All Write in Sin City

On March 19, 2022, a virtual launch was held for a wonderful project called the Community Anthology, published by A Beautiful Place Publishing House, a part of Gertrude’s Writing Room owned by our friend Vanessa Shields.   With poetry from 65 contributors from three continents, eight countries, four Canadian provinces, and four American states, the Community Anthology is a great celebration of wha...

Christopher Lawrence Menard is a writer of stage, screen, fiction & poetry, actor, producer, director, and singer. He was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario where his love and work with local arts and artists led him to his career as the City of Windsor’s Cultural Development Coordinator where he works to support the efforts of the arts, culture, and heritage communities in Windsor. He is a p...

Featured Guest: Rochelle Riley About our guest:   Rochelle Riley ended a nearly 20-year career as an award-winning Detroit columnist in 2019 to become the City of Detroit’s Director of Arts and Culture. She now guides the city’s investment in the creative economy and creates opportunities for transformative innovation. She offers commentary on MSNBC and NPR and contributes to Essence and Ebony mag...

Emma Odrach is an author and literary translator from Toronto, who now calls Windsor home. Alaska or Bust and Other Stories was published by Crimson Cloak Publishing in Missouri in 2017. Her translation of novel Wave of Terror , written by her late father, Theodore Odrach and dealing with the Stalinist occupation during WW2, was published by Chicago Review Press in 2008. She won an honorable menti...

Featured Guests - The Hosts!  Kim Conklin, Irene Moore Davis, Sarah Jarvis On today’s episode of All Write in Sin City, we thought we’d mark and celebrate our 100 episodes so far. We’re going to look back on a few episodes that stood out for each of us in different ways. We loved all of our guests, and all of our episodes – but well, you’ll see how we’ve selected them.    We’ll share some lovely f...

Featured Guests: Elaine Weeks and Chris Edwards  About our guests:  Elaine has a B.A. in English from the University of Windsor plus two years of  postgraduate studies in Visual Arts. She’s a community leader with over 30 years experience in advertising, public relations, event planning, publishing, writing, editing, photography, conservation and heritage preservation. She’s written a novel called...

  The Occasion: In October 2021, something wonderful and astonishing happened: three authors published by small but mighty Windsor-based Palimpsest Press were nominated for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Awards: Sadiqa de Meijer for non-fiction, G.A. Grisenthwaite for fiction, and Tolu Oloruntoba for poetry. In November, Sadiqa de Meijer and Tolu Oloruntoba were indeed announced as two of th...

Robert Earl Stewart’s first collection of poetry, Something Burned Along the Southern Border (Mansfield Press), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His poems have been published in journals in Canada, the U.S., and Great Britain. In 2010, he received the Windsor Endowment for the Arts’ grant for Emerging Artist in Literary Arts. His poetry has appeared in magazines, journals and...

A native of Detroit, Jim Daniels is the author of numerous collections of poetry and short stories. He’s also written four produced screenplays, collaborated with photographer Charlee Brodsky on gallery shows and publication projects including the book street, which won the Tillie Olsen Prize, and he has edited or co-edited six anthologies. He currently lives in Pittsburgh and is the Thomas S. Bak...

A retired history teacher and veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, William Toffan lives in Windsor, Ontario, with his wife, Laura, and children Lauren, Heidi, Oksana, and Heather. Published by Biblioasis in the fall of 2020, his first book is Watching the Devil Dance: How a Spree Killer Slipped through the Cracks of the Criminal Justice System. http://biblioasis.com/brand/toffan-will/

Erin Bartels is the award-winning author of We Hope for Better Things, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, 2020 WFWA Star Award–winner, and a 2019 Christy Award finalist. Other books include The Words between Us, a 2020 Christy Award finalist and 2015 WFWA Rising Star Award–winner, and All That We Carried, released in January 2021. Her short story “This Elegant Ruin” was a finalist in The Saturday Eveni...

Margaret Christakos is a widely published award-winning poet, fiction author, critic, and creative writing instructor. Her work has won the ReLit Award for Poetry and the Bliss Carman Award, has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award twice, and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She was appointed Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2004–2005, served as Ca...

