º£½ÇÉçÇø

Theme / thème: Polyphony / La polyphonie

The theme for the 2024-25 Reading and Conversation Series was “Polyphony” / « La polyphonie », a term borrowed from music denoting the intermingling of melodies and voices, which connotes both the confluence of languages and linguistic traditions and the multiplicity of voices and forms that animate literary production in Canada. The events brought audiences and artists into new connections over languages and artistic forms both familiar and unfamiliar.

Podcast Episode: Odile Cisneros, Klara du Plessis, Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi & Erín Moure

This final instalment in the CLC’s 2024-25 "Polyphonies" Series, and Episode 15 of the CLC's podcast, highlights polyglot, multi- and translingual poetry and poetics in Canada. Poets, translators, and scholars Klara du Plessis, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, Erín Moure, and Odile Cisneros contemplated the effects and objectives of languages intersecting in poetry, through translations of and readings in Afrikaans, Czech, English, French, Persian, and Portuguese. These multilingual writers discussed working across or beyond languages, ruminating on poetic experimentation, on the value of sound, and on multiplicity in comprehension and meaning. Their reflections invite us to find difference and continuity, resonance and tension, power and affect, fluctuating borders and communal spaces, in and across the languages in which we live and write.

Episode Released: August 2025

Author biographies from the event promotions:

Odile Cisneros is a poetry scholar and translator with interests in Latin American avant-gardes, contemporary Brazilian poetry, concrete poetry, ecopoetics, and literary translation. She coedited Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos and has translated the work of Jaroslav Seifert, Régis Bonvicino, and Sérgio Medeiros, among others. Her translations were included in the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. She created and manages the website . Her translation of Haroldo de Campos’s galáxias was published in 2024 by Ugly Duckling Presse. She teaches in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the º£½ÇÉçÇø, and in 2020 she was visiting professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil.

Klara du Plessis is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, literary curator, and poet, known for her contributions to long-form and translingual poetics. Her most recent publications include Post-Mortem of the Event (Palimpsest Press, 2024), a poetic work that mobilizes audiovisual media, transcription, waveform visualization, and digital humanities methods, and I’mpossible collab (Gaspereau Press, 2023), a collection of literary essays on contemporary Canadian poetry. Her first South African and bilingual poetry collection, Ek’t Act (Karavan Press), is forthcoming in September 2025. Klara’s writing has won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2022 Critic’s Desk Award, and has been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Poetry Prize and the Raymond Souster Award, among others. Although primarily a writer, her work often overlaps with visual, sonic, performative, and collaborative terrains, exhibiting, installing and performing at spaces such as Artexte, Centre Clark, and OBORO. Klara is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan) and divides her time between Montreal, Kelowna, and Cape Town.

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (They/Them) is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer and Translator. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize, 2022’s Arc Poem of the Year award, The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season awards for poetry and The Fiddlehead’s 2024 Ralph Gustavson Award. They are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize and the author of four poetry chapbooks and three translated poetry chapbooks. They have released two full-length collections of poetry with Gordon Hill Press. Their full-length collaborative poetry manuscript G is out with Palimpsest press Fall 2023, and their full-length collection of experimental dream-poems Daffod*ls is out with Pamenar Press. Their Translation of Ghazal Mosadeq’s Andarzname is forthcoming with Ugly Duckling Presse Fall 2025. Their fifth poetry manuscript, Book of Interruptions, is forthcoming with Wolsak and Wynn Fall 2025.

Poet, translator and essayist Erín Moure has published more than fifty books since 1979, including 18 collections of poetry in English and Galician/English; a collaboration with Oana Avasilichioaei in English, Galician and Romanian; as well as over twenty books of translation from several languages ​​into English of poets such as Nicole Brossard, Chantal Neveu, and Fernando Pessoa. Since 2018, she has also been translating into French, including Chair de Léviathan by Chus Pato (Éditions Apic, Algiers, 2024) and Huit pistes by Oana Avasilichioaei (Noroît, Montréal, 2024). Her works have earned her several literary awards, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry (1988) and for Translation (2021), as well as two honorary doctorates (Vigo, Galicia, Spain and Brandon, Canada). She has been International Translator in Residence at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and has been a Creative Fellow at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University. Her own most recent book is Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (Anansi, 2023). She lives in Montréal.

