Canadian Writers in Person features Rebecca Salazar, Feb. 15

stack of books

If you love meeting talented writers and hearing them read from their published work, or just want to soak up a unique cultural experience, don’t miss the Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series, which continues Feb. 15 with a reading from Rebecca Salazar’s debut poetry collection, sulphurtongue (Penguin Random House Canada, 2021).

The cover of Rebecca Salazar's book "sulphurtongue."

The series gives attendees an opportunity to get up close and personal with 11 authors who will present their work and answer questions. Canadian Writers in Person is a for-credit course for students and a free-admission event for members of the public. All readings take place at 7 p.m. on select Tuesday evenings via Zoom. Links for each reading can be found here.

Salazar is a writer, editor and community organizer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. The author of poetry chapbooks the knife you need to justify the wound (Rahila’s Ghost) and Guzzle (Anstruther), she also edits for The Fiddlehead and Plenitude magazines.

A finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, sulphurtongue asks how to redefine desire and kinship across languages, and across polluted environments. An immigrant family scatters over a stolen continent. Oracles appear in public transit and online. Bodies are transformed by nearby nickel mines. Doppelgängers, Catholic saints and polyamorists alike pass on unusual inheritances. Deeply entangled in relations both emotional and ecological, this poetry collection confronts the stories we tell about gender, queerness, race, religion, illness and trauma, seeking new forms of care for a changing world.

This year’s Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series lineup consists of a unique selection of emerging and established Canadian writers whose writing explores a broad range of topics and geographical and cultural landscapes. Featuring seasoned and emerging poets and fiction writers, the series highlights Canada’s ever-growing pool of literary talent.

Other readings scheduled in this series are:

Canadian Writers in Person is a course offered in the Culture & Expression program in the Department of Humanities in York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. For more information on the series, visit yorku.ca/laps/canwrite, or email Professor Gail Vanstone at gailv@yorku.ca or Professor Leslie Sanders at leslie@yorku.ca.