You are invited to the 4th session of The Tartan Turban Secret Summer Readings curated by Sang Kim, at Barrett and Welsh on September 21st, 2017. If you are on Facebook you can follow along via the FB event page which will continue to be updated with details.

Curator and Featured Writer: Sang Kim
Sang Kim is a chef, food literacy activist, and writer. He is LCBO and CNE's Celebrity Chef; USDA/Taste U.S. Chef. Appears as a regular chef on CTV's popular daytime talk show, The Social. For his activist work with children in high-risk and vulnerable communities, Sang has been awarded the York West Centennial Citation Award; the North York Civic Award; Lifetime Achievement Award at the 5th Annual Food Idol Awards. His third book, WOODY ALLEN ATE MY KIMCHI, a food memoir, will be released in Spring 2018 (Exile Editions). He is the recipient of the CVC/Gloria Vanderbilt Prize for Fiction; winner, Grain Magazine's Short Story contest; finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize. He is currently completing a collection of short stories, EATING DOGS.

https://library.ryerson.ca/asianheritage/authors/sang-kim/

Featured Writer: Marianne Apostolides
Marianne Apostolides is the author of six books, including Deep Salt Water, Swim, Sophrosyne, Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth About The Writing Life, The Lucky Child, Inner Hunger. Three have been translated. Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth About The Writing Life was listed among the ‘Top 100 Books of 2012’ by Toronto’s Globe & Mail. She is a recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship, and winner of the 2017 K.M. Hunter Award for Literature. Her latest book, Deep Salt Water, is surrealistic memoir about loss, abortion, and the oceans. http://marianne-apostolides.com

Featured Writer: Shannon Bramer
Shannon Bramer is a poet and playwright. Her first book of poems, suitcases and other poems won the Hamilton and Region Arts Council Book Award. Her second book was scarf, which was soon followed up with The Refrigerator Memory, by Coach House Press. Her play, The Hungriest Woman in the World is currently under production by Pencil Kit Productions. Her first collection of poems in over ten years, Precious Energy, was just published this month by BookThug. An illustrated children’s book is forthcoming with Groundwood Books in 2019.
http://poetintheplayground.blogspot.ca

Featured Writer: Karen Connelly
Karen Connelly is the author of eleven books of award-winning poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, the most recent of which is a novel, The Change Room, published by Penguin-Random House. Her books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction have won major Canadian or international awards, have been translated into thirteen languages, and published in seventeen countries. Her books explore exile, dissident politics, transgenerational violence, trauma, and sexuality. She has three new books in the works, her collected poetry, her collected essays, and a new novel. Since her early twenties, Karen has lectured widely about her work as a writer, activist, and woman. She is a long-time writing advisor at the Humber School for Writers as well as a lecturer in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Guelph. She was a fellow in the University of Iowa’s 2012 International Writing Program in Israel, Palestine, and Morocco. She speaks fluent Greek, French, Spanish, Thai, and basic Burmese. Her most recent nonfiction essays engage the complicated territories of sex work and Indigenous-settler relations, holding space/silence/words for missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women in Canada. Her most recent collection of poetry Come Cold River is a memoir about her troubled family, as well as a moving homage to many invisible citizens: the poor, the homeless, the addicted. She is the author of the acclaimed novel The Lizard Cage, a novel that was compared in the New York Times Book Review to the works of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, and was also the winner of Britain’s Orange Broadband New Writers Prize; Touch the Dragon, winner of the Governor General’s Award, Burmese Lessons, a love story, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the BC National Award for Nonfiction. She won the Pat Lowther Award Poetry Award for her first book. Karen is also a long-time supporter of PEN Canada and Amnesty International. She has been active in various campaigns on behalf of writers in prison or living under persecution, most recently the Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho. Though recent travels have taken her to Myanmar, Estonia, Greece, and Iraqi Kurdistan, she makes her home in Toronto with her family.
http://karenconnelly.ca

Featured Writer: Puneet Dutt

Puneet Dutt holds a MA in English from Ryerson University. She is the author of the chapbook, PTSD south beach, which was a finalist for the 2016 Breitling Chapbook Prize. Her poetry has been published in a number of journals and in Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. She is an editorial board member at Canthius and a creative writing workshop facilitator with the Toronto Writers Collective. Her debut collection of poetry is forthcoming with Mansfield Press in Fall 2017. She lives in Toronto with her husband.

https://puneetdutt.com

Featured Writer: Jessica Hiemstra

Jessica Hiemstra is a writer, painter, designer. She lives on the second story of a little beige house in Toronto. She is trying to figure out how to get all the neighborhood cats to stop sleeping on her lounge chair. She’s losing the battle. She’s lived in beige houses all over the world – from Botswana to Sierra Leone to Australia to Toronto. She believes art gives us the courage to live. And she’s noticed this is true from the porches of all her beige house. She’s widely published in Canadian literary journals and honoured to have won some prizes for her writing: Nomination for her essay How to Bury a Yellow toque (National Magazine Award). Winner of the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Non-Fiction. Finalist for the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry. Winston Collins/Descant Prize for Best Canadian Poem. First Prize in Rooms annual poetry contest. First Prize in Poetry for Vancouver’s International Writer’s and Reader’s Festival. Jessica enjoys collaboration – she’s edited a collection of literary essays (with Lisa DeMoor) called How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting (Touchwood Editions) ¬¬about the most heart-breaking of losses, children. She also edited (with Gillian Sze) a collection of poems by Canadain poets and artists called Translating Horses (Baseline Press), in which she had the unmitigated gall of asking people across Canada to rewrite/translate one of her poems. Her third full-length collection of poems was published this year – The Holy Nothing (Pedlar Press). Jessica is always surprised that’s she’s writing, but it’s as close as she can get to asking the questions she wants to. Or at least finding the words to start asking the questions she wants to.
http://www.jessicahiemstra.ca

Anyone attending is welcome to read or perform (if you are musician) in our 3 open mic sessions. If you are a writer or musician who would like to perform in the open mic session, please contact Sang Kim who is curating this session, or Gavin or Mayank. The ambience is intimate and extremely informal.

For those wishing to attend, please note that our space can safely accommodate no more than 30 people, with seating provided for 25. Please bring your own folding chair.

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About The Tartan Turban Secret Summer Readings:
Barrett and Welsh hosts a (not so) secret reading series on its rather lovely open air office rooftop deck.

The Tartan Turban Secret Summer Readings features poetry, drama and prose readings that celebrate Canadian multicultural writing created by multicultural, minority and BIPOC writers. The idea is to provide a platform for minority writers who have very few such platforms while welcoming all writers who want to celebrate Canada’s multiculturalism, diversity and indigenous heritage, and have talent to share.

If you would like to read or curate, contact Gavin Barrett or Mayank Bhatt.

Readings ideally take place every 3rd Thursday or Friday in the month, but this varies depending on what is convenient for featured readers and curators. Ideally, the series will carry on for as long as the seasons allow such an outdoor gathering. (We may move it indoors in the cold weather, if there is an appetite.)

Please feel free to bring any of your friends of every minority whether "visible" or otherwise - non-minorities are warmly welcomed too.

Feel free to suggest others you think might be ideal as curators, or participants or as happy listeners.

The sessions will eventually be filmed and possibly streamed on FB/YouTube live.

(if we can arrange for a production partner to organise this.)

The readings may be collected for a book for publication at the end of the year, so ideally everyone will be reading unpublished work.