:

Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Vallum, carte blanche, The Cincinnati Review and other publications, and she was selected to participate in the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2014 Mentorship Program. She has a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches literature at Concordia’s Liberal Arts College in Montreal, where she lives with her husband and two sons. Her first novel, Arabic for Beginners, was shortlisted for the QWF/Concordia first book prize, and won the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Fiction in 2018. A Joy to Be Hidden (2019) is her second novel.

About the book:
A Joy To Be Hidden is set in a vividly recreated late-90s New York City. The protagonist is Alice Stein, a graduate student whose father died a year before, and who has now lost her grandmother. In the process of sorting through the grandmother's belongings, Alice unlocks a family secret. In addition to its wisdom and rich humour, the novel is full of memorable characters. We can never quite forget the title quote--"It Is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found" (D. W. Winnicott)--and we discover, over the course of the novel, that it applies to all its characters.