Authors for Indies

McNally Robinson Booksellers present

Authors for Indies Group Reading

When: Saturday, April 30, 2:00-3:30 pm
Where: McNally Robinson Booksellers (1120 Grant Avenue, Winnipeg)
Cost: FREE

Authors for Indies is a day when authors show their appreciation for Canadian independent bookstores. We’re thrilled to be participating once again - this year with a special twist.

Rather than have booksellers wander through our shelves to recommend books we will have them on stage reading selections from some of their long time favourites.

Participating authors include Erna Buffie, Méira Cook, Anita Daher, Jeffrey John Eyamie, Ariel Gordon, Maurice Mierau, David Bergen, Roewan Crowe,and Joan Thomas.

Over the past 25 years, Erna Buffie has written, directed and produced numerous award-winning documentary films, and has interviewed some of the world’s most interesting scientists and thinkers, including David Suzuki, Gloria Steinam and Jane Goodall. In 2011, she wrote and directed the multiple-award winning film The Changing Sea, and in 2013 she won a Canadian Screen Award for her film Smarty Plants. Erna lived in Montreal and in a seaside home just outside of Halifax before returning to the prairies and the city where she was born and raised. She now divides her time between Winnipeg and a small cottage on Long Pine Lake in the Whiteshell, which she shares with her husband and their little grey mutt. Her first book, Let Us Be True, was published in 2015 via Coteau Books.

Méira Cook was born in Johannesburg and worked as a journalist in South Africa. Since coming to Canada, she has published widely as a poet and fiction writer. She has won the CBC Literary Award for poetry, the Walrus Prize for poetry, and the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award.

Since 2002 Anita Daher has published more than a dozen books for children, adolescents and teens in Canada, the United States and Europe. When not word wrangling she enjoys inhabiting characters on stage and screen. Anita is also a member of the Crosseyed Rascals clean improvised comedy troupe.

Jeffrey John Eyamie is a Winnipeg screenwriter and novelist who worked in the writers’ room of Less Than Kind (HBO Canada). His comedy pilot Split Level was accepted by the National Screen Institute's Totally Television program. Jeff spent his formative years catching gophers in Virden, Manitoba. He is the author of No Escape from Greatness (Turnstone Press).

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways, won the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Maurice Mierau is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Autobiographical Fictions. His memoir Detachment won the 2016 Kobzar Literary Award and the 2015 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. In 2009 he won the ReLit Award for poetry. He lives in Winnipeg.

Artist and writer Roewan Crowe experiments with queer feminist reclamation practices often entering into fatal wounded landscapes—sometimes violent and xenophobic —to explore possibilities for regeneration. She’s been touring Lifting Stone, an ecosexual performance/installation that creates intimate stone encounters and is the author of Quivering Land (ARP), a gritty meditation on the possibilities of art to reckon with the ongoing legacies of violence and colonization. Crowe’s paid gig: Associate Professor in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

After writing two novels set in the past, Joan Thomas chose Winnipeg for the setting of her first contemporary novel. The Opening Sky won McNally Robinson's Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award. Joan was honoured in 2015 with the Writers Trust Engel/Findley Award in recognition of her body of work.

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I'm going to be recommending—and reading from—Anne Szumigalski's A Peeled Wand.