CanLit Author Spotlights

Issue 251 Author Spotlight – Adam Dickinson

August 30, 2023

Adam Dickinson is the author of four books of poetry. His latest book, Anatomic (with Coach House Books), involves the results of chemical and microbial testing on his body. His work has been nominated for awards including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. He teaches at Brock University.

Forum: Writing with/against/as Extraction in So-Called Canada: Poets on Poetics

Canadian Literature special issue #251 on poetics and extraction is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 251 Author Spotlight – Rūta Šlapkauskaitė

August 16, 2023

Rūta Šlapkauskaitė is an Associate Professor of English literature at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her research interests include Canadian and Australian literature, neo-Victorianism, and environmental humanities. Among her recent publications are “An Ecology of the Hewn in Susan Vreeland’s The Forest Lover” in the collective monograph The Northern Forests co-published by the University of Tartu and Montreal’s Imaginaire Nord; “The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies; and “Precariousness, kinship and care: Becoming human in Clare Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal” in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Article: Pro Pelle Cutem: On the Subject(s) of Extraction in Fred Stenson’s The Trade

Abstract
This paper examines the poetic means Fred Stenson employs in his novel The Trade to dramatize the environmental and affective legacies of the fur trade in Canadian history. Taking its cue from the HBC’s motto and Hortense Spillers’ and Kathryn Yusoff’s thinking about race and flesh, the article considers how the novel expands our reading of the ethics of extraction, organized through the division between living and non-living matter, by correlating its use of the tropes of the skin, bones, and rum to the semiotics of the Windigo figure, which mediates settler colonialism’s extraction of subjectivity through the racial division between humans and nonhumans across the imperial body politic. In thus reappraising the HBC’s interventions into Indigenous ecologies, The Trade highlights the material and visceral impact of the extractive economy while also troubling our ethical readings of Indigenous trauma and resilience.

Canadian Literature special issue #251 on poetics and extraction is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 251 Author Spotlight – Louis M. Maraj

August 2, 2023

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Louis M. Maraj thinks, creates, and converses with theoretical black studies, rhetoric, digital media, and critical pedagogies. His projects specifically address anti/racism, anti/blackness, and expressive form. Maraj’s Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics received the 2022 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and NCA’s Critical and Cultural Studies Division 2022 Outstanding Book Award. His essays appear in several journals and edited collections, including most recently in Women’s Studies in Communication, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and A Socially Just Classroom. He is an assistant professor in University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, Writing & Media.

Article: “Quite here you reach”: T(h)inking Language, Place, Extraction with Dionne Brand’s Land to Light on

Abstract
Performatively exhibiting its argument for “t(h)inking”—para- the usual verb “think,” a process that meditates on, critiques, and undoes extractive Euro-Western logics by which stitched meaning becomes undone, unfurled to fray—this study communes with Dionne Brand’s Land to Light on. It t(h)inks with apposite “tinker,” fiddling to no particular end, with specific regard to themes of language, place, and extraction in Dionne Brand’s collection of poems. Intertwined with deeply personal vignettes on its author’s first return to Trinidad after moving to so-called Canada, this unconventional prose/poem/essay avers that we might understand what has been noted as “ambiguity” by literary scholars in readings of Land as instead representative of para/ontological notions of Blackness: movings across, along, outside, adjacent to ontological nothingness and paraontological fugitivity for Black meaning-making energy in the Western world.

Canadian Literature special issue #251 on poetics and extraction is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 251 Spotlight — Melanie Dennis Unrau

July 19, 2023

Melanie Dennis Unrau is a settler of mixed European ancestry living on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg. Melanie is a Research Affiliate and Visiting Fellow at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Goose (above/ground, 2023) and the poetry collection Happiness Threads (Muses’ Company, 2013), a co-editor of Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat (Palgrave, 2014), and a former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine. Her forthcoming book The Rough Poets: Petropoetics and the Tradition of Canadian Oil-Worker Poetry is on contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Article: Editorial: Poetics and Extraction

Canadian Literature special issue #251 on poetics and extraction is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 250 Author Spotlight – Kyle Gervais

July 5, 2023

Kyle Gervais is a Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he lives with his husband and two cats. His academic work focuses on Classical Latin poetry and its reception from late antiquity to the modern day. He has original poems and translations published in Arion, Literary Imagination, PRISM international, and elsewhere.

