All Write in Sin City

Dr. Karl Jirgens was born and raised in Toronto, and attended University of Toronto for his BA, Ontario College of Art for his BFA, and York University for his MA and PhD. He is a specialist in literary theory, contemporary literature with a focus on Canadian literature, and creative writing and publishing. He currently lectures at the University of Windsor. He is the author of several works on li...

Veronique Perrier Mandal has had a long and celebrated career, having won many awards for her work in both radio and print journalism, including Ontario Journalist of the Year, Windsor Woman of the Year, and the Queen’s Jubilee Medal. She currently coordinates and teaches full-time in the Journalism and Media Convergence programs at St. Clair College in Windsor, and she is the host of the show Scr...

Today’s podcast features a live reading from the Explorers Room in the Detroit Public Library main branch. It’s an edition of Poets and Pies, a reading series sponsored by the Detroit Writers Guild and other literary organizations. It features:  A rare treat for fans of rock legend Frank Zappa, a Detroit reading from Los Angeles Poet, Memoirist and Musician Rubén Guevara Detroit Essayist Lori Tuck...

On today’s podcast, we’ll visit the By the River reading series hosted by Urban Farmhouse press. This event took place at historic Mackenzie Hall here in Windsor, and it features readings by three poets: Samantha Badaoa , Windsor' Youth Poet Laureate. Listeners have heard an interview with Samantha on an earlier episode Sandra Ridley, an award-winning writer of four books of poetry: Fallout ,...

Melanie Janisse Barlow is a poet and a visual artist. Her first collection of poetry, Orioles in the Oranges (Guernica, 2009), was listed for the Relit Award, and her essay poems Detroit were listed in Best American Essays (2013). She has published in a variety of anthologies and journals in Canada and the US, and her painting practice includes The Poets Series, a popular portraiture series of con...

On this week’s podcast, we have a group of selected poetry readings from the annual Black History Month celebrations from 2019 and 2020. The 2019 readings were recorded before our All Write in Sin City podcast was launched last May.    Our Windsor-Detroit region is rich with history, including the history of previously enslaved peoples of African descent. Today, it’s also a multicultural area, hom...

This podcast features poet Daniel Lockhart , fresh from his tour of multiple Canadian cities. Lockhart holds degrees from Trent University, Montana State University, and Indiana University, and is the author of four poetry collections, The Gravel Lot That Was Montana , This City at the Crossroads , Big Medicine Comes to Erie , and most recently, Devil in the Woods. He has also written a collection...

Before they become history, historical events are often family stories. Today we have a live recording of the Windsor book launch for To the River: The Remarkable Journey of Caroline Quarlls . It’s about one of the most famous escape stories in Underground Railroad history, and co-author Kimberly Simmons is a direct descendant of the book’s heroine. The event was held at The Historic Sandwich Firs...

On today’s podcast, we feature poetry and the blues on a live recording from Third Man Records in Detroit. It’s more from the fourth All Access Café, and this program brings you two amazing performances that mix the blues with poetry. The All Access Café is a unique spoken word event with a special focus, serving differently-abled artists and audiences. First, we’ll hear from Robert Bradley , a De...

Today’s podcast is a live recording of an event at Third Man Records in Detroit last November. It’s selected performances from the fourth All Access Café, and this program brings you transformative music and poetry performances. The All Access Café is a unique spoken word event with a special focus, serving differently-abled artists and audiences. On this episode you'll hear from: Detroit mus...

Today’s podcast features a live recording of an event last fall with Benedek Totth, author of Dead Heat . It’s a book that has received a lot of positive reviews by major publications, but fair warning to the faint of heart: It’s a book for fans of dark, graphic literature.  Totth studied American literature and now works as an editor and translator in Budapest. His translations into Hungarian inc...

This live recording took place at the St. Clair Centre for the Arts in Windsor, Ontario on October 20, 2019. Part of the BookFest / Festival du livre Windsor celebrations, the annual Books and Brunch was given over to publisher Marty Gervais, who with wife Donna, started Black Moss Press 50 years ago. Peter Hrastovec is the emcee who introduces Marty, there's a special reading by Elise Gervai...

Marty Gervais is an award-winning journalist, photographer, poet, playwright, historian, editor and teacher. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Windsor, Ontario, and now Poet Laureate Emeritus. His awards include the Toronto’s Harbourfront Festival Prize, the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award, the City of Windsor Mayor’s Award for literature, and nearly twenty awards for journalism. Marty is al...

