Listening to The World / Storying A Place

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Friday, February 11th, 2022
10:00 AM to 11:30 PM

Join us for compelling live performances by two of VIU's Creative Writing & Journalism faculty. Poet and singer-songwriter Sonnet L'Abbé will talk about their impulse to decolonial balladeering and perform some of their new songs, while writer, playwright, and journalist (and Malaspina University-Collage alum) Craig Taylor will read selections from his work.

Sonnet L’Abbé is a professor in English and Creative Writing & Journalism (of which they are also Chair) at VIU and a poetry editor at Brick Books. Their third published collection of poetry, Sonnet’s Shakespeare (2019) is a political engagement with the literary canon that takes aim at Shakespeare to express disaffection for Britain's colonial legacy in Canada.They are currently exploring songwriting and performance as a form of community storytelling and activist poetics on Snuneymuxw territory.

Also on the Creative Writing & Journalism faculty, Craig Taylor is the author of the best-selling Londoners, as well as Return to Akenfield and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, which began as a column in the Guardian Weekend magazine. His most recent book, New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time, was longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Prize. Craig’s journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Globe & Mail, Vancouver Sun, Granta, and McSweeney’s, while his plays have been professionally performed throughout the UK and internationally.