Podcast Episode: Jami Reimer & shalan joudry

Episode 14 of the CLC's podcast features interdisciplinary composer Jami Reimer, who talked about her bioacoustic opera based on the metamorphic life of a frog, and Mi’kmaw storyteller shalan joudry, whose multilingual experimental work reflects on “grief, truth-seeking, and communal healing.” Sharing recordings of their fabulous work, Reimer and joudry discussed the power of collective attention and voice; the stickiness and softness of communication; and how we can attune ourselves to languages other than our own, including the beautiful choruses of frogs.

Episode Released: March 2025

Author biographies from the event promotions:

Jami Reimer (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba. From choral music to field recording practices, Jami explores voice—human and otherwise. In 2023, Jami was awarded the Robert Fleming Prize for composition from the Canada Council of the Arts for her ongoing arts-based research about bioacoustics and amphibian chorusing. Jami’s original work has been performed at Indie Fest (re:naissance Opera), rEvolver Festival (Upintheair Theatre), Biosonic Festival (Active/Passive Performance Society), Sweet November Dance Company (The American School in Switzerland), and Sound Palace (Hard Rubber Orchestra). Her field-recording based compositions have appeared in releases by Unit/Pitt Society for Art and Critical Awareness and in multimedia publications Listening as Shared and Social Practice (University of Regina) and Animated Worlds: Language and Multispecies Kinship (University of Chicago). Jami holds a Bachelor of Music from Canadian Mennonite University, a Bachelor of Education from the University of Manitoba, and a Masters of Fine Arts from the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Jami currently resides on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations known as Vancouver.  

shalan joudry is an award-winning multi-disciplinary storyteller. She is an oral storyteller, theatre and film director, drummer/singer, poet, podcaster, and ecologist. Using her theatrical background, shalan brings eco-cultural stories to a new generation of listeners, as well as recounting personally crafted narratives that follow diverse storying methodologies. Her 13-language poem Kmitkinu became an installation for Nocturne (Halifax) playing in the Halifax Public Gardens, in an audio podcast, and was used as the basis for a dance performance workshopped at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax in 2024. It will be published soon in a limited run by Running the Goat Books and Broadsides. In 2022 her play KOQM won the 2023 Merritt Theatre Award for Outstanding New Play. Keeping cultural stories in the forefront, shalan recently created and directed a new dance theatre, Winter Moons, which premiered at Neptune Theatre in November 2024. shalan lives with her family in their community of L’sitkuk (Bear River First Nation) where she is reclaiming her L’nu language.

Lillian Allen

In collaboration with Dr. Michael A. Bucknor, Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies and Decolonial Practice, the CLC hosted Juno award-winning dub poet and spoken word performer Lillian Allen, the Poet Laureate of Toronto (2023- ), for a visit to the º£½ÇÉçÇø. Lillian performed some of her work and spoke with Michael about it (which you can read more about below). 

Event Details

Date and Time: Thursday, January 30, 2025, from 12:30-1:45 PM
Format and Location: In-person at Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17)

Author biography from the event promotions:

Jamaican Canadian Lillian Allen is an internationally renowned poet, professor, journalist and artistic creator. She has served as Board Member and Advisor to several arts-based agencies (Toronto Council for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, National Film Board of Canada, UNESCO etc). Allen is the author of eight books of poetry and ten recording albums. She has also worked in radio and television. She was the host of a CBC programme on "Poetry and the Spoken Word” and co-produced and hosted WordBeat, a 13-part series for CBC Radio One (2003-05). Her poem “Unnatural Causes” was made into a film by the National Film Board of Canada (1989) and she also co-produced and co-directed Blakk Wi Blakk (1994), a film focused on the dub poet Mutabaruka. She has received numerous awards for both her published volumes and sound recordings. These awards include two Juno Awards from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for her albums Revolutionary Tea Party and Conditions Critical (1986 and 1988). She is widely regarded as the godmother of Canadian dub, rap and hip hop.

With origins in 1970s Jamaica, dub poetry is a type of performance poetry that is rooted in oral and music traditions from the Caribbean. Dub poets often talk about political and social change through their poetry. Lillian Allen is a well-known dub poet who, through poetry, challenges systemic social issues and political ideologies. Allen has talked about activism and feminism in her poetry. 

Allen’s seminal work in the dub poetry and the spoken word genres has made her a legend in the creative circles. She employs what M. Norbese Philip calls a “demotic tongue” that has distinguished her work as recognizing the politics of language use, and has ensured the wider circulation of her Jamaican mother tongue in Canada. The recent release of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (2021) and appointment as Poet Laureate of Toronto reinforce her enduring significance. For more information, visit .

