Tartan Turban Secret Readings #41
You are invited to the 41st session of The Tartan Turban Secret Readings, curated by Dannabang Kuwabong and featuring Linzey Corridon, Elizabeth Allua Vaah, Michael Fraser and Pamela Mordecai. This is an online reading. Our featured writers will be performing virtually. Registered attendees will be able to join via the link shown here. https://meet.google.com/uvi-nkeu-jit
Tonight's downloadable program: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IxN95J1bAcMhFcnpw54GLGTk-VL_P9Jw/view?usp=sharing
Curator
Ghanaian-Canadian poet Dannabang Kuwabong is a professor of English and teaches Caribbean, African, and African Diaspora Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico. His published books include Naa Kɔnga and Other Dagaaba Folktales; Visions of Venom (Poetry); Echoes from Dusty Rivers (Poetry); Caribbean Blues & Love’s Genealogy (Poetry); Voices from Kibuli Country (Poetry); and Sargasso Sea Scrolls (Poetry). His poetry has also appeared in several literary and creative magazines such as The Caribbean Writer, Eleven Eleven, The Prairie Schooner, Interviewing the Caribbean, Creative Contradictions, The Mouth, Contemporary Ghanaian Poetry, etc. He has numerous academic articles and chapters published in peer-reviewed academic journals and books. He co-authored Myth Performance in African Diaspora Drama: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance.
Featured writers
Pamela Mordecai is a Jamaican-Canadian writer whose most recent books of poetry are de book of Joseph (Mawenzi House, 2022), which is one of two books by Jamaican-Canadian poets that were finalists for the OCM BOCAS Award in 2022, and A Fierce Green Place: New and Collected Poems (New Directions, 2022). She has published nine collections of poetry, five books for children, a short story collection (Pink Icing), a novel (Red Jacket) that was shortlisted for the Writer's Trust Fiction Award in 2015. A veteran anthologist with a PhD in English, her collections, edited singly or with collaborators, focus on the writing of Caribbean and Caribbean/Canadian women. Her poetry is archived at https://mordecai.citl.mun.ca She lives in Toronto.
Elizabeth Allua Vaah, author of Maame, grew up in Bakanta, Western Ghana and moved to Canada in 2010. Allua calls herself a Maternal Health Migrant. She is co-founder of a Maternal Health advocacy group, an advocate of girl-child education and a strong environmentalist. She lives in Brampton with her family.
Michael Fraser is published in various national and international journals and anthologies. His manuscript, The Serenity of Stone, won the 2007 Canadian Aid Literary Award Contest and was published by Bookland Press in 2008. He is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, the 2018 Gwendolyn Macewen Poetry Competition, and the League of Canadian Poets’ 2022 Lesley Strutt Poetry Prize. His latest collection, With My Eyes Wide Open, is published by Exile Editions.
Linzey S. Corridon is a Vanier Canada Scholar, educator, and writer. Born and raised in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, he now resides in Canada. As Mawenzi House says, West of West Indian constructs the Queer Caribbean experience as a simultaneously individual and collective one, embracing the language that continues to unsettle queer life. The collection is, at once, a summons and a love letter to familiar figures like the Bullerman, the Chichiman, the Funny man, and the Anty man. The poetry collects a distinctly queer Vincentian Canadian account of love and autonomy, and while it represents a written journey that demarcates queer pain, it is also an exhibition of pleasure flowing from the bodies and minds of the collection’s many subjects.
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About The Tartan Turban Secret Readings
In pre-COVID times, Barrett and Welsh hosted a (not so) “secret" reading series on its rather lovely open-air office rooftop deck or in its large open-concept studio space in Toronto. COVID transformed our readings into a more accessible online/virtual reading format that accepts writers from across the country and can be attended from anywhere in the world.
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings feature poetry, drama and prose readings and celebrate Canadian multicultural writing created by multicultural, minority and IBPoC writers. The idea is to provide a platform for IBPOC writers with few such platforms. At the same time, all writers who want to celebrate Canada’s multiculturalism, literary diversity and Indigenous heritage and have talent to share are welcomed.
Curators change from reading to reading. If you would like to curate an evening, contact Gavin Barrett who is the series curator.
The sessions are photographed, filmed and streamed on FB/YouTube live and recordings will eventually be posted on YouTube and the series website. Please be aware that by attending this event, you agree to be photographed and/or filmed and give permission to use your likeness in promotional and/or marketing materials.
If you are in the audience and do not want to be seen or heard in the recording, keep your microphone and camera turned off.
About Barrett and Welsh
Barrett and Welsh is a minority-led, creativity-powered, change-making ad agency that puts ideas first to make ideas last. A certified B Corporation, it has specialty practices in inclusion communications (mainly multicultural/visible minority and persons with disabilities) and sustainable urban development (mostly transit and economic development).
About the series co-curators
Gavin Barrett is the series curator of the Tartan Turban Secret Readings, which he co-founded with the late Mayank Bhatt in 2017.
Mayank Bhatt's novel Belief was published in 2016 by Mawenzi House. The novel explores youth radicalization and alienation, and the impact of terrorism on a family in the context of the failure of immigration and settlement framework in Canada. Mayank Bhatt immigrated to Toronto in 2008 from Mumbai (Bombay), where he worked as a journalist. His short stories have been published in TOK 5: Writing the New Toronto and Canadian Voices II. In Canada, he has worked as a security guard, as the Chief Administrative Officer of the Indo Canada Chamber of Commerce and as an organizer for the Festive of South Asian Literature and Art. He lived in Toronto with his family and passed away after a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer, in the summer of 2022.
Gavin Barrett is a poet and creative entrepreneur, and the author of Understan, a collection of poems published by Mawenzi House in June 2020 that is a CBC Books recommendation. He was born in Bombay and lived in Hong Kong for several years before immigrating to Canada. Gavin’s poetry has been published in Reasons for Belonging (Viking Penguin India), an anthology of 14 Indian poets; The Joao Roque Literary Journal; the Pen India journal; The Folio; The Independent (Bombay); The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad; and Poiesis, the Bombay Poetry Circle journal. He was a contributing writer to This|ability, a book on Canada’s art brut and outsider artists with disabilities. He is the host and the founder and series co-curator (with Mayank Bhatt) of the Tartan Turban Secret Readings, a series promoting IBPoC writers. He is co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of idea consultancy and brand advertising agency Barrett and Welsh. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Authors Association (Toronto), PEN Canada and The League of Canadian Poets. You can read more about Gavin in the organizer note below.