Nov 2: Who's reading: dee Hobsbawn-Smith, Katerina Fretwell, Stan Rogal, Donato Mancini, angela rawlings,Laura Clarke, Ryan Pratt

This month's LitLive features some amazing writers from as far away as Vancouver and Iceland. We are also beginning a new initiative: we are reserving several places in the series to feature talented emerging writers. What are they emerging from? A vat of literary possibility? Coleridge soup? For our purposes, emerging means 'not having a full length book (yet)'. We are most excited to feature two emerging writers in this month's series—Laura Clarke and Ryan Pratt. 

There's some information about them and all the writers below.

angela rawlings’s research in acoustic ecology, counter-mapping, and ecopoetics informs her artistic output. She is the recipient of a Chalmers Arts Fellowship (Canada, 2009) and held the prestigious position of Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence (Australia, 2012). In 2013, her work Áfall / Trauma was shortlisted for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights. rawlings’ 2012 digital publication Gibber amassed sound and visual poetry from Australian bioregions. Her literary debut Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006) received an Alcuin Award for Design; the book is currently being adapted for stage production by VaVaVoom, Bedroom Community, and Valgeir Sigurðsson. rawlings is an active collaborator and improvisation enthusiast. She works frequently with Maja Jantar and Matt Ceolin. She is also penning a reactive libretto for Longitude in collaboration with composer Davíð Brynjar Franzson and new media artists Davyde Wachell and Halldór Arnar Úlfarsson.

Stan Rogal was born in Vancouver and moved to Toronto in 1987. He is the author of fifteen books of fiction and poetry, and his plays have been produced across Canada. He was co-creator of Bald Ego Theatre, artistic director of Bulletproof Theatre and on the lit scene, he ran the legendary Idler Pub Reading Series for ten years. His 2011 collection is an amazing retrospective of his poetry work, Dance, Monster: Fifty Selected Poems!, published by Insomniac Press.

Katerina Fretwell’s seventh book, which includes her art, Class Acts, was published by Inanna in 2013. Kerry Clare included in her online article for 49th Shelf: “Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2013: Poetry” and Heather Spears, Governor General Award Winner, calls it “addictive ... one of the most authentic voices in contemporary Canadian poetry.” Class Acts confronts social injustice in Mary Wollstonecraft’s era during the French Revolution, in the 2008 meltdown and in her Fifties childhood during the McCarthy repression. Her poem “Kissing Cousins” was a finalist for Descant’s Winston Collins Poetry Prize 2012.

dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s poetry, essays, fiction and journalism have appeared in literary journals including The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, CV2, Vallum, Numero Cinq, Gastronomica and Prairie Fire, and in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines in Canada, the USA and Scotland. Her sixth book and first collection of poetry, Wildness Rushing In, was published by Hagios Press in 2014. Her first collection of short fiction, What Can’t Be Undone, will be published by Thistledown Press in 2015. Dee is a graduate of the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Her essay collection, Bread & Water, was awarded second place in the Saskatchewan Writer’ Guild’s 2014 John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award. Her fifth book, Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, earned Best Culinary Book at the 2013 High Plains Book Awards; Best Food Literature book (Canada-English) at the 2013 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards; and 3rd in Les Dames D’Escoffier’s 2014 MFK Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing, open to women writers in North America and Great Britain. She’s at work on her first novel.

The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on poetry, bookworks, text-based visual art and cultural criticism. Two of his New Star books of procedural and visual writing, Ligatures (2005) and Æthel (2007) were each nominated for the ReLit Award, and Ligatures received honourable mention in the Alcuin Society book design awards. Other publications include 105 posbL resons 4t ;; of thot, an artist's book from BookThug (Toronto, 2010); Fact 'N' Value, a book edition from Fillip (Vancouver, 2011); Buffet World (New Star, 2010); You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (BookThug, 2012); as well as poetic and critical writings in publications such as The Capilano Review, Open Letter, West Coast Line, Rampike, W, The West Wind Review, Parser, ditch, Area Sneaks, Poetry is Dead and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.

Laura Clarke grew up in Hamilton, and now lives and writes in Toronto. She is a graduate of University of Toronto’s MA in Creative Writing program and the winner of the 2013 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from ECW press in 2015.

Ryan Pratt lives in Hamilton, Canada. A contributing writer for The Town Crier and Ottawa Poetry Newsletter, Ryan’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Quiddity, Bywords Quarterly Journal, Contemporary Verse 2, and In/Words Magazine, among others.