Poetry Jazz Café - 224 Augusta Ave, Toronto
Host: Georgia Wilder. Two Super Features for poetry month: Andrea Thompson and Kate Marshall Flaherty! 10 spots on the open mic; $5.00 admission, free snacks. Copies of Quattro's "Best New Poets in Canada" will be available ($20). Feel free to sell your books and make announcements for other poetry events!
BIOS:
Andrea Thompson is a teacher, novelist and poet who has been writing and performing spoken word for over twenty-five years. In 1995 she was featured in the documentary Slamnation, as a member of the country’s first national slam team. In 2005, her spoken word CD Onewas nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award, and in 2009 she was awarded the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word’s Poet of Honour. She is the author of the novel Over Our Heads and co-editor of Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (both Inanna Publications). Thompson currently teaches at Workman Arts (CAMH), as well as through the Ontario College of Art and Design University and The University of Toronto’s Continuing Studies departments. She has written several critical essays on spoken word, including "Committing the Act of Language: The (R)evolutionary Tactics and Hybridist Anxieties of Spoken Word's Third Wave" (More Caught in the Act, 2016) and "Spoken Word: A Gesture Towards Possibility" (Writing Creative Writing: Essays from the Field,2018). www.andreathompson.ca
Kate Marshall Flaherty’s sixth book of poetry, “Radiant,” launches June, 2019 with Inanna Press. Her three poems about Ontario’s Georgian Bay area won the 2018 King Foundation award. She has been published in numerous Canadian and International Journals and Anthologies, has been shortlisted for Exile Editions Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry award 2018, Descant’s Best Canadian Poem, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Prize, the Robert Frost Poetry Award and others. She is presently Toronto Rep. for the League of Canadian Poets, and inaugurated “The Poet is In” – “Poetry in Union, Railway Lines and Valentines” in Toronto’s Union Station February 2019. She guides StillPoint Writing Workshops in schools, youth shelters, universities and hospitals; poetry is her lifeline. See her performance poetry to music at http://katemarshallflaherty.ca/kmf/