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Award-Winning Author Dr. Christina Sharpe Visits the U of A

As part of its Distinguished Visitor speaker series, the Department of English and Film Studies has invited award-winning author and professor Dr. Christina Sharpe to visit the ¶®É«µÛ from October 1-3, 2025, for a series of events.

In collaboration with Dr. Michael A. Bucknor, Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies and Decolonial Practice, the CLC is hosting Dr. Sharpe, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, for a Reading and Conversation event about her book Ordinary Notes. 

"Extraordinary Ordinary Notes": A Conversation Between Christina Sharpe & Michael Bucknor

Along with the metaphysical and material import of Ordinary Notes, a superb meditation on Black lives, Sharpe’s creative crafting of this award-winning work will come into critical focus through this lunchtime reading and conversation.

Date and Time: Wednesday, October 1, 2025, from 12:00-1:30 PM
Location: Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17), U of A

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Ordinary Notes (2023)—winner of the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize, and finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the LATimes Current Interest Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. Ordinary Notes was also named a Best Book of the Year by: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, NPR, New York Magazine, and Granta, among others. In April 2024, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In May, she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2027). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, and The Funambulist.

 

We also invite you to join EFS for Dr. Sharpe's Town & Gown Lecture, "Refusing Necrotopia (What Could a Vessel Be?)"

In this talk, Professor Sharpe shares fresh perspectives from her forthcoming book What Could a Vessel Be?.

Date and Time: Thursday, October 2, 2025, from 6:30-9:00 PM
Location: CCIS L1-140, U of A

 Please register for this event on the EFS website: 

Professor Sharpe's visit will also include events for U of A students. For more information, and to register for these events, click .

 

Meet + Greet and Double Book Launch

Join the Centre for Literatures in Canada and the Department of English and Film Studies in welcoming the 2025-26 Writer-in-Residence, Cody Caetano, and celebrating the launch of new books from EFS members Conor Kerr and Jason Purcell.

 

Scholarly Conversation featuring Dr. David Wallace and Dr. Sarah Krotz

The National Epics Project and the Problem of "Epic" in Canada

Join the Centre for Literatures in Canada and the Department of English and Film Studies for a scholarly conversation about the National Epics project with its creator and editor, Dr. David Wallace, and contributing author Dr. Sarah Krotz. 

 

A New Recorded Conversation: Roundtable on Multi- and Translingual Poetry

This final instalment in the CLC’s 2024-25 "Polyphonies" Series is a podcast Reading + Conversation that highlights polyglot, multi- and translingual poetry and poetics in Canada. Poets, translators, and scholars Klara du Plessis, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, Erín Moure, and Odile Cisneros contemplate the effects and objectives of languages intersecting in poetry, through translations of and readings in Afrikaans, Czech, English, French, Persian, and Portuguese.

These multilingual writers discuss working across or beyond languages, ruminating on poetic experimentation, on the value of sound, and on multiplicity in comprehension and meaning. Their reflections invite us to find difference and continuity, resonance and tension, power and affect, fluctuating borders and communal spaces, in and across the languages in which we live and write.

To listen to the recording, and for full biographies, check out our Podcast page or our

Odile Cisneros is a poetry scholar and translator with interests in Latin American avant-gardes, contemporary Brazilian poetry, concrete poetry, ecopoetics, and literary translation.

Klara du Plessis is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, literary curator, and poet, known for her contributions to long-form and translingual poetics. 

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (They/Them) is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer and Translator.

Erín Moure is a poet, translator and essayist who has published more than fifty books since 1979, including 18 collections of poetry in English and Galician/English; a collaboration with Oana Avasilichioaei in English, Galician and Romanian; as well as over twenty books of translation from several languages ​​into English.

 

Virtual Book Launch: Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics, Literature, and Art 

In partnership with ¶®É«µÛ Press, we are thrilled to host a virtual launch of Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics, Literature, and Art, edited by Dominique Hétu, Libe García Zarranz, Amanda Fayant, and Marie Carrière. There will be a conversation between contributors and co-editors, followed by a Q + A.
 

Date: Monday, May 26, 2025
Time: 10:00 - 11:00 AM (MDT)

Registration is required for this event, which will be streamed via Zoom.

