Evan J. Book Launch (THIN AIR 2021)
Saturday Oct 16 2021 7:00 pm - Grant Park in the Atrium, Streaming on YouTube, Winnipeg
Join us as we celebrate the launch of Evan J's debut poetry collection Ripping down half the trees (McGill-Queen's University Press). This event features a reading and a conversation hosted by Teresa Horosko. Presented as part of THIN AIR 2021: The Winnipeg International Writers Festival.
The launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. The video will be available for viewing thereafter. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.
Some poems can live without souls / but mine remain ghastly fools flicking / uncomfortable narratives like / cigarette butts during class change.
One out of every twenty students in the adult education classes Evan J teaches in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, dies every year; the surviving students are often afflicted by severe racism, poverty, addictions, and violence. Ripping down half the trees engages with these struggles, offering a catalogue of experiences specific to the remote regions of Canada.
These poems also let stand the shelterwood, the upstanding actions of individuals, the totems of hope. They work as coping strategies, as therapy, as empathy, offering a glimpse of optimism and a space for discourse. These are poems that listen.
Evan J (he/him) is from Manitoba and now lives and writes in the town of Sioux Lookout, Ontario.
Teresa Horosko is an emerging writer and zine maker, living and working in Treaty One Territory. A recent graduate of the University of Winnipeg's Honours English program, she works for several arts non-profits in music, literature, and film doing programming, event management or operations management. Currently, she is part of the THIN AIR programming team. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Prairie Fire, and she has just published a limited-run zine called Letters to John Goodman: An Exploration in Anticipatory Grief.
Host Ian Brown is an award-winning writer with the Globe and Mail. He has been the host of CBC Radio’s “Sunday Morning” and is the author several bestselling books, including The Boy in the Moon (winner of the Charles Taylor Prize; the BC National Award and the Trillium Book Prize, and Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year (shortlisted for the Taylor Prize and the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize). He lives in Toronto.
Laura Forsythe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba and a tenure track faculty member in the Faculty of Education at the University of Winnipeg. Her research Ka-akimaahk lii Michif: Including Métis in Post-Secondary Education focuses on Metis Women's Roles in Educational Sovereignty as Knowledge Producers in the Academy. Forsythe’s research contributions include numerous edited collections, peer-reviewed publications, academic conference paper presentations, and one of the creators of a Michif Language program at the University of Manitoba.
Host Robert Enright is a Winnipeg-based art critic and teacher. He is the senior contributing editor to Border Crossings magazine and the Research Professor in Art Theory and Criticism in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.
Jenn Sharp is a storyteller, food activist, author and filmmaker based in Saskatoon. Her first book, 
Host Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and the author of 
Host Dr. Jarvis Brownlie is a settler Canadian who teaches history at the University of Manitoba. His research focuses on settler colonialism in Canada, Crown-First Nation relations, treaties, and oral history. He has published widely on issues such as the Indian agent system, Indigenous rights and treaties, and racial discourses in Canada. He is currently involved in community-based, collaborative research with Cree communities in northern Manitoba on the impacts of hydro dams since the 1960s.
Peter St. John (pronounced Sin-jun) is a partner in Heartland Associates and a retired – though still avidly teaching – professor of International Relations and Senior Scholar at the University of Manitoba.
Jordy Douglas is a former professional hockey player from Winnipeg who played 268 games in the National Hockey League and 51 games in the World Hockey Association. He played for the Hartford Whalers, Minnesota North Stars, and Winnipeg Jets.
