May 5th Reading!

Given the current weather, I'm wondering if we need to establish something analogous to daylight savings time for months. I mean maybe May is the new April. Maybe we have to go back into some famous literature and adjust for global warming wackiness. Move the months around.

I mean May might be the cruelest month with its shoures soote, which brings June flowers. Perhaps it'll be May in Paris soon.

However vernal the weather is or not in good ol' Hamilton, Ontario, May's LitLive promises to be fantastic. After a very successful LitLive/GritLit performance, we return to our usual location at the Homegrown Hamilton/Skydragon location replete with good coffee, beer and wine, and a selection of various munchables.

Here's the line-up and the bios of the performers. Hope to see you at the reading.


Elizabeth (Liz) Zetlin, is an award winning author of five poetry collections, most recently: The Punctuation Field (Black Moss Press, 2011). Liz transforms a field of native grasses into a landscape of language, growing modulators of meaning like the @ symbol, commas and parentheses, and releasing them into the wild. She was Owen Sound’s inaugural poet laureate and is co-founder/former artistic director of the Words Aloud Spoken Word Festival now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Liz is also an award winning filmmaker of the Words Aloud Documentary. This year she received the “Outstanding Individual in the Arts” Owen Sound Cultural Award. See link .

Eva Tihanyi teaches at Niagara College since 1989 and lives in Toronto and Port Dalhousie (St.Catharines, ON). Flying Underwater: Poems New and Collected is her seventh book of poetry. She has also published a collection of short stories, Truth and Other Fictions (Inanna 2009).

Jeffrey Luscombe was born in Hamilton, Ontario Canada. He holds a BA and MA in English from the University of Toronto. He attended The Humber College School for Writers where he was mentored by Governor General Award winning author Nino Ricci. He has had fiction published in Chelsea Station, Zeugma Literary Journal, and filling Station Magazine. In 2010 he was shortlisted for the Prism International Fiction Prize. Shirts and Skins is his first novel. Hey! Check out here .

Leslie Shimotakahara is a writer and recovering academic, who wanted to be simply a writer from before the time she could read. Hard-pressed to answer her parents’ question of how she would support herself as a writer, Leslie got drawn into the labyrinthine study of literature, completing her B.A. from McGill, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern American Literature from Brown. Her memoir The Reading List: Literature, Love and Back Again (Variety Crossing Press, 2011) won the Canada Council for the Arts’ 2012 Canada-Japan Literary Award. She is currently completing an historical novel called The Cherry Blossom Queen that deals with the Japanese Internment. She blogs at www.the-reading-list.com

Richard Scarsbrook is a Canadian author, teacher, and entertainer. Scarsbrook grew up in the rural community of Olinda near Leamington, Ontario. He earned an Honours BA in History from the University of Western Ontario, and a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Ottawa. He lived and taught in Petrolia, Ontario for nearly a decade where he wrote songs, played the drums and sang in a band called The Know. He also began publishing his first short stories and poems. Scarsbrook now makes his home in Toronto where he teaches creative writing courses at Humber College and George Brown College. He also plays and sings with various rock bands. Scarsbrook’s novel, The Monkeyface Chronicles was published in 2010 to excellent reviews.

Sue Goyette lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has published three books of poems and a novel. Her fourth collection of poems, Ocean, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in 2013. She's been nominated for several awards including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther, the Gerald Lampert, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and won the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Prize and the 2011 Bliss Carman Award. Sue currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University, is faculty for the Banff Wired Writing Studio and works part-time at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

The host for this shindig is Hamiltonacorn resident, Gary Barwin. Barwin has never been the Governor of Louisiana. Well, except for that one time and he prefers not to talk about it. I mean there was that incident in Nawlins that just won't be erased from the Internet. Or his police record.