Read his poem on our website: Said the Vines

Canadian Literature issue 250 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 250 Author Spotlight – Nina Berkhout

June 21, 2023

Nina Berkhout is the author of three novels, most recently Why Birds Sing (ECW Press), which appeared in France this year and which was named a “must read” by The Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen, a Best Book of the Year (Canada) by Amazon’s Audible audiobooks, and a Great Group Reads by the Women’s National Book Association (USA). The book has been optioned by Mountain Goat Film. Her young adult novel The Mosaic was nominated for the White Pine Award and the Ottawa Book Awards and named an Indigo Best Teen Book, and her novel The Gallery of Lost Species was named an Indigo and Kobo Best Book and a Harper’s Bazaar Hottest Breakout Novel. Berkhout is also the author of five poetry collections, including Elseworlds, which won the Archibald Lampman Award. Her poetry is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2024. Originally from Calgary, she lives in Ottawa.

Read her poem on our website: A Study in Coats

Canadian Literature issue 250 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 250 Author Spotlight – Robert Hilles

June 7, 2023

Robert Hilles lives in Nanaimo, BC and won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Cantos from A Small Room. His first novel, Raising of Voices, won the George Bugnet Award. He has published eighteen books of poetry, four works of fiction, and two nonfiction books. His latest poetry collection is From God’s Angle (published in 2021) and his latest novel is Don’t Hang Your Soul on That (also published in 2021). A book of flash fiction called Pink Puppet is forthcoming. He is currently working on a new novel and a book of poems.

Read his poem on our website: Dark Sublime

Canadian Literature issue 250 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 250 Author Spotlight – Rocco de Giacomo

May 24, 2023

Rocco de Giacomo is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in literary journals in Canada, Australia, England, Hong Kong and the US. He is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks. His fourth full-length collection, Casting Out, is being launched in April, 2023, by Guernica Editions. Rocco lives in Toronto with his wife, Lisa Keophila, a fabric artist, and his daughters, Ava and Matilda.

Read his poem on our website: HUMANS RUN OUTSIDE TO WATCH THE SNOW

Canadian Literature issue 250 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 250 Author Spotlight – Julie Rak

May 10, 2023

Julie Rak holds the Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her latest book is False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Nonfiction (2021). She has written extensively on nonfiction, including Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013) and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004). Her latest edited collection is the Identities volume of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory (2022), and with Sonia Boon, Candida Rifkind, and Laurie McNeill the forthcoming textbook The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada (2022).

Article: Margaret Atwood and Sexual Assault

Abstract
Margaret Atwood is routinely described as a feminist writer, whose novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a feminist dystopian classic. Her sequel, The Testaments, appeared in 2019 to a rapturous reception as another feminist text. But from the fall of 2016 until 2018, Atwood was at the centre of a controversy in Canada that presented a much more complex picture of her as a feminist, particularly with regards to her view of sexual assault. This essay examines Atwood’s interviews, social media posts, essays and fiction to examine what her understanding and portrayal of sexual assault involves, and what kind of feminist she might be. The goal is to see whether or not representations of sexual assault in Atwood’s fiction can be understood as feminist in their portrayals of consent, of testimony and even how sexual assault itself is defined.

Canadian Literature issue 250 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 250 Author Spotlight – Michael V. Smith

April 26, 2023

In addition to being a professor at UBC Okanagan campus, Michael V. Smith is also a writer, filmmaker, and old-school comedy queen. His first feature film, The Floating Man, is making the rounds at international film festivals. Sourcing work from his archive, The Floating Man unpacks how art has been a gateway for Michael to exhibit a more robust gender practice.

Read his poem on our website: Footage

Canadian Literature issue 250 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.