Free Times Cafe - 320 College Street, Toronto

Host: John Oughton

Featuring:

Patrick Connors
Pat Connors chapbook, Scarborough Songs, was published by Lyricalmyrical Press in 2013, and charted on the Toronto Poetry Map. Part-Time Contemplative, his second chapbook with Lyricalmyrical, was released in 2016. He has recently been accepted for publication by the Spadina Literary Review, Big Smoke Poetry, and Tamaracks, an anthology of Canadian poets being released this spring in Long Beach, California. He is a manager of the Toronto chapter of 100,000 Poets for Change.

Degan Davis Degan Davis spent his childhood in Mattawa, Ontario, and grew up at the confluence of two rivers. He has worked for ten years as a Gestalt Therapist, both in a university setting and in private practice. Degan's poetry and non-fiction have appeared in such places as The Globe And Mail, The Malahat Review, Riddle Fence, and The New Quarterly. What Kind Of Man Are You, is his first poetry collection. He is currently working on a series of essays about masculinity, femininity, and how to be a good man in this era.

Jessica Bebenek "Jessica Bebenek is a writer, bookmaker, & interdisciplinary artist splitting her time between the lands currently known as Montreal & Toronto. k2tog, her collection of knitting patterns for poems, was released by Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press, Fall 2018. Bebenek’s recent poetry can be found in PRISM International, CV2, Cosmonauts Avenue, and in 30 Under 30: an Anthology of Canadian Millennial Poets. Her third poetry chapbook, Fourth Walk, was released by Desert Pets Press (2017). “The Waste Land”, her knitted poetry performance investigating gendered labour & the English canon, was featured in Toronto’s Nuit Blanche 2017. She continues her public knitting performances through her ongoing durational performance, “Rag Bag”, in which she is knitting all 116 of Ezra Pound's cantos. She is currently completing her first full collection of poetry, No One Knows Us There, and is at work on a non-fiction collection, Writing for Men. Bebenek is a graduate of Concordia University’s MA in Creative Writing & English, where she studied poetry & expanded poetics, the culture & technologies of feminist subjectivities, and the revaluation of gendered labour. She continues her work as Lead Risograph Coordinator at the Centre for Expanded Poetics, where she organized the Occult Poetics Symposium (Spring 2017). Bebenek teaches poetry and bookmaking workshops institutionally and independently, and works as a freelance designer and bookmaker. @notyrmuse www.jessicabebenek.art "