Lindsay Wong is the bestselling, award-winning author of The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug-Raids, Demons, And My Crazy Chinese Family . Her debut memoir won the 2019 Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize, and it was a finalist for the Writers Trust’s 2018 Hilary Weston Prize, the 2019 edition of Canada Reads, and long listed for the 2019 Stephen Leacock Medal in Humour. It was also named a Best...

Part of a series that was recorded at BookFest Windsor/Festivale du livre 2019, this podcast features four poets in conversation about Respect , a new anthology of poems inspired by the incredible richness of Detroit music. The book was published in late 2019 by Michigan State University Press.  Two of the poets in this interview were also editors of the book, Jim Daniels and M.L. Liebler . They a...

This podcast is one of a series recorded at BookFest Windsor 2019. In this episode, we talk with Mark Bourrie, an award-winning writer and a respected military historian with a PhD in history. A National Magazine Award-winning journalist, he has been a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery since 1994. Bourrie lectures on propaganda and censorship at the Department of National Defence...

On the podcast this week, recorded at BookFest Windsor 2019, we’ll hear from two fiction writers, Blair Hurley and Nadja Lubiw-Howard. Blair Hurley received her A.B. from Princeton University and her M.F.A. from NYU. Her stories are published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, The Georgia Review, West Branch, Mid-American Review, Washington Square, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Descant, Fugue , and elsewher...

This week’s podcast was recorded at BookFest Windsor 2019. Today, we’ll talk with Ben O’Neil and Jessica Bromley Bartram.  Illustrator, artist, and screenwriter Ben O’Neil is currently based in Toronto, but was born and raised in London. He counts Matt Groening (The Simpsons) and Greg Capullo (Spawn) among his influences. It wasn’t until Ben attended OCAD for Curatorial Practice and Art Criticism...

This podcast was recorded live at Biblioasis bookshop in Windsor in October 2019. You’ll hear Biblioasis publicist Theo Hummer introducing each author. The first reader is  Stan Rogal, reading from Investigation into the Death of Roberto Bolaño , and then you’ll hear author Michael Januska reading from Prospect Avenue. After the readings, there’s an insightful Q&A moderated by Theo. Stan Rogal...

Born and raised in Windsor, Michael Januska has worked with books his whole life, both as a bookseller and for several publishing companies. He is the author of the Border City Blues mystery series set in the Prohibition Era of Windsor/Essex. There are three books in the series beginning with Riverside Drive. Stories from Januska’s Prohibition-era Border City Blues novels have won two consecutive...

"To chance the ducks" is a nineteenth-century idiom that means to do something regardless of the risks or potential for disaster. Windsor's Biblioasis press has grown  from a 1-person operation into "the first truly great new Canadian press of the 21st century" according to The Globe and Mail . In this podcast, you'll hear highlights of the celebratory evening if 15 y...

Born in Chatham, Ontario, Daniel Wells attended the University of Windsor as a history and philosophy major. He opened a second-hand bookshop, Biblioasis, on Ouellette Avenue in Windsor in 1998.  Dan and his wife Alexis helped to found BookFest Windsor in 2002, where he was inspired to think about publishing a book by another author. The Biblioasis bookshop was moved to Wyandotte Street in the tre...

Patrick Brode was born in Windsor, Ontario. He was called to the Ontario Bar in 1977 and has practiced law ever since, most recently as Senior Legal Counsel for the City of Windsor. As a well-respected historian, he has written six books, including Sir John Beverley Robinson: Bone and Sinew of the Compact , which was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award, and The Odyssey of John Anderson ,...

Windsor, Ontario is one of several Canadian cities that boasts a Poet Laureate program. In this podcast, we talk with the two current Poets Laureate of Windsor, Poet Laureate Mary Ann Mulhern and Youth Poet Laureate Samantha Badaoa. Mary Ann Mulhern, Poet Laureate of Windsor, was a well-respected teacher before she embarked on a second career as a poet. Mulhern’s first book of narrative poetry, Th...

New this year, the All Access Café is a unique series of readings and performances that features differently-abled artists and is ASL-accessible through Deaf Can, Inc. It's sponsored by the Detroit Writer's Guild, the Knight Foundation, Poets & Writers, the Detroit Public Library, Wayne State University and Third Man Records.  In this episode, you'll hear performances from sever...