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**POSTPONED** Breakdown Book Tour with Jillian Christmas, Amber Dawn & Vivek Shraya

Saturday Apr 25 2020 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Eckhardt Gramatté Hall at the University of Winnipeg
NOTE: This event has already taken place. Please visit this page to see our upcoming events.

This event has been postponed. We hope to announce a new date when circumstances permit, and apologize for any disappointment.

How does an artist break through without breaking down?

Three outspoken femme writers, Jillian Christmas, Amber Dawn, and Vivek Shraya, voice themes of industry and community pressure, lateral violences, hard-won friendships, and intergenerational healing. Breakdown Book Tour is part cultural criticism, part resistance, and wholly a celebration of narrative, verse, and song.

This event co-presented by the Institute for Women's & Gender Studies (IWGS) at the University of Winnipeg. Ticket information and further details will be announced shortly!

See:

My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems

- Amber Dawn

Trade paperback $19.95
Reader Reward Price: $17.96

Finalist, Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes

In her novels, poetry, and prose, Amber Dawn has written eloquently on queer femme sexuality, individual and systemic trauma, and sex work justice, themes drawn from her own lived experience and revealed most notably in her award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life.

In this, her second poetry collection, Amber Dawn takes stock of the costs of coming out on the page in a heartrendingly honest and intimate investigation of the toll that artmaking takes on artists. These long poems offer difficult truths within their intricate narratives that are alternately incendiary, tender, and rapturous.

In a cultural era when intersectional and marginalized writers are topping bestseller lists, Amber Dawn invites her readers to take an unflinching look at what we expect from writers, and from each other.

Includes a foreword by writer Doretta Lau.

The Gospel of Breaking

- Jillian Christmas

Trade paperback $16.95
Reader Reward Price: $15.26

Winner, Writers' Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers
Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award


In The Gospel of Breaking, Jillian Christmas confirms what followers of her performance and artistic curation have long known: there is magic in her words. Befitting someone who "speaks things into being," Christmas extracts from family history, queer lineage, and the political landscape of a racialized life to create a rich, softly defiant collection of poems.

Christmas draws a circle around the things she calls "holy": the family line that cannot find its root but survived to fill the skies with radiant flesh; the body, broken and unbroken and broken and new again; the lover lost, the friend lost, and the loss itself; and the hands that hold them all with brilliant, tender care. Expansive and beautiful, these poems allow readers to swim in Jillian Christmas's mother-tongue and to dream at her shores.

The Subtweet

- Vivek Shraya

Trade paperback $21.95
Reader Reward Price: $19.76

2021 Dublin Literary Award Finalist 2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist for Transgender Fiction 2020 Toronto Book Awards Finalist "The Subtweet is affecting, unnerving, empowering, and often truly LOL." -- Foreword Reviews, starred review "A beautifully crafted novel about race, music, and social media." -- Booklist Includes an exclusive free soundtrack Celebrated multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya's second novel is a no-holds-barred examination of the music industry, social media, and making art in the modern era, shining a light on the promise and peril of being seen. Indie musician Neela Devaki has built a career writing the songs she wants to hear but nobody else is singing. When one of Neela's songs is covered by internet artist RUK-MINI and becomes a viral sensation, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But before long, the systemic pressures that pit women against one another begin to bear down on Neela and RUK-MINI, stirring up self-doubt and jealousy. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, a career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the centre of an internet firestorm.