January 5: Julie Joosten, Roger Greenwald, Gregory Betts, Jane Silcott, Alexander Dolinin, Jason Dickson, and host, Chris Pannell

A great line-up for January. Read about the authors and their books below:

Alexander Dolinin was born and raised in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the former Soviet Union, where he earned an MA in Iranian philology from the State University of Leningrad. After emigrating to Canada, he earned a BA in Honours History from McMaster University, with Russian history as one of his areas of specialization. Against Destiny, his first novel, joins his experience of living in the Soviet Union with a specialist’s knowledge of the history, realities and circumstances that shape its main characters and plot. He is a Canadian citizen and a member of the Writers Union of Canada. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Gregory Betts is an award-winning author, editor and professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. He has been teaching literature for a dozen years now at four different universities in Canada and Germany. He has published five books of poetry, edited five books of experimental Canadian writing, and recently published Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies and Graduate Program Director of Canadian and American Studies at Brock.

Jane Silcott grew up in Toronto and moved west to find out why her father's voice always got softer when he spoke of the mountains. She's still finding out. Jane’s writing has been called "fearless," "honest," "compelling," and "cheeky," and has been recognized by the CBC Literary Awards, the National and Western Magazine Awards, Room Magazine, and the Creative Nonfiction Collective of Canada. Her first book, Everything Rustles, is a collection of personal essays about love, wrinkles, death, fear and laundry – the usual things.

Jason Dickson is a bookseller, publisher and writer who lives in London, Ontario. He is the editor of Clearance: Selected Journals of Dr. Michael Purdon, Parapsychologist (BookThug 2002). He also publishes the London arts and letters magazine, The London Reader.

Julie Joosten has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from Cornell University.  Her first book Light Light was published by Book Thug (2013).  Her poems and reviews can be found in Jacket 2, Tarpaulin Sky, The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review. 

Roger Greenwald grew up in New York, attended The City College and the St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie Poetry Project workshop, and then took graduate degrees at the University of Toronto. He has won two CBC Literary Awards, one for his poetry and one for travel literature, as well as numerous awards for his translations. He has published one book of poems, Connecting Flight, and several volumes of poetry in translation, most recently North in the World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen; Picture World, by Niels Frank; and Meditations on Georges de La Tour, by Paal-Helge Haugen.  

HOST:

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.