June 7th Reading:UPDATED!! Kathryn Mockler, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Gary Barwin, Colette Maitland, Krista Foss, and Janet Turpin Myers

This June's LitLive, the last for the season. A K-fusion of amazing writers whose name begins with K.

And then some un-K's: 

Reading: May 3: Ariel Gordon, Andrew Forbes, Valerie Nielsen, Amber McMillan, Patrick Friesen, Nicholas Papaxanthos, Michael e. Casteels

Amber McMillan is a teacher and writer living on Protection Island B.C. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Cv2, Forget Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Capilano Review and others. We Can't Ever Do This Again is her first collection of poetry out this month with Wolsak and Wynn.

Andrew Forbes’s stories have appeared in The Feathertale Review, Found Press, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Scrivener Creative Review, This Magazine, Hobart, and The Puritan. “In the Foothills,” which appears in What You Need, was nominated for the Journey Prize and appeared in The Journey Prize Stories 25. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways, was launched in spring 2014. Recently, she won Kalamalka Press' inaugural John Lent Poetry-Prose Award. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms. She blogs at janedayreader.blogspot.ca

Michael e. Casteels has self-published over a dozen chapbooks of poetry and artwork. His poetry has recently appeared in: The Puritan, The Rusty Toque, and Lemon Hound. He has work forthcoming in Arc, and Filling Station. In 2012 he was nominated for the emerging artist award in The Premier's Awards for Excellence in the Arts. He lives in Kingston, Ontario where he runs Puddles of Sky Press.

Nicholas Papaxanthos grew up in Lefkosia, Cyprus, near a playground with mannequins in the sandpit. His work has appeared in various magazines, including Illiterature, The New Chief Tongue, and This Magazine. He recently won the John Lent Poetry-Prose Award, and a collection of poetry is forthcoming from Mansfield Press.

Patrick Friesen, formerly of Winnipeg, lives on Vancouver Island.  He writes poetry, drama, songs, and text for dance and music.  In 1994 Blasphemer’s Wheel (Turnstone Press) won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award in Manitoba.  A Broken Bowl was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award in 1996.  He has also been short-listed twice for the Dorothy Livesay Award in the BC Book Awards.  Friesen has also collaborated with Marilyn Lerner in jazz and literary festivals and on two CDs of spoken word and improv piano.  His most recent book is A Short History of Crazy Bone from Mother Tongue Publishing.

Valerie Nielsen facilitates The Writers' Circle at First Unitarian Church. She leads writing workshops at her lakeshore home, and 5 day retreats at a Unitarian camp where she was Writer in Residence. She is past president of The Tower Poetry Society, and is regularly featured in their publications. Her book, Romantic Pilgrimage, contains selections of her parents' love letters, and her poetry collection is called Green Light. She currently teaches a memoir course in Grimsby. Her feature work tonight, Over The Top  tells her grandmother's story of her rocky courtship and marriage to a soldier in World War One.

Reading: April 12

March reading: Ray Robertson, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, George Murray, Nancy Jo Cullen, Diane Schoemperlen, Taylor Wilson, and Geoffrey Line.

Can you tell me about the readers for February?

Why, sure. But, before we do, here's the poster for the event again.

Adrienne Barrett is a writer and bricklayer. A graduate of Trent University and the University of British Columbia, she has seen her poetry published in Arc, Prairie Fire, and The Fiddlehead. Her work has also appeared on the longlist for the 2011 Montreal Prize. Born in Hamilton, she kicked around Peterborough, Vancouver, and Toronto before settling in Woodstock, Ontario. Her poetry collection, The House is Still Standing appeared with Goose Lane Editions in 2013.

Bill Kennedy and his colleague operate a website The Apostrophe Engine which is the source of poems in apostrophe, a book published by ECW Press in 2006. the home page of the Apostrophe Engine site presents the full text of a poem called “apostrophe”, written by Bill in 1993. In the digital version of the poem, each line is a hyperlink which generates an entire new poem with the help of a team of handy robots and the entirety of the internet.

Dani Couture is the author of three collections of poetry, GOOD MEAT (Pedlar Press, 2006) and SWEET (Pedlar Press, 2010), and YAW (Mansfield Press, 2014), and the novel ALGOMA (Invisible Publishing). SWEET was named one of Maisy’s Best Books of 2010 by Maisonneuve Magazine and nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry; SWEET won the ReLit Award for poetry. In 2011, Dani also received an Honour of Distinction from The Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications including The Globe and Mail, Grain, The Walrus, Lemon Hound, Hazlitt, and two Best Canadian Poetry in English anthologies. She is the literary editor at This Magazine.

Jim Nason is the author of two books of poetry, If Lips Were as Red and The Fist of Remembering, the latter an emotionally rich and honest account of the death of his partner from cancer. Educated in Montreal (McGill), and Toronto (Ryerson and York), Jim Nason currently lives and works as a social worker in Toronto. His work, praised by writers such as John Ashbery in the United States and Laura Lush here, has appeared in many literary journals across North America. His latest work is Music Garden from Frontenac Press.

Kathy Page is the author of seven novels, including Alphabet (a Governor General's Award finalist in 2005), The Story of My Face (longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002), and The Find (shortlisted for the ReLit Award in 2011), as well as many short stories, previously collected in As In Music. She recently co-edited In the Flesh (2012), a collection of personal essays about the human body, and has written for television and radio. Born in the UK, Kathy has lived on Salt Spring Island since 2001. Alphabet will be reissued by Biblioasis in Fall 2014.

