All Write in Sin City

Curtis Chin is the author of the award-winning memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. The restaurant of the title was a popular downtown Detroit eatery owned by his family for generations.

Chin was recently in Windsor, kicking off his five-stop Canadian book tour. A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Curtis Chin served as the nonprofit's first Executive Director. He went on to write comedy for network and cable television before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in twenty countries. He has written for CNN, Bon Appétit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Emancipator/Boston Globe.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Chin has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. We caught up with him at Biblioasis bookshop. This podcast features the recorded highlights of his book talk and his conversation with Scarlet Kennedy. You can find out more about the book and Curtis on his website, curtisfromdetroit.com.

Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Chemical Life, which was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award. Johnstone has also won several awards, including the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Robin Blaser Award, and Poetry's Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, he curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Windsor’s Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. His most recent books are Bait & Switch, a collection of reviews, essays and conversations on poetry, and a collection of poems, The King of Terrors. 
Bait and Switch was published by Porcupine’s Quill. The King of Terrors was published by Coach House Books. 

 Poetry Magazine Summer 2025

In this episode, we are delighted to welcome students from the University of Windsor’s 2026 Publishing Practicum course. Together with some stand-out Canadian Poets, including Rosemary Sullivan, Molly Peacock, Dan MacDonald, and G.A. Grisenthwaite, the students talk about their unique new book of poems and recipes, The Poet’s Cookbook published by Conspiracy Press. 

In this episode, the announcer who introduces and closes the episode is Evelyn Stephenson. The interviewer is Joven Panahon. Both are students of the Publishing Practicum course and members of the Conspiracy Press Social Media Team.

https://www.conspiracypress.ca/

Marcello Di Cintio is the prize-winning author of six books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, and Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers. He has also written for the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The International New York Times, and Canadian Geographic, among others. He lives in Calgary. His latest work for Windsor’s Biblioasis Press is Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers.

https://marcellodicintio.com/

https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/new-releases/precarious-the-lives-of-migrant-workers/

Vida Cross is a Visiting Fulbright Research Chair who has come to the University of Windsor at the invitation of Leddy Library and the Black Scholars Institute. She has been conducting intensive research towards a creative writing project, focusing on Underground Railroad journeys to the Detroit River Borderlands and especially to Canadian communities in the region. Vida is a blues poet, a two-time Pushcart nominee, a Carl Sandburg Literary Award honoree and a Cave Canem Fellow. Vida’s work references her ancestry as a third generation Chigagoan as well as the work of Archibald J. Motley Jr. and Langston Hughes. Vida’s work has appeared in multiple journals and anthologies such as The Creativity and Constraint Anthology for Wising Up Press, A Civil Rights Retrospective with the Black Earth Institute, Tabula Poetica with Chapman University, Transitions Magazine at the Hutchinson Institute, the Cave Canem Anthology XII, The Literary Review with Fairleigh Dickinson University, Reed Magazine at Reed College, and The Journal of Film and Video from The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry collection Bronzeville at Night: 1949 was published by Avst Press in 2017. Vida Cross holds an MFA in Writing and an MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in English from Iowa State University and a BA from Knox College. She is a faculty member at Milwaukee Area Technical College and Chairperson of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. 

 https://vidacross.com/bio

 The Virtual Black History Presentation Vida recorded for the museum can be found here: https://youtu.be/BlMchbCSPYA?si=0_ca3rOOnfPt-6uy

Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Since then, she’s produced a collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, a short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, and a poetry chapbook, the leaves of grass are dreaming. Her debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, is being published this month by Windsor’s Palimpsest Press.
Hollay is a board member of the League of Canadian Poets, the co-chair of the League's BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of the region in which she lives. She’s also a host on The New Books Network. and a host of HOWL—the literary arts show—on 89.5 CIUT FM.

https://www.hollayghadery.ca/

https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/the-unravelling-of-ou-hollay-ghadery/

Lisa de Nikolits is the award-winning author of twelve published novels. 

She has appeared on recommended reading lists for Open Book Toronto, 49th Shelf, Chatelaine, Canadian Living, Hello! Canada, the Quill & Quire, and most recently, the CBC’s 65 works of Canadian fiction to watch for in Fall 2022. Her book The Occult Persuasion and The Anarchist’s Solution was longlisted for a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of The Fantastic, and The Rage Room was a finalist in the International Book Awards, 2021. Her short fiction and poetry have also been published in various international anthologies and journals. Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits came to Canada in 2000. She lives and writes in the Beaches in Toronto. The book we’re talking about today is her latest, Mad Dog and the Sea Dragon, a modern noir novel from Inanna Press 

https://www.lisawriter.com/

https://inanna.ca/product/mad-dog-and-the-sea-dragon/

C. M. Forest, also known as Christian Laforet, is the author of multiple projects including the 2023 Benjamin Franklin silver award winning novel Infested (Eerie River Publishing), and the novella, We All Fall Before the Harvest (Timber Ghost Press.) and the upcoming (Sept. 2024) short story collection, The Roots Run Deep and Other Stories (Eerie River Publishing). His short fiction has been featured in over a dozen anthologies across multiple genres. A self-proclaimed horror movie expert, he spent an embarrassing amount of his youth watching scary movies. When not writing, he lives in Ontario, Canada with his wife, kids, three cats, and a pandemic dog named Sully who has an ongoing love affair with a blanket. His newest release is the short story collection The Roots Run Deep and Other Stories, from Eerie River Publishing.

https://christianlaforet.com/

Karen Smythe’s previous books include the novel This Side of Sad (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), the story collection Stubborn Bones (Polestar/Raincoast, 2001), and the critical study Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). Her family background is Norwegian and German/Irish. She lives with her husband in Guelph, Ontario. Her newest release is the novel A Town Without Noise published by Windsor’s Palimpsest Press. 

https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/a-town-with-no-noise-karen-smythe/

Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. She holds an MFA from the University of King’s College. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. Her work has won the Malahat Review Creative Nonfiction Prize and has been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Her essays, reviews, and poems have been published by the CBC, The Globe and Mail, The Humber Review, Wasafiri International Contemporary Writing, and World Literature Today. Her first book of essays, called Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas, was released by Dundurn Press in 2024. Gloria lives in Toronto, and she dances daily.

Instagram @gloriawrites

Bluesky ‪@gloriablizzard.bsky.social

Website: www.gloriablizzard.com

Links to buy: https://linktr.ee/blackcaketurtlesoup

Substack newsletter: https://carnivalesque.substack.com/