East End Arts

Our new Draft Season approaches in just a few short weeks!

We’ll be featuring new work by Maheen Hyder and Emily Sanford, along with brief readings from friends of Draft … new and old. Stay tuned for more information on who will be presenting brief readings.

Meantime, here’s some information on our feature readers. We hope to see you October 20th for a wonderful afternoon of readings.

Maheen Hyder is a mental health therapist and poet who has been raised between various cities in the Middle East and South Asia. She writes about identity and displacement and being from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Emily Sanford was born in Nova Scotia and has an MA in Literature and Performance from Guelph. She is the winner of the 2016 Eden Mills Writers’ Festival Literary Award for Poetry, the 2018 Janice Colbert Award, and was listed in The 10 Best Poems of 2016, by Vancouver Poetry House. Her work appears in Canthius, Grain Magazine, Minola Review, newpoetry.ca, Plenitude Magazine and the Applebeard Editions anthology of flash fiction, release any words stuck inside of you. One of her poems, You Wave, was recently set to music for four-part choir, by Canadian composer EKR Hammell, and premiered in Toronto in May 2019. Emily co-curates and hosts the Brockton Writers Series.

We are grateful for the financial assistance of the League of Canadian Poets, The Writers’ Union of Canada, The Playwrights’ Guild of Canada, The Ontario Arts Council, The Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Council in presenting this season’s readings.