Margaret Christakos is a widely published award-winning poet, fiction author, critic, and creative writing instructor. Her work has won the ReLit Award for Poetry and the Bliss Carman Award, has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award twice, and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She was appointed Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2004–2005, served as Canada Council Writer in Residence at Western University in 2016–2017 and at the University of Alberta in 2017–2018, and as Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto (2018–2019). Her recent publications include Charger, a poetry collection published by Talon Books (2020) and an intergenre memoir, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies, published by Book*hug (2016). In 2017, Wilfrid Laurier University Press published Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos. Her most recent collection is Dear Birch, published by Palimpsest Press in 2021. Margaret Christakos will be appearing virtually at BookFest Windsor in October 2021.Margaret ChristakosMargaret Christakos - Palimpsest Presshttps://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/

All Write in Sin City

Attached to the Earth: A Conversation with Margaret Christakos

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of five books. Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa won the Henry Kriesel Award for Best First Book. Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran won the Wilfred Eggleston Prize for Best Nonfiction at the Alberta Book Awards. Walls: Travels Along the Barricades and Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense were both winners of the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize, with the former winning the 2013 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. (Shaughnessy Cohen, for those who don’t know, was a remarkable Member of Parliament from Windsor.) His magazine writing has appeared in appeared in publications such as The International New York Times, The Walrus, EnRoute, Geist, Canadian Geographic, and Afar. Di Cintio has served as a writer-in-residence at the Calgary Public Library, the University of Calgary, and the Palestine Writing Workshop, and he teaches nonfiction writing at the annual WordsWorth youth writing residency. Marcello DiCintio’s latest book is Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers, published by Biblioasis in 2021. He will be appearing virtually at BookFest Windsor in October 2021.https://www.literaryartswindsor.ca/bookfest/http://biblioasis.com/brand/di-cintio-marcello/

The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers with Marcello Di Cintio

Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University in the School of Creative Industries. She is author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture. She previously held a Banting postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. Her work has appeared in The Conversation, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, Spacing, Herizons Magazine, Halifax Coast, and Rabble.ca. She was born and raised in Toronto, where she currently resides. She has also lived in the United States and in Windsor, Ontario. Her most recent book is Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics Of Loyalty.https://www.drcherylthompson.com/https://chbooks.com/Books/U/Uncle

Uncle: Race and Nostalgia with Cheryl Thompson

Alexa Winik is a Canadian poet and writer from Windsor, Ontario. She was awarded the 2020 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in various journals. She holds an MLitt in Women, Writing, and Gender and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. Winik has also served as poetry editor for the online literary journal The Scores. In 2019, she was the poet-in-residence with the At Sea Residency in Margate, England, as well as a finalist of Mid-American Review&apos;s James Wright Poetry Award.Close River by Alexa Winik was the winner of the Magma Open Pamphlet Competition in 2020 Alexa has recently returned to Windsor from Edinburgh, Scotland.https://www.writerstrust.com/authors/alexa-winik/         https://magmapoetry.com/publications/close-river-by-alexa-winik/

Bronwen Wallace award winner: Alexa Winik

Nick Conrad&apos;s poems first began to appear in national and international literary reviews in the late 70&apos;s. More than 125 poems have since appeared in a variety of journals and review in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland as well as on the web and in various anthologies. He lives in Toledo, Ohio. Nick’s most recent book is Lake Erie Blues, published by Urban Farmhouse Press.https://urbanfarmhousepress.ca/index.php?id_product=25&controller=product

Lake Erie Blues with Nick Conrad

Elisa Sinnett is a writer and teacher and a member of the American Federation of Teachers. She lives in Windsor, Ontario with her family, but her hometown is Detroit, Michigan. She works on her writing with author Ariel Gore and the Literary Kitchen. Sections of her book Detroit Fairy Tales have been published in or recognized by various magazines and journals. Elisa says that she is “an immigrant to the middle class and is dismayed to discover shortly after her arrival that is was being dismantled.”  Detroit Fairy Tales is her first book. www.elisasinnett.com 

Detroit Fairy Tales with Elisa Sinnett

Hammett Award and Nero Prize-winning novelist Stephen Mack Jones is the author of the critically acclaimed thrillers AUGUST SNOW and LIVES LAID AWAY. LIVES LAID AWAY was short-listed for the CWA-UK "Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award." He has also contributed an essay to the non-fiction book WHAT NOW?: Essays On Life After Trump (2021, Wellstone Center of the Redwoods.) His new book, DEAD OF WINTER, was published in May. Stephen Mack Jones is also a published poet, an award-winning playwright, and a recipient of the prestigious Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary fellowship. Once-upon-a-time he worked in advertising and marketing communications for which he is deeply sorry and promises never to do that again. He lives in suburban Detroit and has three adult children that mostly like him.stephenmackjones.com

