Riverside Reading Series is proud to be part of this year’s Culture Days programming!
We’re kicking off our new year of literary events with presentations of original writing by Gary Barwin, Gloria Blizzard, Suzanne Craig-Whytock, and Alicia Elliott.
Presenter books will be available for purchase.
Author signings will follow the presentations.
Free public parking is available throughout Downtown Paris.
Accessible venue with public washrooms.
MEET THE WRITERS
GARY BARWIN is a writer, musician and multimedia artist, the author of 31 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long listed for Canada Reads. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario. For more information, visit www.garybarwin.com.
GLORIA BLIZZARD, a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages, is an award-winning writer and poet. Her work has received the Malahat Review Open Season Creative Non Fiction prize, has been nominated for the Queen Mary Wasafiri Life Writing prize, and the Pushcart prize. Additional essays, poetry, reviews and poetry have published in World Literature Today, Wasafiri International Contemporary Writing, the Humber Literary Review, Musicworks, cbc.ca, byblacks.ca, and other publications. Her work was also listed amongst top music writing 2022 by Invisible Press. Gloria holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from the University of King’s College. Her book of essays Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas is published by Dundurn Press. For more information, visit www.gloriablizzard.com.
SUZANNE CRAIG-WHYTOCK is the author of five novels: Smile, The Dome (English version, 2019; international Arabic translation, 2022), The Seventh Devil, The Devil You Know, and Charybdis (just released in March by JC Studio Press), two short story collections: Feasting Upon The Bones and At The End Of It All, and the humorous non-fiction publication What Any Normal Person Would Do. Suzanne is also the editor-in-chief of DarkWinter Literary Magazine, as well as the editor and founder of DarkWinter Press and Baxter House Editions. Suzanne's humour book What Any Normal Person Would Do was recently longlisted for the prestigious Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.
ALICIA ELLIOTT is an award-winning Mohawk writer living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. Her essays have been nominated for numerous National Magazine Awards, winning Gold in 2017. Her short fiction was selected for publication in Best American Short Stories 2018, Best Canadian Stories 2018, and Journey Prize Stories 30. She was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller in 2019, was chosen as a Best Book by the Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire and Chatelaine, and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Her second book, the novel And Then She Fell, was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, won the Amazon First Novel Award, and won the Indigenous Voices Award for Prose in English. It was also named a Globe and Mail and CBC Best Book of the Year.