Campbell House Museum
It Happened again! The date for this month's reading fell just a few days before Halloween. Come dressed up if you wish! Or not--it's all up to you. Whatever you do, be sure to come down to Campbell House on the 28th because we have three amazing writers to share: Robin Blackburn McBride is travelling all the way from Ottawa to join us! M. L. Gamboa and Banoo Zan will each be sharing their new work at Common Readings for the first time! There's no cozier atmosphere than the Campbell House Museum in the autumn, so Come for the Words and the Wine!
M.L. GAMBOA (LEAN) is a Filipinx writer from Baliuag, Bulacan. They are an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph and currently host Speakeasy Reading Series. They are also part of Pluma Collective, a group of Filipinx writers in Canada. Their writing can be found in Living Hyphen, Sewer Lid, Hart House Review, PRUDEmag, and elsewhere. They are at work on their first poetry chapbook and a novel about competitive gaming subcultures.
ROBIN BLACKBURN MCBRIDE is an author, speaker, and coach in human potential. She grew up in Toronto, and for over twenty years Robin worked as a teacher in the city. She has a passion for Toronto’s history, intergenerational family stories, and the hero’s journey in its myriad forms. In 2002, Guernica published a collection of her poems, In Green. Her self-help eBook, Birdlight: Freeing Your Authentic Creativity, became an Amazon Best Seller in 2016, and has since been released in paperback and as an audio book. Recognized by the Historical Novel Society as an Editors’ Choice book, The Shining Fragments is her first novel. Robin is currently writing the sequel.
BÄNOO ZAN is a poet, librettist, translator, teacher, editor and poetry curator, with more than 180 published poems and poetry-related pieces as well as three books. Song of Phoenix: Life and Works of Sylvia Plath, was reprinted in Iran in 2010. Songs of Exile, her first poetry collection, was released in 2016 in Canada by Guernica Editions. It was shortlisted for 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 in Canada. 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.