All Write in Sin City

About our guest:  Elaine Feeney is an award-winning poet, novelist, short story writer and playwright from the west of Ireland. Her 2020 debut, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Her second novel, How to Build a Boat, is longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Previously, Feeney has published three collections of poetry, including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story “Sojourn” was included in The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Feeney lectures at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/feeney-elaine/

Join our three podcasters: Kim Conklin, Sarah Jarvis, and Irene Moore Davis for a fond look at some of the titles that caught our attention in 2023.  It's not an exhaustive list as we loved all our interviews and you can find them all in our episodes.
Here are links to the ones we mentioned here:

The Middle Daughter  Chika Unigwe
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12557891

G.A. Grisenthwaite’s Tales for Late Night Bonfires
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/13410063

Psych Murders with Stephanie Heit
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12415544

https://stephanie-heit.com/books-psych-murders/

Black Scientist, Black Activist, Black Icon by Howard McCurdy. Edited by George Elliott Clarke
 https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/13453444

The African Samurai by Craig Shreve
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/13445022

Raising Bean by W.S. Penn
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/11908024

Ordinary Wonder Tales with Emily Urquhart
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12838402

Tend by Kate Hargreaves
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12514105

Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure
 https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12867483

Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell
https://www.buzzsprout.com/327233/12962533

Jacqueline Vogtman’s fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Permafrost, The Literary Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Third Coast, and other journals. A graduate of the MFA program at Bowling Green State University, she is currently Associate Professor of English at Mercer County Community College. She has lived in New Jersey most of her life and resides in a small town surrounded by nature, which she explores with her husband, daughter, and dog. Girl Country is her first book.
https://www.dzancbooks.org/all-titles/p/girl-country#:~:text=A%20near%2Dfuture%20farmer%20battling,the%20end%20of%20the%20world.
https://jacquelinevogtman.com/

Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. He is the author of three novels: Breaking and Entering, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata. He is also the author of a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and has written nine books for children, two of which were nominated for a Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at Walrus magazine, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.

 His latest book is Breaking and Entering, published by Biblioasis in 2023. Don was a featured author at this year’s BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor, October 12th-15th in Windsor, Ontario.

https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/gillmor-don/
http://www.dongillmor.ca/

Alise Alousi’s writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Three Fold Press, Mom Egg Review, The Detroit Free Press, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry and We Call to the Eye and the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Descent. She is a 2019 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and has received awards and fellowships from the Knight Foundation, Mesa Refuge, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and others. Alise Alousi has worked at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit for two decades, she serves the Room Project, a workspace for women and nonbinary writers in Detroit, and she currently teaches poetry to teens at the Arab American National Museum. Her latest poetry collection, published by Wayne State University Press in August 2023, is What to Count.
https://alisealousipoetry.com/
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/what-count

Our local writer feature this time is Erik ETomic Johnson. You'll catch one of his poems later in the episode.
Erik E-tomic Johnson is a local hip-hop lyricist, vocalist and slam poet. From the Windsor-Essex county area. Erik has been writing and performing poetry for a number of years. He draws his poetic inspiration from his Afro-Indigenous
culture and experiences as an artist of color and physically disabled creator. His goal as an artist is to highlight the experiences of BIPOC through storytelling, a theme that is deeply ingrained in all of his poetic endeavours.
https://biblioasisbookshop.com/
https://storytellersbookstore.ca/

Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has worked since 2004. He is also author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel An Exaggerated Murder and his fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary publications. He grew up in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. His latest book is The Art of Libromancy with Biblioasis Press. 
https://www.biblioasis.com/brand/cook-josh/

Lisa Alward grew up in Halifax during the 1960s and 70s. She worked in literary publishing in Toronto in the 80s and began writing fiction at 50. Her stories have won The Fiddlehead Prize and the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories, as well as literary journals such as The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, untethered, Prairie Fire, and Exile. She lives with her husband, John, near the Wolastoq River in Fredericton.  Cocktail is her first book, published by Biblioasis.
More information here: https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/fiction/short-fiction/cocktail/
Lisa's website: https://www.lisaalward.com/
More about BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor 2023 here:  https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/

Poet, novelist, playwright, and critic Dr. George Elliott Clarke is a native of Windsor, Nova Scotia. He is a seventh-generation Canadian of African American and Mi'kmaq Indigenous descent. He earned his BA from the University of Waterloo, MA from Dalhousie University, and PhD from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario (which is where I first met him.) Clarke has served as both Poet Laureate of Toronto, Ontario and Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, and he teaches Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada. He has written too many books to mention but some particular favourites of mine are Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues, Whylah Falls which he later adapted for the radio and stage, Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of George and Rue, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award, Red, Black, Blue, Gold, White, Canticles, War Canticles, Canticles III, and Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir (2021.) He’s also the author of many critical and scholarly works, including Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002).

George Elliott Clarke is no stranger to the Detroit River borderlands and to BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor in particular, and this October, he’ll be appearing BookFest Windsor again. On October 14th, he’ll be appearing at the Windsor launch of his latest project, Black Scientist, Black Activist, Black Icon, and on October 15th, he’ll be part of the always popular BookFest Windsor event, the Poetry Café.

Available from Nimbus Publishing.
About BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/

Craig Shreve was born and raised in North Buxton, Ontario, a small town that has been recognized by the Canadian government as a National Historic Site due to its former status as a popular terminus on the Underground Railroad. He is a descendant of Abraham Doras Shadd, the first Black person in Canada to be elected to public office, and of his daughter Mary Ann Shadd, the pioneering abolitionist, suffragette, and newspaper editor/publisher who was inducted posthumously into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in the United States. Craig has volunteered internationally on humanitarian building projects, and is a keen outdoor sports enthusiast – including climbing, hang gliding, caving, and other terrifying activities. Craig is the author of One Night in Mississippi and a graduate of the School for Writers at Humber College. His latest novel is The African Samurai, published by Sribner Canada which has already been optioned by Netflix. Craig will be one of the spotlight authors featured  during BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor 2023, happening October 12th-15th in Windsor.
For more information: https://craigshreve.com/bio

Available from: https://www.simonandschuster.ca/authors/Craig-Shreve/191441634
and your favourite independent bookstore.

For more information about BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor : https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/

G. A. Grisenthwaite is Nlaka’pamux [Ing-khla-kap-muh], a member of the Lytton First Nation. He was a graphic designer in Vancouver and Kelowna before completing his master’s in English literature and creative writing at the University of Windsor. His stories and poems have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Our Stories Literary Journal, FreeFall, Exile Quarterly, ndnCountry, Offset 17, Prism International, and Bawaajigan: Stories of Power. Grisenthwaite’s work has earned a number of prizes, including the 2014 John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award for his short story “The Fine Art of Frying Eggs;” his first novel, Home Waltz, published by Palimpsest Press, was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for English Language Fiction and his short story “Splatter Patterns” was shortlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize. His new short story collection, published by Freehand Press, is Tales for Late Night Bonfires. G.A. Grisenthwaite lives in Kingsville, Ontario. And we’re thrilled that G.A. Grisenthwaite will be one of the authors featured during BookFest/Festival du Livre Windsor 2023, happening October 12th-15th in Windsor.

*Contains a mention of suicide.

For more information: https://www.gordongrisenthwaite.com/
Available from: https://freehand-books.com/product/tales-for-late-night-bonfires/#tab-description
and your favourite independent bookstore.
More about BookFest / Festival du Livre Windsor: https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/