Mercedes Eng

Poet Mercedes Eng read from from her most recent book, Cop City Swagger (Talonbooks, 2024), and talked about this work in conversation with 2024-25 Writer-in-Residence Ryan Fitzpatrick and EFS Associate Professor Jordan Abel. Cop City Swagger offers a poetic critique of police violence in Vancouver and elsewhere, asking how conceptions of safety and care run through the rhetoric and actions of policing. Cop City Swagger extends a socially-invested poetics that is grounded in the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown communities of Vancouver and that balances social investigation and political advocacy. Eng discussed Cop City Swagger in the context of her ongoing work, her mixed-register approach to poetic form, and the ethics of writing about real people and communities.

Event Details

Date and Time: Tuesday, January 14, 2025, from 2:00-3:00 PM
Format and Location: In-person at Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17)

Author biography from the event promotions:

Mercedes Eng is a prairie-born poet of Chinese and settler descent living in Vancouver on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ. She is the author of my yt mama, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (winner of the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize) and Mercenary English. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, The Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review, The Abolitionist, and r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Survaillance, and M’aidez (Press Release). Mercedes was recently the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence and a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University. She is an assistant professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she organizes the On Edge reading series.

Book Launch Event: Dorothy Thunder, Marilyn Dumont, Jaspreet Singh & Erina Harris

To celebrate recent publications by members of the º£½ÇÉçÇø community, the CLC hosted an afternoon of readings. First, Dorothy Thunder and Marilyn Dumont read from and discussed their respective books This Land Is a Lullaby / cistomâwasowin ôma askiy and South Side of a Kinless River. After a coffee break and an opportunity to purchase books from for the audience, Jaspreet Singh, with Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock, and Erina Harris, with Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead, read from and talked about their new poetry collections.

Event Details

Date and Time: Thursday, November 28, 2024, from 2:00-4:30 PM
Format and Location: In-person at Henderson Hall (Rutherford Library South 1-17) 

Portrait Photo Credit for Marilyn Dumont: Nadya Kwandibens 
Portrait Photo Credit for Erina Harris: Evan Will

Author biographies from the event promotions:

Dorothy Thunder is a first-language speaker of nehiyawewin/Plains Cree from Little Pine First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, and is a Professor of Cree at the º£½ÇÉçÇø. Recognizing that her command of the language is uncommon among members of her generation, she shares it at every opportunity: in classrooms, on-line teaching, and at land-based camps. Dorothy serves as a major contributor to contemporary Cree language reclamation and revitalization. Her personal experiences and land-based language camps have given her unique insights into the role of language in relationship to the land. As a nehiyaw iskwew (Plains Cree woman), she holds strong her relationship to kikâwînaw askiy (mother earth) and the gifts that the land has to offer and the importance of looking after the land (wâhkohtowin) and her strong connection to nehiyaw kehte-ayak (Elders).

Marilyn Dumont teaches for the faculties of Arts and Native Studies at the º£½ÇÉçÇø and is proud of Métis family lines from her mother’s--Vaness/Dufresne--families and her father’s--Boudreau/Dumont--families. Her four collections of poetry have won provincial or national awards: A Really Good Brown Girl (1996); green girl dreams Mountains (2001); that tongued belonging (2007); and The Pemmican Eaters (2015). A fifth collection surrounding Indigenous history of Edmonton, called South Side of a Kinless River, was published by Brick Books in 2024.

Jaspreet Singh is the author of acclaimed poetry collections, non-fiction, novels, short stories, and a memoir. His books include the novels Chef and Helium, the story collection Seventeen Tomatoes, the poetry collection November, and the award-winning memoir My Mother, My Translator. More and more his work engages with deep time and the ecological crisis. His newest book, Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock, was published in Canada in November 2024 by NeWest Press. Jaspreet was the Writer-in-Residence at the º£½ÇÉçÇø for 2016-17.

Erina Harris is a Canadian writer, educator and mentor. Her first book, The Stag Head Spoke (Buckrider Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Poetry. A graduate and Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has been published widely and in translation. She is the recipient of the Editor’s Choice Award (ARC Magazine), This Magazine Great Literary Hunt Prize, and short-listings/nominations for the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award, the Air Canada Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the National Magazine Awards. She has received numerous grants, international residencies, and was honored to receive a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award in 2024. For over a decade she curated the yearly Blue Betty's Bistro International Women's Day Reading Salon, a fundraising event for local women's shelters featuring innovative women writers. Erina teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the º£½ÇÉçÇø.