Joel-Asa Miller was born in New York City and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Washington, DC. He drove a taxi, operated punch presses, welded iron castings and spent 10 years as an assembler in a General Motors plant outside of Milwaukee where he was also an active member of United Autoworkers of America. Joel left Milwaukee to earn the MFA in Film and Television at UCLA. Since moving to Montreal nearly 15 years ago, Joel numerous TV commercials, documentary and fiction film projects. He currently lives in Montreal where he writes short fiction and poetry based on the many interesting characters he’s met along the way.

Stephen Near is a playwright, producer, performer and educator living in Hamilton. His plays have been performed across Canada in a variety of festivals including Toronto Fringe, Hamilton Fringe, New Ideas and Summerworks. Stephen is a member of the Playwright’s Guild of Canada and the Theatre Aquarius Playwrights Unit and co-founded three theatre companies including the new Hamilton-based Same Boat Theatre. Stephen's critically-acclaimed, full-length horror drama Monstrous Invisible, about the life of author H.P. Lovecraft, was developed and co-produced by Theatre Aquarius as part of their New Play Development and TA2 Studio Series. Stephen teaches playwriting at Mohawk College in Hamilton and is the Operations Officer with the Hamilton Arts Council.

February reading: Adrienne Barrett, Kathy Page, Jim Nason, Bill Kennedy, Dani Couture, Stephen Near, and Joel Miller.

January's readers! Bonnie Lendrum, Nicholas Power, Kerry-Lee Powell, Phlip Arima, Eric Bronson, Kate Hargreaves!!!!

Kate Hargreaves is a writer and roller derby skater. Her first book, Talking Derby: Stories from a Life on Eight Wheels (2012), is a collection of short prose vignettes inspired by women's flat-track roller derby. Her poetry has been published in literary journals across North America, including Descant , filling Station, The Puritan, Drunken Boat, The Antigonish Review, Canada and Beyond, Carousel , and Rampike, in the anthologies Whisky Sour City (2012), Detours (2012), as well as in the Windsor Review's "Best Writers Under 35" issue. Hargreaves was the recipient of a Windsor Endowment for the Arts Emerging Literary Artist Award in 2011 and a Governor General's Gold Medal in Graduate Studies at the University of Windsor in 2012, where she obtained her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English and Creative Writing. Kate grew up in Amherstburg, Ontario, but now lives in Windsor, where she works as a publishing assistant and book designer. Follow her on Twitter @TalkingDerby.

Bonnie Lendrum began creative writing in 2002, but her personal writing projects were soon hijacked by a community issue: a proposed industrial mining operation that would negatively affect the quality and quantity of her community's water supply. For ten years, writing time was re-directed to the production of annual reports, community flyers, web updates, and attendance at meetings. She was happy if she managed to write a few days per month on her own project…a series of linked short stories about a family managing their way through palliative care. The short stories never materialized, but a novel did. Autumn’s Grace was published in June 2013 by Inanna Publications and Education. Lendrum attained a BScN and an MScN from the University of Toronto. She worked in senior nursing roles in Ontario and Quebec teaching hospitals and volunteered extensively in health care and education. www.bonnielendrum.com

Nicholas Power is a founding member of the Meet the Presses literary collective, and has performed with the storytelling duo The Wordweavers and the sound poetry ensemble Alexander’s Dark Band. He works as a psychotherapist in private practice. He has been published by Teksteditions (Melancholy Scientist), Underwhich Editions (wells), The Writing Space (a modest device), and Battered Press (No Poems). He has been editing and publishing with his own Gesture Press for 30 years.

Phlip Arima is the author of five books, the most recent being Pin Pricks (Quattro Books). He has also produced an audio CD, and directed and performed a poetry/music/dance collaboration for part of the Figure of Speech series at Majlis Multidisciplinary Arts. His work has been adapted to stage by Newfoundland's Neighbourhood Dance works in collaboration with RCA Theatre, and to video by Vision Television. He is a former Artistic Director of the Art Bar poetry series and was a co-organizer/host of The Basement Reading series. For more about Phlip and to read samples of his work please visit www.phliparima.com.

Kerry-Lee Powell was born in Montreal and grew up in Antigua, Australia and the United Kingdom. Her work has appeared in The Spectator, Ambit and the Virago Press Writing Women series. In 2013, she won The Boston Review fiction contest and The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons prize for short fiction. Her debut collection of poetry is forthcoming from Biblioasis Press in 2014. A short story collection and a novel are forthcoming from HarperCollins.

Eric Bronson is a visiting professor in the Humanities Department at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the editor of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy (2011), Poker and Philosophy (2006), Baseball and Philosophy (2004), and co-editor of The Hobbit and Philosophy (2012), and The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy (2003). He was producer and co-editor for the film, My Lazy White Friends, winning Best Documentary awards at the Hermosa Beach Film Festival, Atlantic City Film Festival, Newport Beach International Film Festival, Saguaro Film Festival and an Audience Award winner at the Brooklyn Film Festival. In 2007 he served as the "Soul Trainer" for the CBC radio morning show, "Sounds Like Canada."