with Liisa Kovala, Books & Shenanigans Book Club, Chelsea Wakelyn, Lilian Nattel, Mona Eltahawy, Kai Cheng Thom, Memoir Land, Aisha’s Story, and more
Gatherings
My News
On April 11, 2025 I’ll be chatting with
on her podcast! So looking forward to this conversation!I’m Doing My First Book Club at Books & Shenanigans!
I’ve been invited to the Books & Shenanigans Very Specific Book Club for Canadian and Small Press books hosted by Susan Sanford Blades to discuss my debut story collection, Anecdotes.
Any book club navigation tips welcome!
Speech Dries Here on the Tongue
I’m thrilled to have three poems included in this wonderful and important anthology on environmental collapse and mental health.Speech Dries Here on the Tongue: Poetry on Environmental Collapse and Mental Health Edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqura Revulva, and Amanda Shankland The Porcupine's Quill, 2025
Kirby News
Dale Martin Smith’s book The Size of Paradise published by
’s press knife | fork | book has been longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize!Congrats to Dale and Kirby!
Read Dales notes on his book:
In this episode of NBN host, Hollay Ghadery speaks with the incomparable Toronto poet Kirby in an exclusive sampler of spectacular Kirby poetry.
Interview with CAConrad, Judge of the 2025 Queer Poetry Prize by Marcella Haddad, Palette Poetry
Celebrating Queer Poetry in the New Age of Heterosexual Violence & Absolute Stupidity!
CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital Grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 13 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam.
What I’m Reading
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This Omar El Akkad Penguin Random House, 2025
Reading During a Genocide What Etel Adnan's novel taught me by Isabella Hammad in The Yale Review
Over the course of the past year, my reading habits have narrowed. As Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians in Gaza expanded to Lebanon with the complicity and support of many of the world’s great powers, I found myself passing over books that failed to offer me a route into thinking about the great brutality of the period through which we are living. I returned repeatedly to Ghassan Kanafani and James Baldwin; to Walid Daqqa, Primo Levi, and Natalia Ginzburg; to the poetry and diaries of Palestinians documenting the horrors they are enduring in Gaza, such as those by Atef Abu Saif, Doha Kahlout, Hossam Madhoun, and Mosab Abu Toha; and to accounts of asymmetrical warfare and genocide, such as the essays of Eqbal Ahmad, who participated in the Algerian Revolution, and The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins’s narrative of the 1965–66 U.S.-backed genocide in Indonesia. Something similar happened in my relationships: I have struggled with friends who aren’t looking at the live-streamed mass slaughter and calling it by its name—who won’t, in some sense, meet my eye.
Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes by Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte in McSweeney’s
Early in President Trump’s first term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes, and it felt urgent to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors. This list will be updated monthly between now and the end of Donald Trump’s second term.
On collective resistance by Iris (Yi Youn) Kim from
and in A Time for Giants for 100 Days of Creative Resistance
When the regime and its institutions do not work at the service of the people, when you know that the regime and its institutions consider journalists and media as enemies of the state to be curbed and controlled, when you know that the regime and its institutions use the criminal justice system not to protect you but to protect themselves from accountability and from you, then you throw all those things into a kaleidoscope and you turn it and you begin to see other ways to do, to be, and to survive.
One of the best literary reads—a perfect roast of the scammy Narrative Magazine from
What I’m Listening To
Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses his new book, To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7.
Nick shares how experiences of domestic, political and sexual violence – in both his family history and his own childhood – have shaped his understanding of events since October 7th. He talks about what it means to identify as an anti-Zionist Jew in the current moment, and how we can find new anticolonial ways of seeing that reject the drone’s-eye-view of ‘white sight’. We also discuss the evolving visual politics of Palestine solidarity, from watermelon emojis and AI-generated images, to the torn canvas of a portrait of Arthur Balfour.
What I’m Watching
Sarah Galea Davis’ film The Players, will be kicking off its theatrical run next month at the Revue Cinema in Toronto!
Please join us on April 12 at 7:00 p.m. for the first screening
Aisha’s Story, receives its official world premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs International Documentary Festival on April 26 and 28, alongside powerful films from 47 countries. Co-directed by Elizabeth Vibert and Chen Wang. As noted in Variety: “The Hot Docs ‘World Showcase’ program features Aisha’s Story, in which a Palestinian grain miller in a Jordanian refugee camp safeguards her culture and shares her people’s history through food.
Aisha’s Story was also just announced as the opening film for Vancouver’s Doxa documentary film festival on May 1. Elizabeth Vibert spoke to CBC Radio’s On The Island about the news on March 31.
I love that you’re doing this. Thanks for the shout out!! 💕💕💕
💜✊🏽❤️ thank you for sharing my post