Barrett and Welsh - 577 Kingston Road, Toronto
You are invited to the 15th session of The Tartan Turban Secret Readings curated by Mark Sampson at Barrett and Welsh on Thursday, March 14th, 2019, from 7 pm to about 10 pm, featuring Randy Boyagoda, Pratap Reddy and Bänoo Zan. The theme: Strangers in a Strange Place.
Mark Sampson is the author of five books: the novels The Slip (Dundurn, 2017), Sad Peninsula, (Dundurn, 2014), and Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007), the short story collection, The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015), and the poetry collection, Weathervane, (Palimpsest Press, 2016). Mark has published many short stories and poems in literary journals across Canada, and he is a frequent book reviewer for Quill & Quire, Canadian Notes & Queries (CNQ) and other publications. His next novel, All the Animals on Earth, will be published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2020. Born and raised on Prince Edward Island, he currently lives and writes in Toronto.
Bänoo Zan is an immigrant poet, librettist, translator, teacher, editor and poetry curator, with more than 180 published poems as well as three books. Songs of Exile was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award by the League of Canadian Poets in 2017. Letters to My Father, her second poetry book, was published in 2017 by Piquant Press. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Toronto’s most diverse poetry reading and open mic series (inception: 2012). It is a brave space that bridges the gap between communities of poets from different ethnicities, nationalities, religions (or lack thereof), ages, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, poetic styles, voices and visions.
Pratap Reddy moved to Canada in 2002 from India. An underwriter by day and a writer by night, he writes about the agonies and the angst (on occasion) the ecstasies of new immigrants. He has completed a creative writing program from the Humber School of Writers. He is the recipient of the 'Best Emerging Literary Artist' award from the Mississauga Arts Council and grants from the Ontario Arts Council. Guernica Editions published his collection Weather Permitting & Other Stories in 2016, and his novel Ramya's Treasure in 2018.
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist, professor of English, and principal and vice-president of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, where he also holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. Original Prin is his third novel and was named a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2018. He is the Chair of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury and lives five minutes from our venue with his wife and their four daughters.
We hope you will come, read, share and listen, but if life/the evening/your acrobatic gerbil has other plans for you, we completely understand.
We encourage you to support our featured writers by buying signed copies of their works at the reading (cash only please) or making a donation to their Indigogo page.
Open mic: Anyone attending is welcome to read or perform (if you are a musician) in our open mic sessions.
If you are a writer or musician who would like to perform in the open mic session, we ask that you listen in to at least one session to get the flavour of the evening and join in on your next visit. To participate in TTSR #15 please contact Mark Sampson the evening's curator — beforehand as this will allow him to line up readers and manage the evening efficiently.
Open mic readers are given 4 minutes in total — you may read a work of creative writing (fiction/poetry/drama/screenplay) - or a work of reportage or creative non-fiction. This is not a lecture or motivational speaking series, so no academic or self-help works, please.
It doesn’t matter if it’s not in English or French - one of our open mic readers read a stunning series of poems in Spanish based on interviews with jailed murderers in Mexico. Simply accompany your readings with an explanation of the context and a brief translation in English.