Join us Tuesday, September 26 at 7:00 pm Pacific for Regional Spotlight: Vancouver’s Adrift Collective with host Meaghan Hackinen.
Register here (bcwriters.ca/events-for-writers) and a link will be sent to you. When it's time for the event, click on the link to join the live Zoom event. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Digital Doors Open at 6:55 pm!
Adrienne Drobnies (regional host and reader) is a Vancouver poet and scientist. Her debut poetry collection Salt and Ashes (Signature Editions) won the Fred Kerner Book Award from the Canadian Authors Association and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. One of her poems was selected for BC Poetry in Transit. Her long poem “Randonnées” won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Award and was a finalist for the CBC literary award. She is currently working on an anthology about resisters to the TMX pipeline expansion and her second book of poetry.
Christopher Levenson moved to Vancouver in 2007 after teaching English and Creative Writing at Carleton University, Ottawa. He has published thirteen books of poetry, most recently Small Talk, a collection of very short poems with Silver Bow Press (2022). His next book, Moorings, will appear with Caitlin Press this Fall. Christopher was co-founder and first editor of Arc magazine and helped revive and organize The Dead Poets Reading Series, and reviews poetry for the BC Review.
Ken Klonsky was born and raised in New York, received an undergraduate degree at the University of Vermont and earned an M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1970. Writing credits include Taking Steam, a play written with the late Brian Shein, performed at the Jewish Repertory Theatre of New York and Toronto’s Leah Posluns Theatre in 1983. An anthology of short stories, Songs of Aging Children, was published in 1992 (Arsenal Pulp Press); Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom, the spiritual autobiography of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, was written with Dr. Carter and published by Chicago Review Press in 2011. A novella, Life Without, the story of a wrongly convicted New York taxi driver, was released in April 2012 by Quattro Books. In 2018, Chicago Review Press published Ken’s Freeing David McCallum: The Last Miracle of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter.
In May 2018, Ken was honoured by the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) with the Liberty Award for the Excellence in the Arts.
William Ellis William Ellis received his PhD in English from Boston College. He currently teaches at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of The Theory of the American Romance, an Ideology in American Intellectual History, nominated in 1989 for the John Hope Franklin Prize. He has published fiction and poetry in several journals: Mala Literary Journal, Unshod Quills, Chengdu Grooves, HALiterature, New Millennium Writing, The Good Men Project, OJA&L Art Journal,Sixty Four Best Poets of 2019, and WriteOn.
His poems won first and second prize in the 2014 West End Writers Poetry Contest, first, second, and third prize in the 2015 North Shore Writers Association Poetry Contest, first prize in the 2016, 2017, and 2020 North Shore Writers Association Contests, and three honourable mentions in the 2019 North Shore Writers Association Contest.
Tom Gorman was born in Montreal but brought up in Sunderland in the northeast of England. As a teenager, he worked in a bingo factory and at 20 worked with the homeless in London. Tom returned to Canada in the 1980s. He is a retired psychiatric nurse, working in forensic psychiatry, particularly in the areas of family violence, sexual and violent offenders and psychopathy. Burdett—the main villain of Tom’s book—is based on the author’s 30 years of experience in working with clients diagnosed as psychopaths.
Tom penned four musical comedies for fringe festivals with middling success, but has a lot of fun. He was chairman of a social theatre group, the highlight of which was assisting a group of grade 12 students and (separately) two groups of inmates in a maximum security prison write and perform a series of vignettes addressing family violence. Tom is presently working on three other books based in northern England.
Meaghan Hackinen (FBCW host): is a bike-obsessed bookworm on a lifelong hunt for exceptional cycling routes, both on and off the pavement. Her cross-continental bike race memoir, Shifting Gears, is forthcoming from NeWest Press in October, 2023. She lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Syilx/Okanagan People in Kelowna, BC.
*This event will be recorded.
