What happens when you have secrets you can’t share with those closest to you, but more importantly, what happens when those people find out? Join authors C.A. Tanaka and Emily Pohl-Weary as they tell us coming of age stories of finding freedom, family, and acceptance.

Location: Sunroom, UBC Robson Square

Type: Young Adult, Ages 12-17, Grades 8-12

Sponsored by Y.P. Heung Foundation

Moderator: Alison Tedford Seaweed

Readers: C.A. Tanaka, Baby Drag Queen (Orca Book Publishers) | Emily Pohl-Weary How to Be Found (Arsenal Pulp Press)

About The Moderator

Alison Tedford is an author and business consultant from Abbotsford, BC. Her career has centered around diversity, equity, inclusion and creating social impact. She’s a member of Kwakiutl First Nation, a mom and woman with a disability. Alison spent over a decade working on Indigenous inclusion issues in the Canadian federal government and has been a full time entrepreneur for six years.

About The Readers

Candie Tanaka is a multiracial trans writer, artist and librarian challenging the binaries continually reconstructed between self and other while exploring archive and memory in a socio-political context. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Their first YA book, Baby Drag Queen was published with Orca Books in April 2023. They’ve also have work in Resonance: Essays on the Craft of Life and Writing with Anvil Press and This Will Only Take A Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction with Guernica Editions.

Emily Pohl-Weary’s latest YA novel is How to Be Found (Arsenal Pulp, 2023). Her audio play, The Witch’s Circle, produced by Odyssey Theatre, can be streamed at theotherpath.ca/listen. Previous books include Not Your Ordinary Wolf Girl (YA), Ghost Sick (poetry), and Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril (Hugo Award-winning biography). emilypohlweary.com