Kathy Friedman + Erin Robinsong
+ Leannah Fidler (student)
Wednesday April 19, 2023, 4pm PST – Zoom
We are thrilled to welcome Kathy Friedman and Erin Robinsong at Oxygen Art Centre’s Author Reading Series on Wednesday April 19th at 4:00 PM PST on Zoom.
Kathy Friedman is a writer and professor, joining us from Toronto, Canada. Her recent collection of stories, All the Shining People, is published by House of Anasi Press in 2022.
All the Shining People explores migration, diaspora, and belonging within Toronto’s Jewish South African community, as individuals come to terms with the oppressive hierarchies that separate, and the connections that bind. Seeking a place to belong, the book’s characters — including a life-drawing model searching the streets for her lover; a woman confronting secrets from her past in the new South Africa; and a man grappling with the legacy of his father, a former political prisoner — crave authentic relationships that replicate the lost feeling of home. With its focus on family, culture, and identity, All the Shining People captures the experiences of immigrants and outsiders with honesty, subtlety, and deep sympathy.
Accompanying Friedman is poet and interdisciplinary artist, Erin Robinsong who is currently based in Montréal, Canada, but will be joining us from the United Kingdom for the event.
Robinsong’s recent book of poetry, Wet Dream, is published by Brick Books (2022). Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart.
The evening will also feature a reading by student writer, Leannah Fidler, from the Selkirk College Creative Writing Program.
Join us on Wednesday, April 19, 2023 @ 4:00 PM PST on Zoom to participate in the second instalment of the Author Reading Series featuring Kathy Friedman and Erin Robinsong. Admission is free or by donation. Register via EventBrite to attend.
Please note the Author Reading Series event with Canisia Lubrin and Jessica Johns has been rescheduled to take place on May 10, 2023, at 4:00 PM PST on Zoom. Register via EventBrite to attend.
This event is generously supported by this Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance. Special thanks to Oxygen’s Author Reading Series committee.
Image Credit: Kathy Friedman (L) + Erin Robinsong (R)
About the Authors
KATHY FRIEDMAN studied creative writing at UBC and the University of Guelph, and she was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Grain, Geist, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, and Canadian Notes & Queries. Her first collection of short stories, All the Shining People, was published in April 2022 with House of Anansi. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about travel, music, and mental health.
A full-time professor in Humber College’s Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program, Kathy has been teaching creative writing to diverse adult communities since 2013 through NISA/Northern Institute for Social Action, Workman Arts, The 519, Progress Place, CAMH, and the Toronto Public Library.
Kathy is also the co-founder and artistic director of InkWell Workshops, which delivers free creative writing workshops to people with mental health and addiction issues. She is the publisher of four literary anthologies with in-house imprint InkWell Books, and she edited the anthology Brilliance Is the Clothing I Wear, published by Dundurn Press in June 2021. Quill & Quire called this latest anthology a “polished, triumphant collection.”
Kathy emigrated with her family from South Africa to Thornhill, Ontario, when she was five. She now lives in Toronto, an uninvited guest on the shared Ancestral territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit and other Anishinaabe Nations, as well as the Wendat and other Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. She endeavours to live in right relation with the land and its original inhabitants and caretakers, and to uphold the values embedded in the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Treaty.
ERIN ROBINSONG is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. Her debut collection of poetry, Rag Cosmology, won the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and she is the author of Liquidity (House House Press, 2020) and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2022).
A PhD student at Concordia University, Erin’s research-creation work focuses on ecological imagination in contemporary poetry. With scholar and place-based educator Michael Datura, she co-organized a Geopoetics Symposium & Residency on Cortes Island in spring 2022, bringing together poets, scholars, activists and place-based educators around questions of what it means to think and create with the more-than-human world.
Collaborative performance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; revolutions and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. Originally from Cortes Island, Erin is grateful to make her home in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
LEANNAH FIDLER recently found her poetry voice while enrolled in the creative writing program at Selkirk College. She draws much of her inspiration from rural BC and the surrounding forests. Leannah has been published in the Blackbear Review and has also participated as part of the editorial team for creative non-fiction over the last two semesters. She is currently working on her first poetry chapbook.
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