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Saturday Night at Spring ForeWord

With Vinh Nguyen, Mélikah Abdelmoumen, Fazeela Jiwa, Chad Lucas, Rebecca Thomas, Sue Goyette, Grayer Parsons, Eris Davis, and Asha Abdosh
Saturday, April 26
6:30PM – 9:00PM (Doors open 6:00PM)
Park Place Theatre, 5480 Point Pleasant Drive (in Point Pleasant Park, lower parking lot)
$10.00

Description

We’re celebrating our second annual Youth Mentorship Program with readings from Grayer Parsons, Eris Davis, and Halifax Youth Poet Laureate Asha Abdosh, along with their mentors Chad Lucas, Rebecca Thomas, and Sue Goyette. After an intermission featuring snacks, we’ll welcome Vinh Nguyen and Mélikah Abdelmoumen in conversation with Fazeela Jiwa. Read about Vinh’s new book, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, and Mélikah’s new book, Baldwin, Styron, and Me, and join us for this night of readings, conversation, and celebration.

Speakers

  • VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, The Criterion Collection’s Current, and MUBI’s Notebook. He is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the author of the academic book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. His writing has been short-listed for a National Magazine Award and has received the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers.

  • Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. She lived in Lyon, France, from 2005 to 2017. She holds a PhD in literary studies from the Université de Montréal and has published many articles, short stories, novels, and essays, including Les désastrées (2013), Douze ans en France (2018), and Petite-Ville (2024). She worked as an editor with the Groupe Ville-Marie Littérature in Montreal until 2021. She was the editor-in-chief of Lettres québécoises, a Québec literary magazine, from 2021 to 2024. Baldwin, Styron, and Me is her tenth book (and the first to be translated).

  • I'm an acquisitions and development editor at Fernwood Publishing, an independent publisher dedicated to critical thinking. In 2023, Editors Canada gave me the Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence. I'm also a writer, which is much harder. I like to use humour and existential absurdity to explore complex human contexts like migration. I've had pieces published in anthologies and magazines. I'm currently working on my first book, my second book, and my third book all at the same time.

  • Rebecca Thomas is an award winning Mi'kmaw writer of things. Sometimes they are poems, sometimes they are childrens’ books and sometimes they are love notes for family and friends. But they are always done with purpose and intention. She is a registered band member of Lennox Island First Nation in Epekwitk. Her ultimate goal is to take up space as an Indigenous woman in a world where they aren’t as valued or worthy as other groups of people. Rebecca dares you to tell her to be smaller and see what happens. She has been the Poet Laureate of Halifax and caregiver to her father who is a survivor of the Shubenacadie Residential School. She has performed with the Halluci Nation, Symphony Nova Scotia, and has spoken and lectured at conferences and coffee houses from coast to coast. Her first book I'm Finding My Talk has been shortlisted for the First Nations Community Reads Award. Her most recent collection of poetry called "I place you into the fire" was listed as one of CBC's top 20 books of 2020. Her book "Swift Fox All Along" was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General's Award for children's literature. She has an upcoming children's book called "Grampy’s Chair" is set to be released in September of 2024. She pays her bills by helping students who are overwhelmed with life and studies as a Student Services Advisor at the Nova Scotia Community College.

  • Sue Goyette has published nine books of poems and a novel. Her collections include Monoculture, The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, and Ocean (for which she was awarded the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017) and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spray painted on a sidewalk and tattooed. She was nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several national awards. She lives in Halifax (K'jipuktuk) and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.