Readers & Writers
BookThug is looking to recruit new citizens. Authors of all kinds will be available at the festival to make you aware of BookThug Nation. It's easy to be a citizen: just be curious! Authors will share their work with you from all angles: they will broadcast it from the rooftops, perform it in the street, interrupt your everyday conversations, and generally challenge you to consider poetry and literature as part of the spaces of your lives. If you are daring enough, you can even buy a book or attend one of the featured readings that will be happening throughout the day. We at BookThug are fully aware that our books are not for just anybody. So why not become somebody today? Editio Durus Natio Semper!
Bookthug Nation will be presenting three literary street components:
Roaming Readers: have a poem read to you one on one by the author of the poem or one of our Bookthug youths.
Battling Bards: Look up, look waaay up. Can you hear that? Look, it's two poets battling it out with megaphones on the rooftops and window sills.
Resting Readers: For you more traditionalists there will be three readings a day by various writers, on the back patio of the Troubadour bar.
The Readers and Writers
- Resting Readers Performance Schedule
- About Bookthug
- www.bookthug.ca
- The Artists
- Amanda Earl
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Amanda Earl's poetry appears most recently in Drunkenboat.com, the Windsor Review (Windsor, Ontario); and Van Gogh's Ear (Paris, France) and is forthcoming in Rampike (Windsor, Ontario), and Ryerson University's Whitewall Review. Her chapbooks are "Welcome to Earth: poem for alien(s)" (Book Thug, 2008); "The Sad Phoenician's Other Woman" (above/ground press, 2008); "Eleanor" (above/ground press, 2007). Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal and runs the new micropress AngelHousePress (www.angelhousepress.com). For more information on upcoming readings and recent publications, please visit www.amandaearl.com.
- Greg Betts & Gary Barwin
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Gregory Betts is the author of If Language (2005), Haikube (2006), and the forthcoming The Others Raisd in Me. He lives in St. Catharines and teaches at Brock. More information is available at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/betts/.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and performer. His music and writing have been published and presented in Canada, the US, and Europe.
- Margaret Christakos
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Margaret Christakos is a writerly loaf of bread and a plate of cheese. She covers the basic food groups, and sometimes gets awarded things and called innovative. Her most recent, of seven, poetry collections is What Stirs, from the nutritious Coach House Books, warm in fall 2008, nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She teaches creative writing and facilitates "Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon" at U of T School of Continuing Studies.
- Marianne Apostolides
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Marianne Apostolides' first novel, Swim (BookThug, 2009), explores the eroticism of language, food and family. Her first book, Inner Hunger: A Young Woman's Struggle Through Anorexia and Bulimia (WW Norton, 1998), was translated and published in seven countries. She currently lives in Toronto with her two children.
- Angela Carr
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Angela Carr is a poet and translator. Her first book, Ropewalk, was published in 2006. She contributed to Translating Translating Montréal (2007) a collection of essays and poetry on unconventional translational practices. Her forthcoming Rose Concordance (Bookthug, fall 2009) masquerades as a translation of a keyword index to a medieval allegorical poem, the Roman de la Rose. Her texts have been published internationally and translated into French and Slovenian. She lives in Montréal with her two daughters.
- Steven Zultanski
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Steven Zultanski is the author of the chapbooks Homoem (Radical Readout, 2005), USA = NAZI (Nocturnal Editions, 2008) and Steve's Poem (Lettermachine, forthcoming). He edits President's Choice magazine, a Lil' Norton publication. His poetry has appeared in Antennae, FO(A)RM, The Physical Poets, Shiny, and elsewhere. In 2008 BookThug published his chapbook This and That Lenin.
- Gili Haimovich & Megan English
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Gili Haimovich is an internationally published poet. She has published the poetry collection Living on a Blank Page (2007) and three volumes of Hebrew poetry. In North America her work appeared in numerous journals including the Literary Review of Canada and Cahoots and the anthology TOK1: Writing the New Toronto. Megan English is a dance artist. Her solo, "This Dance is Mic’ed", was part of Dance Matters. (2008) Megan worked with "Zephyr in Zanussi" in England. She dances in the video, "Backstage with the Modern Dancers." (Great Lake Swimmers) Her Nell Shipman inspired project was supported by the TAC. (2009)
This performance extends beyond the traditional format of a poetry reading. Voice, movement, improvisation and language are the tools applied to explore the different layers of the poetry. Songs and dances are shaped from the rhythm, images and symbolism contained in each poem. The dialogue between dancer and poet involves a broad rhythmic palette which combines both English and Hebrew. The play and spontaneity between the performers bring the poems to life in a real time and space. Blank Page engages the audience in an intermodal experience. The concept for this piece was initiated at the book launch for 'Living on a Blank Page' by Gili Haimovich. (Type on the Danforth, February 2008)
- Daniel F. Bradley
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i live and work in toronto, i have a girl friend and daughter, and a bunch of books including A Boy's First Book Of Chlamydia and T=I=D=Y language.
- Jay MillAr
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Jay MillAr is a Toronto poet, editor, publisher, and virtual bookseller. He is the author of False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), Mycological Studies (2002), and The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000). His most recent collection is the small blue (Fall 2007). In 2006 he published Double Helix, a collaborative "novel" written with Stephen Cain. MillAr is the shadowy figure behind BookThug, an independent publishing house dedicated to cutting edge work by well-known and emerging North American writers, as well as Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, a virtual bookstore that specializes in the books that no one wants to buy. A long-time fixture of the Toronto writing and publishing scene, Jay has participated in such diverse projects as the UNBC/Via Rail Poetry Train, The Scream in High Park, Test Readings Series and Influency: A Poetry Salon. He is also the co-editor (with Mark Truscott) of BafterC, a small magazine of contemporary writing. Currently Jay teaches creative writing at George Brown College.
- The Amorphus BookThug Readers
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Several guest authors from BookThug's strange and exceptional catalogue will drop in throughout the day for improvised readings and performances. See the BookThug list of poets come to life on the streets of the junction throughout the day.
- Jenny Sampirisi
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Jenny Sampirisi is a poet, prose writer and editor. She is the managing editor for BookThug and facilitates the online concrete poetry journal, Other Cl/utter. She is also an executive member of the Scream Literary Festival. Her first novel, is/was explores the flexible boundaries of language, media, and the body. Here poetry, prose and critical work have most recently appeared in Event, Open Letter and Drunken Boat.
- Sistah Lois
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Sistah Lois, anotha afrikan princess, grandmamma, dawta, sista, personal consultant, creatrix, arts activist, teacha, preacha, friend, inner light animator, succulent woman, child of the universe, exploring therapeutic musician, uncovering her own personal life force, through creativity. Performing from age three, her creative education and experiences have spanned more than three decades, and continents leading to Toronto in 1988. Gratefully accepting the blessing of getting to do what she loves for life. Sistah untiringly challenges herself to see with a three in one love vision... 1; push her emotional envelope as 2; to feel love with consistent connectedness 3; to keep creating concrete loving paths toward satisfilling her desired hopes, of write justice. Her performances contain interactive music poetry, dramatic stories, and song. "If you can talk you can sing" is sistah's mantra, so feel free to do just that!
Sistah is also...Creator/Director of Sistah Lois' Creative Capers, a successful arts program for children of all abilities; Ontario Arts Council 2008-2009; Leslie Bell Prize for Choral Conducting Nominee; Short-listed for 2009 Writing for Children Competition, Writers Union of Canada; Had extensive experience in Children's Theatre as director, storyteller dance/movement instructor, and performer; Positive motivator and communicator volunteer coordinator, event organizer and community group mentor; Independent workshop developer and facilitator for a variety of children's and family service organizations and community centres; Professional actor and entertainer (film, television and stage)
- Melissa Major
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Melissa Major is a poet, playwright, director and performer. Her writing has been published in CanPlay, Open Book Toronto, Sydney Law Society Journal & International Psychogeriatrics. She is the Artistic Director of The Cheshire Unicorn Theatre Company and has worked on almost forty stage productions. Her own scripts have been produced in Canada, USA, Asia and (in November) India. She has won 6 awards for her work and has been nominated for several more. So far she has 3 university degrees (Theatre, Psychology and Fine Arts Education from York University) and she is currently completing a M.F.A. in Creative Writing at University of Guelph. She is a full member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada and is the Artistic Director of The Cheshire Unicorn.
