Poetics/Ethics: New Work by Queer Poets III
This is the third of four readings that will showcase contemporary queer poetry by authors working in Canada, based on the notion that ethics should be conceived as encompassing not just academic research but also literary writing. Each of these poets crafts new languages to describe and confront the interplay of lived experience and political critique. By bringing them together, we hope not only to foster a conversation between the authors of some of the most exciting poetry being written today, but also some of the most complex and subtle thinking about gender and sexuality and their intersections with race, indigeneity, migration, and colonialism
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Aisha Sasha John’s medium is energy. She is author of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize nominated collection, I have to live. (M&S 2017), as well as THOU (Book*hug 2014), finalist for the Trillium and Relit Poetry Awards. She served as guest faculty for the 2019 Writing Studio residency program at The Banff Centre and was the 2018 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto (Scarborough). Aisha is also a choreographer and the 2019-2022 Dancemakers’ Resident Artist; in March 2020 she will remount her solo show the aisha of is which premiered at the Whitney Museum in 2017.
Gail Scott‘s iconic feminist novel Heroine (Toronto : Coach House, 2019) has been re-issued with an introduction by Eileen Myles. Other novels include The Obituary (New York, Nightboat, 2012; Coach House, 2010), a ghost story set in a Montréal triplex, a 2011 finalist for Le Grand Prix du Livre de la Ville de Montréal. My Paris (Dalkey Archive), about a sad diarist in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin in late 20th century Paris ; Main Brides ; Heroine (1987 edition), Spare Parts Plus 2 (stories and manifestoes). Essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs and La Théorie, un dimanche (translated as Theory, A Sunday, New York : Belladonna, 2013). Scott is co-editor of the New Narrative anthology: Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House, 2004). Her translation of Michael Delisle’s Le désarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award. A memoir, based in Lower Manhattan during the early Obama years, is forthcoming.
Fan Wu is freshly depleted of desire circa this Year of the Metal Rat. He runs creative writing and critical reading workshops across art galleries in Toronto. A litany of his obsessions: translation, melancholia, meta-relationality, sex as a question. You can read his writing online in baest journal, MICE Magazine, Aisle 4, and Koffler Digital.
Fri, Feb 14, 2020
07:00 PM - 09:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin