Metacösm

Join writer and poet Ali Pinkney at her kitchen table for the latest episode of Metacösm this week.

Ali Pinkney is a literary writer based on Tkaron:to/Toronto where she is a graduate student with the Department of English in the Field of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. She published her debut collection of poetry, Tampion, with Metatron Press in 2014. Ali holds a BA in English and Creative Writing (2017) and an MA in English Literature (2021) from Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Her thesis work focused on Percy Bysshe Shelley's idiosyncratic use of extended and accumulative similes. She sees Shelley's operations with this poetic technique as a way of producing matrices of reciprocity that poetically engender a politics of sympathetic intimacy that values plurality and alterity over the logic of likeness and categorical subsumption. Currently, Ali works as a teaching assistant of undergraduate creative writing at the University of Toronto.

Join writer Lee Suksi this week for our third episode of Metacösm.

Lee Suksi's debut book The Nerves (Metatron Press, 2020) won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Erotica. Their art writing accompanies and has been presented at exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cooper Cole, Georgia Scherman Projects, Susan Hobbs, Towards, The Table, and Calaboose. They’ve presented at Doored, Images Festival and Blackwood Gallery.

Join writer Fariha Roísín this week for our second episode of Metacösm.

Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles, California. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, liminality, otherness, and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam, and queer identities and has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Vice, Village Voice, and others.

She is currently the co-founder and director of Studio Ānanda, a space of cultivation and archive for radical, anti-colonial wellness; deputy editor of Violet Book, and sits on the Board of Directors at Find Center. She also teaches a quarterly class called Writing with Vulnerability and writes a weekly newsletter.

Róisín has published a book of poetry entitled How To Cure A Ghost (Abrams, 2019), a journal called Being In Your Body (Abrams, 2019) and a novel named Like A Bird (Unnamed Press, 2020).

Her first work of non-fiction is forthcoming and entitled Who Is Wellness For? An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who it Leaves Behind, which will be published by HarperWave, on June 14th, 2022. Her second book of poetry is Survival Takes A Wild Imagination and will be published by Andrews McNeel, Fall 2023.

Join poet Ivanna Baranova this week for our first episode of Metacösm.

Ivanna Baranova is the author of CONFIRMATION BIAS (Metatron Press, 2019). Her poems have been published by or are forthcoming with Cixous72, Jubilat, Newest York, and Peace on Earth Review. She lives in Los Angeles and helps with communications at The Poetry Project.