- Stephen Cain
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Stephen Cain is the author of three poetry collections - American Standard/ Canada Dry (Coach House, 2005), Torontology (ECW, 2001), and dyslexicon (Coach House, 1998) - and a collaborative series of micro-fictions, Double Helix (Mercury, 2006), written with Jay MillAr. He is also co-author, with Tim Conley, of The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (Greenwood, 2006). He lives in Toronto where has been a literary editor at the Queen Street Quarterly and fiction editor at Insomniac Press. His newest chapbook is Wordwards (No Press, Calgary).
- Shannon Bramer
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Shannon Bramer is the author of FISHINGS, a chapbook of stories, poems and drawings--published by Bookthug in 2007. She has also published poetry with Exile Editions and Coach House Books. She is currently at work on new poems and a play. She became a west-ender last September and spends a lot of time in the Junction with her two daughters, Sadie and Lydia.
- Adam Seelig
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Adam Seelig is a poet, playwright, stage director, and the founder of One Little Goat Theatre Company in Toronto, with which he has premiered works by Yehuda Amichai, Thomas Bernhard, Jon Fosse and himself. His plays include All Is Almost Still (New York 2004), Antigone:Insurgency (Toronto 2007) and Talking Masks (BookThug 2009). Talking Masks will be performed in Toronto this November. For more visit www.OneLittleGoat.org.
- Rob Read
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Rob Read lives in Poplar Hill, ON. O Spam, Poams: Selected Daily Treated Spam (BookThug, 2005) collects a bunch of modified junk emails from the first 3 years of the Daily Treated Spam project. Read is editor-in-chef of Produce Press, a publisher of handmade books. Ongoing collaborations with AEM have been partially published, with Open Letter, Closed Book (Produce Press, 2004), and Atone Neither Overflowing Clause (Produce Press, 2005) having so far hit the world. Read performs as a part of Alexander's Dark Band with jwcurry, Maria Erskine, and Nick Power.
- Mark Truscott
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Mark Truscott's first book is Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House, 2004). Nature is forthcoming from BookThug in 2009. With Jay MillAr, he co-edits BafterC. He lives with his wife and son in Toronto.
- Nevena Martinovic
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Nevena likes to write. Her work has been published by her sister in the form of an awesome yellow book of poems A.K.A. We've Had A Very Emotional Morning. She also wrote a play, Ouvrez La Porte, Fermez La Bouche, which was very well received by members of her immediate family, friends, strangers, and the 2007 Sears Drama Festival where she won the Adjudicators' Award.
- West Toronto Junction Historic Society
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CELEBRATING ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF THE ANNETTE STREET LIBRARY
SATURDAY, SEPT 12, ANNETTE STREET LIBRARY
10:30 a.m. Historical Walking Tour Led by Miss Elizabeth McCallum (Madeleine McDowell) and A.B. Rice (Neil Ross), the tour will encounter the Legends of the Junction in their natural habitat.
2:00 p.m. Book Launch and signing The Most Attractive Resort in Town by Barbara Myrvold
3:00 p.m. A Trip Down Memory Lane With A.B. Rice and Miss McCallum, taking tea and reminiscing about books and buildings in the Junction.
SUNDAY SEPT 13, WTJHS BOOTH
2:00 p.m. Join Neil Ross who will lead an Arts and Letters tour of the Junction leaving from the WTJHS booth. Meet the swashbuckling poets and pioneer painters who gave the Junction its voice.
BookThug is an independent literary publisher that operates out of Toronto's west end. Founded by Jay MillAr in the mid 90s, the press was inspired by the idea that "if you build it they will come." Since then poets and writers of all kinds have popped up in the literary landscape through the operations of the press. They and their readers make up what we like to think of as BookThug Nation – people who scour bookstores looking for unexpected literature, who desire to participate in a different kind of readership. Poetry, visual literature, conceptual literature, translation, the lyric, critical texts and fiction: BookThug makes them all available in publications that come in a variety of shapes and sizes and origins, but each one is distinctly BookThug.