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of five books. Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa won the Henry Kriesel Award for Best First Book. Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran won the Wilfred Eggleston Prize for Best Nonfiction at the Alberta Book Awards. Walls: Travels Along the Barricades and Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense were both winners of the W. O. Mitc...

Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University in the School of Creative Industries. She is author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture . She previously held a Banting postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in The Conversation , Toronto Star , Montreal Gazette , Spacing , Herizons Magazine , Halifax Coast ,...

Alexa Winik is a Canadian poet and writer from Windsor, Ontario. She was awarded the 2020 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in various journals. She holds an MLitt in Women, Writing, and Gender and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. Winik has also served as poetry editor for the...

Nick Conrad's poems first began to appear in national and international literary reviews in the late 70's. More than 125 poems have since appeared in a variety of journals and review in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland as well as on the web and in various anthologies. He lives in Toledo, Ohio. Nick’s most recent book is Lake Erie Blues, published by Urban Farmhouse Press. https://urbanfarmhous...

Elisa Sinnett is a writer and teacher and a member of the American Federation of Teachers. She lives in Windsor, Ontario with her family, but her hometown is Detroit, Michigan. She works on her writing with author Ariel Gore and the Literary Kitchen. Sections of her book Detroit Fairy Tales have been published in or recognized by various magazines and journals. Elisa says that she is “an immigrant...

Hammett Award and Nero Prize-winning novelist Stephen Mack Jones is the author of the critically acclaimed thrillers AUGUST SNOW and LIVES LAID AWAY. LIVES LAID AWAY was short-listed for the CWA-UK "Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award." He has also contributed an essay to the non-fiction book WHAT NOW?: Essays On Life After Trump (2021, Wellstone Center of the Redwoods.) His new book, DEAD OF...

In this episode we are celebrating two of Windsor’s earliest and most influential women writers, both of them women of African heritage who lived in Windsor in the 1850s: Mary Miles Bibb and Mary Ann Shadd Cary. We are joined Teajai Travis, Amina Abdulle, and our own Irene Moore Davis.   Teajai Travis is an Afro-Indigenous artist and activist, born and raised in Waawiiyaatanong, the last stop of t...

Harvey Ovshinsky is a writer, producer, story consultant, educator, and public speaker. He was only seventeen when he started The Fifth Estate , one of the country’s oldest underground newspapers. Five years later, he become one of the county’s youngest news directors in commercial radio at WABX-FM, Detroit’s notorious progressive rock station. Both jobs placed him directly in the bullseye of the...

Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy . He is the editor of Sunday with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game and The Myles Horton Reader, and co-editor of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies . His academic/creative nonfiction book, The 1976 Project: On Comics and Grief, is forthcoming. He is the editor of The W...

Vanessa Shields is a poet, writer and workshop facilitator in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Her first book, Laughing Through A Second Pregnancy – A Memoir , was published by Black Moss Press in 2011 to rave reviews. In April 2013, Shields edited a poetry anthology entitled, Whisky Sour City (Black Moss Press). I Am That Woman (Black Moss Press), her first book of poetry, was published in 2014, Look At...

Ellie Csepregi has been a cultural worker since 1972… a nomad who is currently situated in Windsor, Ontario, who graduated from the University of Windsor, and who has taught high school for over twenty years. Her work has been performed by dance and theatre companies in Vancouver and has appeared in several publications including The Windsor Review, Rampike, Ash (Oxford University Press), Spittoon...

Lainey Cameron is a debut author who has achieved great success with her novel, The Exit Strategy . It’s the winner of the 2020 Readers’ Favorite Award for women’s fiction and #1 Amazon Bestseller in Feminist books. The book has also been honored with:  •      A Gold Medal in the 2020 Readers Choice Awards (for women's fiction)  •      A Finalist designation in the 2020 Best Book Awards by Am...

Cecily Nicholson is the author of Triage , and From the Poplars , which won the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize. Her most recent book, Wayside Sang , won a Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. She volunteers with community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Her performances, talks and residencies have been hosted by educational spaces such as New York University’s Tisch School of...