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Making the Invisible Visible

With Joshua Whitehead, Sue Murtagh, Shashi Bhat, Erin Wunker, Lisa Moore, and Stephanie Domet

Sunday, November 10
7:00PM – 10:00PM (Doors Open at 6:30PM)
Bus Stop Theatre (2203 Gottingen St, Halifax)
$15.00

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Description

Joshua Whitehead starts the night with a reading from recent work. Then, two short story writers join author and scholar Erin Wunker in conversation—Sue Murtagh (We’re Not Rich) and Shashi Bhat (Death by a Thousand Cuts). And Lisa Moore tells festival co-director Stephanie Domet about Invisible Prisons, the riveting true story of a boy’s four-year internment at a reform facility in Newfoundland, and how Jack Whalen survived not only to tell the tale—but to change the law.

Accessibility Notes: ASL, free livestream

Presented by the University of King’s College

Speakers

  • Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer, Jonny Appleseed, Making Love with the Land, and Indigiqueerness: a Conversation about Storytelling as well as the editor of Love after the End: an Anthology of Two Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. Currently, Whitehead is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary.

  • Sue Murtagh lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a graduate of the Alistair MacLeod mentorship program (Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia) and the Humber School for Writers, where she worked with mentor Danila Botha. Her writing has appeared in The Nashwaak Review, Grain, carte blanche, the Humber Literary Review, The New Quarterly and yolkliterary.ca. Nimbus Publishing and Vagrant Press published her debut short story collection, We're Not Rich, in October 2024. Award-winning writer Alexander MacLeod edited the linked collection.

  • Shashi Bhat is the author of the story collection Death by a Thousand Cuts (McClelland & Stewart), and the novels The Most Precious Substance on Earth (M&S, Grand Central), a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Award for fiction, and The Family Took Shape (Cormorant), a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Her fiction has won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and has appeared in such publications as Hazlitt, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Stories, and The Journey Prize Stories. Shashi is the editor of EVENT magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.

  • Erin Wunker is a writer and a teacher who lives in Mik'ma'ki.

  • Lisa Moore is the author of the bestselling novels Alligator, February, Caught, and This is How We Love; the story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and a young adult novel, Flannery. Her books have been finalists for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, CBC Canada Reads, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. Lisa is also the co-librettist, along with Laura Kaminsky, of the opera February, based on her novel of the same name (2023). Lisa lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

  • Stephanie Domet is the author of two novels, and is at work on a third. She lives in Halifax where she is a freelance writer and editor who teaches creative writing in her dining room to little kids, sews her own clothes, and absolutely wants to make you supper when you’re in town.