VMI Reading
VMI will be at AWP, the Association of Writers &Writing Programs Conference,in Seattle.
Join us at our offsite reading!
Friday March 10, 2023 at 7pm-8:30pm at the Vermillion Art Bar at 1508 11th Ave.
Free and open to the public. Masks, please.
Meet our readers:
Ashanti Anderson is a Black Queer Disabled poet, screenwriter, and playwright. Their debut short poetry collection, Black Under, is the winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition at Black Lawrence Press. Their poems have appeared in World Literature Today, POETRY magazine, and elsewhere in print and on the web. Anderson is a 2023 NEA Fellow and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. He is the Senior Staff writer of the Stranger, a lecturer at Cornish College, and has collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on three films, two of which Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and one of which, Zoo, screened at Cannes. Mudede, whose essays regularly appear in e-flux, C-theory, and Tank Magazine, is also the director of Thin Skin (2021).
Danielle Geller is the writer of personal essays and memoir. Her first book, Dog Flowers, was published in 2021. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The New Yorker, and Brevity. She teaches at the University of Victoria and for the low-rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is a citizen of the Navajo Nation.
David Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). Bradford’s acclaimed debut collection, Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), won the A.M. Kein QWF Prize and was a finalist for the Gerard Lampert Memorial Award, the Governor General’s Literary Awards and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His work has also appeared in Brick, The Fiddlehead, fillingStation, The Capilano Review, and elsewhere. House Within a House, Bradford’s translation from the French of Désormais, ma demeure by Nicholas Dawson, will be released on May 1, and his second poetry collection, Bottom Rail on Top, will be published by Brick Books in the fall of 2023
Elee Kraljii Gardiner is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Trauma Head and serpentine loop, and the anthologies Against Death: 35 Essays on Living and V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A frequent collaborator with choreographers, musicians, and visual artists, Elee is currently collaborating with nature via a series of durational installations that investigate the law of thermodynamics and cultural ideas regarding the passing of time. Her recent work appears in Best Canadian Poetry, HOAX, and illiterature. Originally from Boston, Elee lives in Canada where she directs Vancouver Manuscript Intensive, a program pairing authors with mentors. eleekg.com
Erika Thorkelson is a freelance journalist, essayist, culture critic and fiction writer living in Vancouver, Canada. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and is a lecturer in humanities and writing at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She is currently working on a memoir.
Jen Currin is the author of Hider/Seeker: Stories, which won a Canadian Independent Book Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. Jen has also published four poetry collections, including The Sleep of Four Cities, Hagiography, The Inquisition Yours, a LAMBDA finalist and winner of the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and School, a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the ReLit Award. Jen lives on the unceded territories of the Qayqayt, Musqueam and Kwantlen Nations (New Westminster, BC), and teaches writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Susan Olding is the author of Big Reader: Essays, and Pathologies: A Life in Essays, selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared widely in literary journals and magazines throughout Canada and the U.S., including Arc, The Bellingham Review, Grain, Prairie Fire, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, and the Utne Reader, and have won a National Magazine Award, the Edna Staebler Prize for the Personal Essay, and other honours. She lives with her family in the traditional territories of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ nations, in Victoria, British Columbia.
Susan Steudel is a poet and editor living in Vancouver on the unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her poetry book New Theatre was published by Coach House Books in 2012. She is currently completing a manuscript left by her late husband Jeff Steudel who died from cancer in 2021. The work, entitled “Swimming Through Paris,” addresses social themes through its unique interpretation of classic texts.