About the Book:

This transdisciplinary collection investigates relations of “living and learning with” as compelling forms of engagement and care between humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans. Through academic and creative writings, contributors address the need for sustainable relationships between various feminist positions, focussing on Indigenous and Black knowledges, queer and trans artistic interventions, and anti-racist methodologies. They pursue crucial conversations on intersecting oppressions, intersubjectivities, voices, and positionalities. Rooted in feminist literary and artistic practices, the volume explores urgent ongoing transnational issues and benefits scholars in literature, Indigenous studies, intercultural studies, and gender studies.

Contributors: Kim Anderson, Alexandre Baril, Sissel M. Bergh, Marie Carrière, Élise Couture-Grondin, Junie Désil, Amanda Fayant, Mylène Yannick Gamache, Libe García Zarranz, Dominique Hétu, Larissa Lai, Amina Lalor, Sheri Longboat, Brittany Luby, Stephanie Oliver, Anne Quéma, Veronika Schuchter, Erin Soros, Erin Wunker.

 

A New Recorded Conversation: Jami Reimer & shalan joudry

From the CLC Readings and Conversations series comes a new podcast episode featuring interdisciplinary composer Jami Reimer, who discusses her bioacoustic opera based on the metamorphic life of a frog, and Mi’kmaw storyteller shalan joudry, whose multilingual experimental work reflects on “grief, truth-seeking, and communal healing.”

Sharing recordings of their fabulous work, Reimer and joudry discuss the power of collective attention and voice; the stickiness and softness of communication; and how we can attune ourselves to languages other than our own, including the beautiful choruses of frogs.

To listen to the recording, and for full biographies, check out our Podcast page or our

Jami Reimer (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba. From choral music to field recording practices, Jami explores voice—human and otherwise. 

shalan joudry is an award-winning multi-disciplinary storyteller. She is an oral storyteller, theatre and film director, drummer/singer, poet, podcaster, and ecologist. Using her theatrical background, shalan brings eco-cultural stories to a new generation of listeners, as well as recounting personally crafted narratives that follow diverse storying methodologies. 

 

Congratulations to the Winners of the 2025 CLC Poetry Contest!

The CLC congratulates Alexis De Villa and Teren Hazzard as joint first-place winners of our 2025 Student Poetry Contest! 

Read the winning poems here and get to know a little bit about the poets.

with Teren and Alexis about their interpretation of the contest theme.

Thank you to this year's contest jury--Ryan Fitzpatrick (Writer-in-Residence, U of A), Gabriel Proulx (Athabasca), Lisa Martin (MacEwan), and Kelly Shepherd (NAIT)--as well as to our contest partners and sponsors: Athabasca University, MacEwan University, NAIT, Athabasca University Press, NeWest Press, ¶®É«µÛ Press, and the Edmonton Poetry Festival.

Thank you to all the students who submitted poems this year!

 

2025 Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture with David A. Robertson: Watch Now!

On Wednesday, March 12, 2025, David A. Robertson presented the 19th annual Kreisel Lecture, held at the TIMMS CENTRE for the ARTS. The lecture, titled "On Writing as Social Activism," was preceded by an introduction from Conor Kerr and followed by a Q & A with CLC Director Sarah Krotz. Attendees were then invited to join us for a reception and book signing.

 the lecture and Q & A on YouTube.

About the lecture:

Writing as Social Activism

Writing stories imagines future readers,
and in so doing imagines a future influence by those stories.
-- Margaret Atwood

The road to reconciliation is paved with Story. The phrase "Truth & Reconciliation" means the two are inextricably linked. While the definition and understanding of what reconciliation means and what it entails are up for discussion — at its most basic, albeit still complex form, it is the act of building community — truth means what really happened, and what is still happening, on Turtle Island. For too long, our stories, as Indigenous peoples, have been told by others. Only recently, within the last fifteen years, we have been able to reclaim our truth and share it with others through Story. This storytelling resurgence has created a revolutionary change that has ripped apart the fabric of what we thought this country was, and has stitched together a new understanding of Canada. Every form of writing — from blog posts to novels — is distinct, but shares the goal of knowledge transfer. Story ought, as well, to motivate the reader to utilize the knowledge they have been gifted with to take meaningful action so that we can do better than has been done in the past. This is the work of social change: understanding what has been so we can clearly understand what can be.

