November's reading features lost canoes, ranches, bullets, broken china, epithalamiums, nervous cities, moon howling, and Epic hosting. Not to mention good food (new menu at Homegrown Hamilton!) and drink and the always warm and convivial audience.
Who are the authors? What are there they're their books?
Ahh. Look below and all will be known.
Sean Johnston’s latest book is the novel Listen All You Bullets. His work has been nominated for the Journey Prize and a Saskatchewan Book Award, and he’s been shortlisted three times for the ReLit Award, winning it in 2003 for his short story collection A Day Does Not Go By. He teaches literature and creative writing at Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC. He can be found online at www.seanjohnston.ca
Listen All You Bullets tells the story of a young boy named Billy who is trapped on a hardscrabble North Dakota ranch with his lonely mother and his wheelchair-bound father. But Billy isn’t just any boy stuck on any ranch: Billy and his family are the creations of Jack Schaefer’s popular 1949 Western novel, Shane. Long after that novel’s action has concluded and its plot and characters have seemingly solidified into popular myth, Sean Johnston sets out to explore the possibilities of a story’s resistance to its own arrested afterlife.
Amanda Jernigan is a poet, playwright, essayist and editor. Her first book of poems, Groundwork, published by Biblioasis, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and named to National Public Radio's list of "Best Books" of 2011. Her new book, All the Daylight Hours, was published by Cormorant Books in the spring. She currently lives in Hamilton, where she is at work on a Ph.D. in English at McMaster University, her dissertation project a critical edition of the poems of Richard Outram.
All the Daylight Hours, Amanda Jernigan’s second poetry collection, took shape over the course of twelve years, through many changes of setting and amid a changing cast of characters encountered both face to face and in the pages of books long lived-with and loved. The poems themselves ring changes on nature and artifice, love and loss, the power of language and the limitations of language, returning to these themes in a wide variety of registers. No less moving for being meticulously crafted, these elegies, epithalamiums, dramatic monologues, and meditations trace a human journey through time.
Stan Rogal's work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe, some in translation, including: Rampike, The Fiddlehead, Grain and Exquisite Corpse. He is the author of 18 books: 4 novels, 3 story and 11 poetry collections. A poem of his placed third in the 2012 GritLIT contest. He is also a playwright with productions mounted variously across Canada, generally in fringe venues. His new collection is Howl Down the Moon, and his next, Love's Not The Way To is due in April 2013.
Chris Pannell serves on the board of Hamilton's annual gritLIT literary festival. He has published four poetry books: Under Old Stars, Sorry I Spent Your Poem, Drive, and his most recent, A Nervous City. He is also the author of a set of three poetry broadsheets entitled Fractures, Subluxations and Disclocations, which won the Hamilton and Region Arts Council poetry book award in 1997. In 2010, his book Drive won the Acorn-Plantos People's Poet award and the Arts Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year. From 1993 until 2005 he ran the New Writing Workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. and edited two book-length anthologies for the group. He has been published in literary magazines across Canada and internationally as well.
In A Nervous City is an array of poems that explore the depth and breadth of the city, capturing both its darkness and its charm.
Ann Shin’s writing has been published in anthologies and magazines in Canada and the US, including Crossroads Cant , Broken Jaw Press On a Bed of Rice, Anchor Books, and Geography of Encounters, Rowman and Little Press and IV Lounge Reader, Insomniac Press, and The Last Thing Standing, by Mansfield Press. Her latest book of poetry, The Family China was published in 2013, by Brick Books and has won the Anne Green Award for innovation in story and narrative form. Some of the poems from the book were produced for broadcast on the CBC Radio One program ‘Living Out Loud.’
Barbara Fradkin has been writing since she was six and has always had an affinity for the dark side. Her work as a child psychologist provides ample insight and inspiration for stories. She is a two-time winner in Storyteller Magazine's annual Great Canadian Short Story Contest, as well as a four-time nominee for the Crime Writers' of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story, including "Voices from the Deep" in 2007.
However, she is best known for her award-winning police procedural series. There are nine books in the series, starting with Do or Die in 2000. The sequel Once Upon a Time (2002) was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' of Canada's Arthur Ellis award for Best Novel, while both Fifth Son (2004) and Honour Among Men (2006) won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel in their respective years.
Whisper of Legends begins in the wake of a violent summer storm when a broken canoe washes up on the rocky shore of the Nahanni River. Four canoeists are missing. Has the mighty river claimed another life? Or has greed, revenge and a family legend led to murder?
The MC for the evening, Jaime Krakowski is the owner of the popular Epic Books located at 226 Locke Street South in Hamilton. The store hosts many readings of its own, details of which can be found at their website.
