Speakeasy Reading Series -- Janurary 15

Welcome to the Speakeasy Reading Series, happening at 7 PM on Janurary 15 at the renowned Glad Day Bookshop! The Speakeasy Reading Series is a monthly event hosted by the Guelph Creative Writing MFA Program, featuring readings from students, alumni, and community readers. All are welcome at this cozy community event!

This month, our readers are:

torri blue
Madeeha Hashmi
Erica Isomura
Jody Chan

*see bios below

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Event details:

• The reading will be online and in-person at Glad Day Bookshop at 7 p.m. We ask our audience to make a suggested donation of $10-20. All proceeds go directly to unfunded readers. If you have difficulty donating, just let us know. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
  
• The reading will not be recorded. Automated closed captioning will be available at Glad Day and online via Zoom. Unfortunately, they are only about 60-80% accurate.
  

• In-person information:

Doors open at 6:30 pm. Masks are mandatory when not reading or drinking. We ask attendees to refrain from using fragrances.

Glad Day Bookshop has a wheelchair-accessible washroom. Beverages (including alcohol) will be available for purchase.

Glad Day Bookshop is located at 499 Church St., Toronto, ON M4Y 2C6, and is just a short walk from Wellesley Station. Street parking is also available.

• Online attendance information:
  
  Zoom link will be emailed to registered attendees 24 hours before the event. Please check your mailbox's junk mail folder if you don't receive it. The waiting room will open 10 minutes before the event starts.
  
  To turn on live captions on Zoom:
  In the meeting controls toolbar, click the Show Captions icon.
  
  To adjust font size of live captions:
  In the meeting controls toolbar, click the up arrow icon next to the Show Captions CC icon. Click Caption settings. Next to Font Size, move the slider to adjust the caption size.

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Speaker Bios:

Torri Blue is an autistic poet, writer, and lyricist, an amateur gardener and budding ecologist, a late bloomer, a queer mother. she writes about the earth, our earth-bodies, mortality and birds and contentment. she has an affinity for multimodal collaboration, and her words have been set for choirs and folk songs and short films. as a poet-scholar, torri’s focus is on the intersection of autistic and poetic embodiment—and the possibilities within autistic poetry to transform our ecological ethic. her peer-reviewed series of essays on Autistic Poetics and Mary Oliver’s poetry was recently published in Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture. she is currently seeking her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. she lives on a farm with her wife, Alex, and her son, Auden.

Madeeha Hashmi is a Pakistani-Canadian writer living in Toronto, her second home after her birth city, Karachi. Her work comes from the neither-ness of her identity – not Pakistani, but longing for Pakistan as home, and in that longing, not Canadian – and aims to traverse the gulf of this contradiction. She is currently a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing candidate at the University of Guelph and is also an employment and human rights lawyer and a portrait photographer.

Erica Isomura is a writer-artist who was born and raised beside the Stó:lō (Fraser River). Her current projects include: writing and illustrating a visual book exploring her family’s history on the north coast of BC, and creating a series of handmade books. Erica’s work appears in Seep | Swell (Burnaby Art Gallery, 2025), The Gate of Memory (Haymarket Books, 2025), The RAVEN Essays (University of Toronto Press, 2025) & elsewhere. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph.

Jody Chan is a poet, care worker, and community organizer based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of two books of poetry, sick (Black Lawrence Press) and impact statement (Brick Books), a member of the Daybreak Poets Collective, and co-host with Sanna Wani of the podcast Poet Talk.

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Speakeasy Reading Series acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts | Conseil des arts du Canada through The League of Canadian Poets.

Follow us on Instagram: @speakeasyreadings

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