David A. Robertson is a two-time Governor General's Literary Award winner and has won the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award and the Writer's Union of Canada Freedom to Read Award. He has received several other accolades for his work as a writer for children and adults, podcaster, public speaker, and social advocate. He was honoured with a Doctor of Letters by the University of Manitoba in 2023 for outstanding contributions to the arts and distinguished achievements. Robertson’s memoir All the Little Monsters: How I Learned to Live with Anxiety was published in 2025 by Harper Collins. He is a member of Norway House Cree Nation and lives in Winnipeg. For more information about his work, .

 

Juno Award-Winning Dub Poet Lillian Allen Visits the CLC!

In collaboration with Dr. Michael A. Bucknor, Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies and Decolonial Practice, the CLC is hosting spoken word performer Lillian Allen, the current Poet Laureate of Toronto, for a visit to the ¶®É«µÛ.

Listen to and learn from Lillian's work by joining us for one or both of the following events:

Masterclass (Registration Required)

Date and Time: Wednesday, January 29, 2025, from 3:00-6:00 PM
Location: Additional details will be provided to successful registrants

Words in Motion: Language Dance Motion Meaning
Presenting your work to the public requires learning an additional set of skills than just writing! This workshop will engage poets and any kind of writers in exploring ways to bring their work alive and present it to a public. The workshop will provide opportunities for participants to develop their performance confidence, and to explore strategies and techniques for presenting a range of different works to an audience. Participants will gain tools to write for sound and the ear and understand how to cultivate emotive qualities of words and story. As writers, we will create at least one individually written piece, and possibly explore one collaboration, but do bring a piece of your older writing to try out some new techniques. Priority will be given to BIPOC emerging writers but we welcome others.

Registration for the Masterclass is now closed.

Reading, Conversation, Performance

Date and Time: Thursday, January 30, 2025, from 12:30-1:45 PM
Location: Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17), ¶®É«µÛ

Hosted by Dr. Michael A. Bucknor, Lillian will perform and speak about some of her work (which you can read more about below). Light refreshments will be served. No registration is required for this event.

Jamaican Canadian Lillian Allen is an internationally renowned poet, professor, journalist and artistic creator. She has served as Board Member and Advisor to several arts-based agencies (Toronto Council for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, National Film Board of Canada, UNESCO etc). Allen is the author of eight books of poetry and ten recording albums. She has also worked in radio and television. She was the host of a CBC programme on "Poetry and the Spoken Word” and co-produced and hosted WordBeat, a 13-part series for CBC Radio One (2003-05). Her poem “Unnatural Causes” was made into a film by the National Film Board of Canada (1989) and she also co-produced and co-directed Blakk Wi Blakk (1994), a film focused on the dub poet Mutabaruka. She has received numerous awards for both her published volumes and sound recordings. These awards include two Juno Awards from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for her albums Revolutionary Tea Party and Conditions Critical (1986 and 1988). She is widely regarded as the godmother of Canadian dub, rap and hip hop.

With origins in 1970s Jamaica, dub poetry is a type of performance poetry that is rooted in oral and music traditions from the Caribbean. Dub poets often talk about political and social change through their poetry. Lillian Allen is a well-known dub poet who, through poetry, challenges systemic social issues and political ideologies. Allen has talked about activism and feminism in her poetry. 

Allen’s seminal work in the dub poetry and the spoken word genres has made her a legend in the creative circles. She employs what M. Norbese Philip calls a “demotic tongue” that has distinguished her work as recognizing the politics of language use, and has ensured the wider circulation of her Jamaican mother tongue in Canada. The recent release of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (2021) and appointment as Poet Laureate of Toronto reinforce her enduring significance.  

For more information, visit .

 

Public Lecture with Dr. Ian MacLaren

Separating Fact from Painted Fiction: An Examination of Paul Kane's Problematic Representations of Indigenous Peoples in North America

Ian MacLaren, U of A Professor Emeritus (History and Classics & English and Film Studies), is launching his four-volume Paul Kane's Travels in Indigenous North America: Writing and Art, Life and Times (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024).  

To celebrate this significant work of scholarship, Dr. MacLaren will give a public lecture on Paul Kane's Travels at the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA), sponsored by the Centre for Literatures in Canada and the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, and hosted by the AGA.