All Write in Sin City

Here is a special short with Literary Arts Windsor President Wesley Foster talking about the exciting lineup for Windsor's annual literary festival BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor 2024.
This year, it's all virtual, so accessible from anywhere, and the theme is Bridging Communities.
Here's our co-host Irene Moore Davis chatting with Wes about the literary conversations coming right to you!
For tickets and more information, see
https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/event/bridging-communities-bookfest-festival-du-livre-2024/

Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh was born in Washington, D.C. to an Iranian father and an American mother. She moved to Iran at age 5 and grew up in Tehran under the Shah. She returned to the U.S. to attend Stanford University, and when the Islamic Revolution started brewing shortly after she graduated, she moved back to Iran and plopped herself down in it. She later received an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. A lifelong English teacher, she has taught in schools and universities on three continents, and she now lives in the United States. Her fiction has been published in numerous publications, including The Georgia Review, Gertrude Press, and Fiction International, and she received an honorable mention for The Best American Short Stories 2018. Her latest book, Zan, a collection of short stories, is published in 2014 by Dzanc Books and was the Winner of the 2022 Dzanc Short Collection Prize.

https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/zan

Renée D. Bondy taught in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Windsor, where she facilitated courses on queer activism, women and religion, and the history of women’s movements. Her writing has appeared in Herizons, Bitch, Bearings Online, and the Humber Literary Review. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers. Renée lives in Chatham, Ontario, and the book is inspired by events that happened there. [non]disclosure published by Second Story Press is her first novel.
https://secondstorypress.ca/collections/renee-d-bondy

Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (2013) and the co-author (with Heidi LM Jacobs) of 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer (2021). His essays have appeared in journals including but not limited to Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, English Journal, College Composition and Communication, Biography, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Journal of Comics and Culture, and Studies in Comics. Dale is the editor of the Myles Horton Reader (2003) and Jeff Lemire: Conversations (2021,) as well as the co-editor of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies (2003.) He lives in Windsor, Ontario where he is a faculty member in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor. His latest book, released this year by Wilfrid Laurier Press, is On Comics and Grief.

https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/O/On-Comics-and-Grief

Kim Nelson is an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Windsor, and also the Director of the Humanities Research Group and the Live Doc Project. Originally from Vancouver, she has been based in Windsor since 2005. She has a BA in Film from UBC and an MFA in Film from York University. Her work spans fiction and documentary. Her interests include women’s rights and equality, colonialism and conflict, and the environment.

Her documentaries have been presented at festivals and campuses across Canada, the US, and Europe. She is a co-editor of The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image, and the author of Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film. Recently, she has also become a co-host of Moving Histories, a podcast that explores the films that connect us all with history. 
https://www.thekimnelson.com/
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/making-history-move/9781978829770/

Barbara Tran’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, The Malahat Review, and Conjunctions. Included in Barbara’s writing for the screen is the narration for Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend, a short XR film, which was a 2022 Official Selection of SXSW and in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Barbara’s poetry collection In the Mynah Bird’s Own Words was the winner of Tupelo Press’s inaugural chapbook award. A co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, 25th Anniversary Edition, Barbara is a member of the She Who Has No Master(s) and AfroMundo collectives. Much of her writing is conceived while walking, playing, or sharing a tasty morsel with a rescue dog.  Precedented Parroting is published by Windsor’s Palimpsest Press.

https://barbaratran.com/
https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/precedented-parroting-barbara-tran/

A native "Thumbody," RS Deeren is an assistant professor of creative writing at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. His research interests include contemporary fiction, US working-class studies, and rural-urban dynamics. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in periodicals including The Great Lakes Review, Joyland, Midwestern Gothic, and more. Like some of his characters, he has also worked as a line cook, landscaper, lumberjack, and a bank teller. He received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His debut story collection, Enough To Lose, was selected as a Michigan Notable Book in 2023, and it was published by Wayne State University Press. 
https://www.rsdeeren.com/

https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814350409/

Marty Gervais and André Narbonne

About our guests:  The Publishing Practicum is a different kind of University of Windsor English course. It’s like a year-long internship for a group of students who take one or two books per year through the steps of the publishing process from editing to book design to creating a promotional campaign and a book launch. Marty Gervais, journalist, author, Poet Laureate Emeritus and publisher of Black Moss Press, has supervised the program for more than 20 years. 2024 is his final year at the helm, and he’s turning it over to award-winning author and U of W professor Dr. André Narbonne. They’re both joining us today to talk about the history of the program, the two books that the Practicum launched this year, and what the future holds for this popular educational experience. 

Usually at the end of the podcast, we have the author read a selection from the book. This time, we have readings from some of the poets who participated in the anthologies.

Where the Map Begins—
Kalie Chapman is a master’s student at the University of Windsor in English Literature & Creative Writing. She is currently working on a creative manuscript for her thesis, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She has been published in three chapbooks, and was on the editorial team for at the end, beginnings by Christopher Lawrence Menard. 

Peter James Billing. As a Poet, Author, Composer, Songwriter, Filmmaker and Incredible Dishwasher, Peter believes that a great idea at the top of a staircase stays there, if not jotted down. You may find him in deep thought in bank lines, or drifting off forming stories at cafes but always ready to listen and support artists in Windsor and Walkerville. Whether by Poe or Puck, rhyme or rhythm, pen or paper, a road hockey game may break out. 

What Time Can’t Touch—

Barry Brodie is a poet, playwright, actor, director and teacher. He has written two books: The Language of the Star – Journals of the Magi and Tom Thomson – On the Threshold of Magic. His poetry has appeared in Amethyst Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal. He held the Chair in Religion and the Arts at Assumption University, co-founded Shō – Art, Spirit & Performance and currently teaches a course on the creative process at the University of Windsor.

Karen Rockwell is a lesbian poet, flash fiction author and accidental artist, who considers colour her home, chaos, a friend and words, her salvation. Author of Curious Connections, a chapbook of flash-fiction published in 2016 by Urban Farmhouse Press, Karen is published in journals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Recognition includes: First Place in Room’s 2013 Poetry Contest, and in Polar Expressions’ 2011 Story Contest; Second Place in Brooklin Poetry Society’s 2018 Poetry Contest, among others.


https://www.uwindsor.ca/english/317/practicum-courses

Colleen Coco Collins is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. She’s worked as a gallery director, in forestry, fossil preparation, and renovation; as an autism support worker, teacher, and women’s shelter counsellor. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, and more. Collins has studied at universities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Zealand, and Ireland. She lives in rural Mi’kma’ki, Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox. Sorry About the Fire is her poetry debut, published by Biblioasis. 
https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/new-releases/sorry-about-the-fire/

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist who uses somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and codirector of the somatic writing studio Turtle Disco. Her third performance poetry collection, Gut Botany, was named one of the top ten US poetry books of 2020 by the New York Public Library, and it won the 2022 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Her fourth collection, Diver Beneath the Street - true crime meets ecopoetry at the level of the soil – was published by Wayne State University Press in 2024.

https://www.petrakuppers.com/
https://wsupress.wayne.edu/9780814351116/