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April 23, 2017
Phoebe Wang on Poetry Exercises
Today's post on poets and poetry prompts features Toronto-based writer and educator Phoebe Wang. She was the 2015 Grand Prize winner of the Prism International Poetry Prize and her debut collection of ...
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May 31, 2019The Mindful Writer and the Desire To Publish
This is my last post with Open Book. I tried to approach my residency by writing about things that writers might find useful, or at least semi-entertaining. And I find it amusing that just like being ...
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January 15, 2019On Re-Fusing CanLit--Or Why We Need Integrity, Community, and Roses
In a lot of the trauma memoirs I’ve been reading lately, I see the same metaphor used to describe the process of healing. You’ve likely heard it too. It compares healing from trauma to the Japanese ...
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November 02, 2016The WAR Series: Writers as Readers, with Katherine Ashenburg
Katherine Ashenburg's All the Dirt: A History of Getting Clean (Annick Press) gets pretty filthy, but it's still appropriate (and irresistible) for its middle grade audience, because this dirt is the ...
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June 26, 2020Finding Our Intentional Role in the Black Lives Matter Movement
As a Black professional in the publishing industry, I have been listening deeply to all of the conversations taking place around what folks can do to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Some of these ...
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May 10, 2022Genres You Didn’t Learn About in Kidlit 101
One of the most formative experiences in my development as a writer was working in a bookstore. For four glorious years I was the manager of the award-winning, much beloved Flying Dragon Bookshop in Toronto. ...
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February 13, 2019Writing Black Futures: I see you creating strong bonds
In February of 2018 I had curated an event at the Vancouver Public Library called “Where are you really from?” which I hoped would create a safe space for dialogue around what it means to identify ...
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February 27, 2019Excerpt! Experience the Power of Sue Farrell Holler's Cold White Sun
In Cold White Sun (Groundwood Books), a new young adult novel by Sue Farrell Holler, Tesfaye lives a happy life with his mother, sisters, and brother, safe behind the walls of their compound in Ethiopia. ...
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August 08, 2023Read an Excerpt from Cattle by Early Asian-Canadian Literary Superstar Winnifred Eaton, Newly Republished After 100 Years
Winnifred Eaton was not only one of the first North American writers of Asian descent to publish fiction in English, she was one of the most successful novelists of her day. Born in Montreal to an English ...
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February 14, 2016Something Totally New: Part One of Stephen Thomas in Conversation
I first came across Stephen Thomas on Twitter. It was 2012 and I’d started doing this embarrassing YouTube show no one watched called A Chat With Jess. Steve was doing something similar while doing ...
