McClelland and Stewart and Another Story Bookshop present Poetry Night 2025
featuring Aisha Sasha John, Chris Bailey, Rebecca Salazar, and Tolu Oloruntoba in celebration of their new collections!
Curated by M&S Poetry Editor, Canisia Lubrin, who since 2021 has published groundbreaking collections by the brightest poets in the country.
By popular demand, readings will be livestreamed to an overflow seating room (adjacent to the main room). Reserving a ticket guarantees admission to the event, but seating in the main room is first-come, first-serve. Once the main room fills up we will ask people to watch the livestream. Everyone will be welcome to purchase a book and get it signed.
Please contact us with any access needs.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
AISHA SASHA JOHN is the author of i have to live (2017), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; THOU (2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award; and The Shining Material (2011). She choreographs and performs in the feminist collective WIVES as well as solo performances (The Aisha of Oz, VOLUNTEER). Aisha's video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and installed at Union Station in Toronto (Art Metropole). She was born in Montreal.
CHRIS BAILEY is a graphic designer and commercial fisherman from Prince Edward Island. He holds a MFA Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Chris’ writing has appeared in Grain, Brick, The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories 2021, Best Canadian Stories 2025, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, What Your Hands Have Done, is available from Nightwood Editions. His piece, Fisherman’s Repose, was a winner of the 2022 BMO 1stArt! Award. Forecast: Pretty Bleak is his second poetry collection.
REBECCA SALAZAR (she/they) is a queer, disabled, and racialized Latinx writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. Their first full-length collection sulphurtongue (McClelland & Stewart) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the New Brunswick Book Awards, the Atlantic Book Awards, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. antibody is their second poetry collection.
TOLU OLORUNTOBA was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he studied and practiced medicine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award and Each One a Furnace, a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. He gave the 2022 League of Canadian Poets Anne Szumigalski Lecture, and is a Civitella Ranieri fellow.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
total is the highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Aisha Sasha John.
Confessional, candid, and insightful, Forecast: Pretty Bleak looks at life in rural PEI. These poems explore climate change, work, family, love, and the idea that sometimes all you’ve got is hope for better weather and favourable winds tomorrow.
antibody mobilizes body horror as resistance, refusing to sanitize the atrocities of sexual violence or to silence its survivors. Challenging myths of “perfect” victimhood, this collection honours the messy, rageful, queer, witchy, disabled, and kinky grief work of enduring trauma and learning to want to live.
A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world.
