Playwright Yolanda Bonnell, graphic fiction author Sami Alwani, and poet Carellin Brooks read from their acclaimed books, each of which takes “directness of expression” to new levels.
Location: Room C485, UBC Robson Square
HYBRID EVENT (Yolanda and Sami are joining virtually)
Hybrid events are held in person, you will also be able to watch it live streamed from our Youtube channel.
Presented by: Word Vancouver
Type: 2SLGBTQIA+ Programming
Moderator: C.E. Gatchalian
Readers: Yolanda Bonnell, Bug (Scirocco Drama, 2020), Sami Alwani, The Pleasure of the Text (2021), Carellin Brooks, Learned (Book*hug Press)
About The Moderator
Born and raised on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Waututh peoples (“Vancouver”), currently dividing his time between “Vancouver” and Tkaronto (“Toronto”), C.E. Gatchalian is a Filipinx queer neurodivergent author, editor and playwright. The author of six books and co-editor of two anthologies, he was the 2013 recipient of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize and a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist. His memoir, Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty and the Making of a Brown Queer Man, was published in 2019 by Arsenal Pulp Press. He is a recipient of the one-time only British Columbia Lieutenant Governor’s Arts & Music Awards for his contributions to the arts in BC.
About The Readers
Yolanda Bonnell (They/She) is a Bi/Queer 2 Spirit Anishinaabe-Ojibwe, South Asian mixed performer, playwright and multidisciplinary creator/educator. Originally from Fort William First Nation, Ontario her arts practice is now based in Tkarón:to. In February 2020, Yolanda’s four-time Dora nominated solo show bug was remounted at Theatre Passe Muraille while the published book (Scirocco Publishing 2020) was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award. In 2022, her play White Girls in Moccasins, was produced at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre as well as at the frank theatre on Coast Salish Territory. Yolanda was the first Indigenous artist recipient of the Jayu Arts for Human Rights Award for her work and won the PGC Tom Hendry Drama Award for her play, My Sister’s Rage which was produced by Tarragon Theatre in 2022. Yolanda has taught/facilitated at schools like York University and Sheridan College and proudly bases her practice in land-based creation, drawing on energy and inspiration from the earth and her ancestors.
Sami Alwani is a cartoonist and illustrator based in Toronto. His comics have appeared in Best American Comics, Vice, NOW Magazine, Carte Blache, Broken Pencil and the Fantagraphics anthology Now. He has been nominated for an Ignatz Award and the Cartoonist’s Studio Prize. He received a Doug Wright Award in 2018 for his story The Dead Father and again in 2022 for his first book, The Pleasure of the Text, published May 2021 with Conundrum Press.
Carellin Brooks has written five books in different genres and edited two collections. Her first, Bad Jobs: My Last Shift at Albert Wong’s Pagoda and Other Ugly Tales of the Workplace (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998), was inspired by personal experience. After unsuccessfully attempting to earn a degree from Oxford University in 1995, she made a not-so-triumphant return to hometown Vancouver. The best job on offer? Night shift at a chat line, the wee hours spent policing the free, female side of the line for the underage and imposters. Her second collection, Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions (Arsenal, 2000), co-edited with Brett Josef Grubisic, advanced the thesis that Canadians are sexy. Results were mixed. Every Inch a Woman (UBC Press, 2006), an academic monograph about the phallic woman in twentieth-century texts, stems directly from her ultimately successful (2010!) PhD thesis. Wreck Beach, a social geography of the most beautiful nude beach in the world (New Star, 2007) was a naked bid for out-of-office “research.” Fresh Hell (Demeter, 2013), an anti-baby book about mother’s first year, was written to keep maternal insanity at bay. These results were also mixed. One Hundred Days of Rain (Book*hug, 2015), won both the ReLit Award for best small-press book of the year in Canada and the Edmund White Award for Debut LGBT Fiction from Pink Triangle Press in the United States. In French, as Cent Jours de Pluie, it was published in Quebec and Europe by Les Allusifs in 2016. Learned, Brooks’ first book of poetry, chronicles the first-person narrator's time at Oxford University and in the underground lesbian sadomasochistic scene in London. Vancouver-born, Brooks has lived in Salt Lake City, Ottawa, Montréal, Oxford, London, San Diego, and Japan. She has presented in Seattle and Toronto and at UNBC, York University, and the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. She is a lecturer in academic writing and communications at the University of British Columbia.
