April Powers Literary with gritLIT @ Lit Live!

It's here! On Sunday, April 10th, you'll witness the event collaboration of the year between gritLIT, Hamilton's Literary Festival and Lit Live, Hamilton's monthly reading series. The Skydragon Centre on King William Street will host a dynamic line-up of six outstanding writers in the closing event of the gritLIT weekend. (April 7-10).

Remember, for April only, Lit Live will hold this special event on the second Sunday of the month.

Shaena Lambert reads from her novel Radiance, published by Random House Canada.

Jean Rae Baxter reads from Broken Trail, the second novel in her young adult trilogy, recently launched by Ronsdale Press.

Howard Richler delves into Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words published by Ronsdale Press.

Roy Miki's most recent collection of poetry is There, published by New Star Books.

Catherine Graham reads from her poetry collection Winterkill, released in 2011 by Insomniac Press.

Ian Burgham parses The Grammar of Distance for us, his latest collection of poems from Tightrope Books.

Shaena Lambert

Shaena Lambert’s novel Radiance was both a Globe and Mail and Quill and Quire best book and was a finalist for the Rogers Writers Trust Award and the Ethel Wilson Award. Her collection of stories, The Falling Woman was published to critical acclaim in Canada, the UK and Germany, and was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award. Her stories have appeared recently in Zoetrope: All Story, The Vancouver Review, and Best Canadian Stories 2010. Other stories are
forthcoming in Ploughshares and Best Canadian Stories 2011. She lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University.

Jean Rae Baxter

When anyone comments that there is a contradiction in producing two very different kinds of writing, Jean Rae Baxter’s answer is that life is full of contradictions. In literature it is called irony, and irony is at the heart of her first collection of short stories, A Twist of Malice, which was published to critical acclaim in 2005. At the same time that she was writing short stories about the dark side of apparently everyday lives, she was working on an historical novel about a courageous Loyalist girl during the period of the American Revolution. This novel, The Way Lies North, was released in the fall of 2007. For her second novel, she returned to crime. Her literary murder mystery, Looking for Cardenio (2008), centred upon the discovery of an old manuscript that might be a lost play by Shakespeare. For her third novel, she returned to historical fiction. Broken Trail (2011) follows some of the characters who appeared in The Way Lies North, focusing upon the plight of the native people during the American Revolution. With the publication of The Runaways in 2012 she will complete her trilogy dealing with this historical period. As before, she has interspersed novel writing with the crafting of short stories. A second collection of short fiction, Scattered Light, is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2011.

Howard Richler

Howard Richler is a journalist who has written many books on language: Can I Have a Word with You? (Ronsdale Press, 2007), Global Mother Tongue: The Eight Flavours of English (Véhicule Press, 2007), A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top (Stoddart, 1999), Take My Words: A Wordaholic’s Guide to the English Language (Ronsdale Press,1996), and The Dead Sea Scroll Palindromes (Robert Davies Publishing, 1995). Richler makes his home in Montreal.

Roy Miki

Roy Miki is a writer, poet, and editor who lives in Vancouver. He is the author of numerous publications, including Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice (Raincoast 2004), a work that explores the Japanese Canadian redress movement through a creative blend of personal reflection, documentary history, and critical examination. He is also a poet with four books published. His third book of poems, Surrender (Mercury Press 2001), received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Most recently, he has co-edited, with Smaro Kamboureli, Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (Laurier Press 2007) and edited Roy Kiyooka’s The Artist and the Moose: A Fable of Forget (LineBooks 2009). He is currently completing “Mannequin Rising,” a book-length series of poems and photo collages that probe the internal effects of commodity culture (forthcoming from New Star Books). He received the Order of Canada in 2006 and the Order of British Columbia in 2009.

Catherine Graham

Catherine Graham is the author of three collections of poetry. She completed an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in England while living in Northern Ireland. Graham now lives and writes in Toronto, where she teaches creative writing, is active in several arts organizations, and designs and delivers workshops on creativity for the business and academic community. You can visit her at www.catherinegraham.com Her latest book of poetry, Winterkill, was published by Insomniac Press in 2011.

Ian Burgham

Ian Burgham was born in New Zealand, raised in Canada, and has lived and worked in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He has published three collections of poetry, the latest of which is entitled The Grammar of Distance. His poems have appeared in Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, The New Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, Queen's Quarterly, the League of Canadian Poets, dANDelion, Harpweaver, Precipice, Jones Avenue, and Ascent Aspirations. His new poetry collection, A Weight of Bees, is to be launched in London, England and Toronto in 2012. He divides his time between Toronto and Kingston.