A Publishing Speakers’ Series Returns for 2023-24

This year’s line-up includes celebrated authors and award-winning editors

After a stellar inaugural series last year, A Publishing Speakers’ Series returns in 2023-24 and features in-depth conversations with notable authors and industry professionals. Curated by the University of Winnipeg English Department’s Lindsay Wong, the series offers the opportunity for students, faculty, and community members to hear from and engage with those involved in all stages from the publishing process, from authors and editors to publicists and publishers.

Series events are free and open to the public, and the first three have just been announced:

A Virtual Reading and Q&A with Award-Winning Author Chelene Knight

Date: Friday, September 29 2023
Time: 2:30-3:30 PM CT
Click here to register

Chelene Knight is the author of Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award, and long-listed for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals, plus the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and the Toronto Star. Her work is anthologized in Making Room, Love Me True, Sustenance, The Summer Book, and Black Writers Matter, winner of the 2020 Saskatchewan Book Award. Her poem, “Welwitschia” won the 2020 CV2 Editor's Choice award. She was shortlisted for PRISM's 2021 short forms contest. Chelene's novel Junie (Book*hug 2022) was longlisted for the Inaugural Carol Shield Prize for fiction and is a finalist for the 2023 Ferro-Grumley Prize for LGBTQ fiction.

Chelene’s latest book of narrative nonfiction Let It Go is forthcoming with HarperCollins Canada in January 2024 and Safe Keeping: A Writer's Guided Journal For Dreaming, Drafting, and Launching Your Book With Love, is forthcoming with House of Anansi, fall 2024.

Knight was the previous managing editor at Room magazine, and the previous festival director for the Growing Room Festival in Vancouver. She has also worked as a professor of poetry at the University of Toronto. Chelene is now founder of her own literary studio, Breathing Space Creative through which she’s launched The Forever Writers Club, a membership for writers focused on creative sustainability, and the Thrive Coaching Program. www.breathingspacecreative.com  

A Virtual Q&A with Award-Winning Editor Shirarose Wilensky (House of Anansi Press)

Date: Friday, October 6
Time: 2:30-3:30 PM CT
Click here to register

Shirarose Wilensky works for House of Anansi Press from her home in Port Moody, BC. She attended Simon Fraser University’s Master of Publishing Program and has worked for Arsenal Pulp Press, Greystone Books, Douglas & McIntyre, and Harbour Publishing. She won the Editors Canada Tom Fairley Award for editing Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi. Other bestselling and acclaimed books she has edited include Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi, A Dream of a Woman by Casey Plett, Rebent Sinner by Ivan Coyote, Shut Up You’re Pretty by Téa Mutonji, and The Woo-Woo by Lindsay Wong. She acquires and edits literary and upmarket commercial fiction and narrative and issues-based non-fiction, with a special interest in BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+, and debut writers.

A Virtual Reading and Q&A with Acclaimed Memoirist Danielle Geller

Date: Friday, October 20
Time: 2:30-3:30 PM CT
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Danielle Geller’s first book, Dog Flowers, was published by One World/Random House in 2021. Her work has appeared in Guernica, the New Yorker, and Brevity. She teaches at the University of Victoria and is a faculty mentor for the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Watch for the announcement of the Winter 2024 events for A Publishing Speakers’ Series later this fall.