Exile: Celebrating 50 Years in Publishing

with Barry Callaghan, Michael Callaghan, Darlene Madott, Katie Zdybel and George Elliott Clarke

Hosted by Janet Somerville

Live Online Streaming Fiction Poetry

Admission

Free

Monday

Nov , 2021

7:30pm

Eastern

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Exile: Celebrating 50 Years in Publishing

Barry Callaghan · Photo by Mark Tearle Darlene Madott · Photo by Vincenzo Pietro George Elliott Clarke Katie Zdybel Michael Callaghan · Photo by Eric Fefferman

Callaghan writes with a powerful verve, a seeming abandon and heedlessness which upon closer examination reveals itself to be the result of careful, subtle, and unobtrusive skill and care... [He] doesn't write about characters so much as inhabit them...

Quill & Quire

Join us as we celebrate 50 years of great writing and unique Canadian publishing! Janet Somerville hosts a conversation on Exile Quarterly and Exile Editions with Barry Callaghan and Michael Callaghan.

We also have three authors launching three new books :

Dying Times by Darlene Madott,

Equipoise: Ten Stories by Katie Zdybel

J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence) by George Elliott Clarke

Exile Quarterly was founded in 1972 by one of Canada’s most recognized persons of letters, Barry Callaghan. In 1975, the books publishing house Exile Editions launched. Both have become recognized and respected as truly unique independent presses. The two houses have published some 500 books and over 170 issues of a literary/visual arts magazine that has presented over 2,500 contributions. This body of published works is impressive, the result of a shared editorial vision, one that looks to make it possible for writers, artists, and readers to benefit from a vibrant, accessible, and pluralistic arts environment that enables a culture of discovery and expression through literary and artistic diversity.

Exile Quarterly (published by the charitable organization The Excelsis Group) and Exile Editions continue to evolve in their support of a vital and diverse Canadian arts ecology. Each year’s list of books, and on average 70 contributors annually appearing in the magazine, speak to people across Canada, and to those in countries around the world that enjoy the rich and fulfilling Canadian arts experience.

Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.

The Authors

Barry Callaghan

Barry Callaghan, of Toronto, is the well-known novelist, poet, and person of letters who has been included in every major Canadian anthology, and his fiction and poetry have been translated into seven languages. He has received seven National Magazine awards, and was awarded the inaugural W.O. Mitchell Award. In the United States he has received the White Award, the Lowell Thomas Award, and the Pushcart Prize. Among his 13 books are the fictional works The Black Queen Stories, The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings, A Kiss Is Still a Kiss, Between Trains, and Beside Still Waters. He has two novels forthcoming in 2022, When Things Get Worst (a new edition), and Never’s Just the Echo of Forever.

Darlene Madott

Darlene Madott is the author of seven books, including Stations of the Heart and Making Olives and Other Family Secrets. She has twice won the Bressani Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the $15,000 Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Award three times, among others. Her short fiction has also been widely anthologized. A lawyer who practiced for over three decades, Dying Times, her eighth book, grows out of aspects of her legal background and is a fictional exploration of the last journey. She lives in Toronto. www.DyingTimes.com www.DarleneMadott.com

George Elliott Clarke

George Elliott Clarke was the 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/ Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke is a revered artist in song, drama, fiction, screenplay, essays, and poetry. His publications number titles in Braille, Chinese, Italian, and Romanian.Born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960, Clarke is a matrilineal descendant of African-Americans and Cherokee (peoples transported to Nova Scotia during the War of 1812) and a patrilineal descendant of an African-American great-grandfather and a Jamaican grandfather. He be Afro-Métis. Educated at the University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University, and Queen’s University, Clarke is a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature. The inaugural E. J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. Also he is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His recognitions include the Bellagio Center Fellowship, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), International Fellow Poet—Encyclopedic Poetry School Trophy (China), and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award. In 2021, he was named a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. Clarke’s work is the subject of Africadian Atlantic: Essays on George Elliott Clarke (2012), edited by Joseph Pivato, as well as a substantial entry in Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume 459 (2020), also overseen by Professor Pivato.

Katie Zdybel

Katie Zdybel resides in the Blue Mountains region of Ontario. She is the winner of the 2020 $10,000 Emerging Writer category of Exile's Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Award, and Equipoise is her first collection of stories - alsoshortlisted for the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. She has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from UBC, and is a graduate of the Humber College Creative Writing by Correspondence program.

Michael Callaghan

Michael Callaghan, of Holstein, Ontario, is a publisher, editor, and book designer; a videographer and digital editor producing book trailers, interviews and events; an exhibiting painter/visual artist. With his wife, Gabriela Campos, they run Exile Editions (publishers of fiction, poetry, translations, nonfiction and drama, with some 500 books to date) and he is CEO of the charitable organization, The Excelsis Group, which as part of its educational activities publishes EXILE: The Literary Quarterly (celebrating 50 years in 2022). His bedrock passion in publishing is the seeing through to a book by young/emerging writers so they may find their place among Canadian voices - and in tune with that, giving them a first entrance onto the literary scene via Exile’s annual Carter V. Cooper/Exile Short Fiction competition and Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry competition (which between them have awarded $125,000 to Canadian writers over the past 10 years).