Dead of Winter: with Stephen Mack Jones

In this episode we are celebrating two of Windsor’s earliest and most influential women writers, both of them women of African heritage who lived in Windsor in the 1850s: Mary Miles Bibb and Mary Ann Shadd Cary. We are joined Teajai Travis, Amina Abdulle, and our own Irene Moore Davis. Teajai Travis is an Afro-Indigenous artist and activist, born and raised in Waawiiyaatanong, the last stop of the Underground Railroad. As an art practitioner, Teajai uses poetry, spoken word and traditional hand drumming to spin a tapestry of narratives to breathe flesh and blood to the long-lost stories of his ancestors. In 2017 he launched his Missing from History: Women of the Underground Railroad project to identify the important role women played in the intricate network of freedom fighters known as the Underground Railroad. He went on to develop these stories through poetry, spoken word, and theatre. More recently, Teajai’s exploration of his family history led to a multi-disciplinary project called Born Enslaved. He is a member of the founding board of The Windsor Youth Centre, the founder of an arts based community outreach initiative called The Bloomfield House, involved in many organizations, and currently the Executive Director at Artcite Inc. This year, in collaboration with Friends of the Court at Mackenzie Hall, Teajai successfully advocated for the renaming of a City of Windsor park in honour of nineteenth century writer, educator, and activist Mary E. Miles Bibb. Irene Moore Davis is a Windsor, Ontario-based educator, writer, historian, and podcaster. In addition to being one of our All Write in Sin City co-hosts, Irene is President of the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, Program Chair at BookFest Windsor, and actively involved with many other community organizations. Irene has published works of poetry, short fiction, history, and journalism. Her forthcoming book is titled Our Own Two Hands: A History of Black Lives in Windsor from the 1700s Forward. She is a graduate of the University of Windsor, Western University, and Queen&apos;s University, and is an administrator at St. Clair College, where she also teaches English, Underground Railroad history, and Black cultural studies.  Amina Abdulle is a poet and a teacher who&apos;s passionate about art and expression. Born in Somalia, Amina has been living in Canada since she was 7 and is proud to call Windsor her home. Amina has been working as a teacher for the last 10 years. She has taught English at the high school level and is now the Department Head of ESL at Kennedy Collegiate. She is also the co-founder Black Staff Equity Alliance as well as a member of various organizations within the city that focus on equity and justice. Amina sits on the board of two organizations and tries to use her time and voice to support her community in whichever ways she can. Amina began writing fiction at a very young age and quickly fell in love with poetry and all forms of artistic expression. A graduate of the University of Windsor&apos;s Creative Writing program, Amina began to focus on writing works of poetry that touch on several issues including her cultural background and issues of identify.

Celebrating Windsor’s Earliest Black Women Writers, Mary Miles Bibb and Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Harvey Ovshinsky is a writer, producer, story consultant, educator, and public speaker. He was only seventeen when he started The Fifth Estate, one of the country’s oldest underground newspapers. Five years later, he become one of the county’s youngest news directors in commercial radio at WABX-FM, Detroit’s notorious progressive rock station. Both jobs placed him directly in the bullseye of the nation’s tumultuous counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. Later, as a documentary director, his work was awarded broadcasting’s highest honors, including a national Emmy, a Peabody, and the American Film Institute’s Robert M. Bennett Award for Excellence. Now he’s sharing the behind-the-scenes stories from his career in Scratching the Surface from Wayne State University Press. The memoir also doubles as a survival guide and an instruction manual that speaks not only to the need for storytelling and the role that endurance and resilience play in the creative process.https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/scratching-surface

Digging Deep with Harvey Ovshinsky

Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy. He is the editor of Sunday with the Tigers: Eleven Ways to Watch a Game and The Myles Horton Reader, and co-editor of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. His academic/creative nonfiction book, The 1976 Project: On Comics and Grief, is forthcoming. He is the editor of The Windsor Review and teaches in the English Department at the University of Windsor. Heidi LM Jacobs’ novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2020. She is a librarian at the University of Windsor andone of the researchers behind the award-winning Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred "Boomer" Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars project. She is currently writing a book about the 1934 Chatham Coloured All-Stars, the first Black team to win the Ontario Baseball Amateur Association Championship. Their new book together is 100 Miles of Baseball: Fifty Games, One Summer. The book was inspired by their realization in 2016 that something was missing in their relationship with baseball. So, they drew a one-hundred mile radius around their home in Windsor, and set a goal of seeing fifty games within that circle. That took them across southwestern Ontario and into Michigan and Ohio, to games at the high school, university and major league levels.100 Miles of Baseball is the story of their sports-driven road trip and their rediscovery of their love of the game. http://biblioasis.com/shop/new-release/100-miles-of-baseball-fifty-games-one-summer/

100 Miles of Baseball with Dale Jacobs and Heidi L.M. Jacobs

Vanessa Shields is a poet, writer and workshop facilitator in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Her first book, Laughing Through A Second Pregnancy – A Memoir, was published by Black Moss Press in 2011 to rave reviews. In April 2013, Shields edited a poetry anthology entitled, Whisky Sour City (Black Moss Press). I Am That Woman (Black Moss Press), her first book of poetry, was published in 2014, Look At Her (Black Moss Press)  in 2016. In 2017, Shields was part of a Group of Seven poets published in an anthology about the history of Windsor, entitled Because We Have All Lived Here (Black Moss Press). In 2018, the chapbook Feminism: Revisit, Revise, Revolutionize: A Two-part Harmony was published by the League of Canadian Poets’ Feminist Caucus with Shields as co-editor/introduction writer. She writes a monthly blog for the League of Canadian Poets on being a writing parent. She is passionate about promoting poetry and the writing life, and is often on a jury for major awards and/or contests.Shields self-published a collection of children’s poetry entitled From A to Ziffery Zanks with Windsor illustrator Glen Hawkes in 2019. A new collection of poetry, thimbles has just been published by Palimpsest Press. https://vanessashields.com/https://palimpsestpress.ca/our-authors/vanessa-shields/

Measuring out in Thimbles with Vanessa Shields

Ellie Csepregi has been a cultural worker since 1972… a nomad who is currently situated in Windsor, Ontario, who graduated from the University of Windsor, and who has taught high school for over twenty years. Her work has been performed by dance and theatre companies in Vancouver and has appeared in several publications including The Windsor Review, Rampike, Ash (Oxford University Press), Spittoon (Beijing), Cranberry Tree Press Anthologies, and Whisky Sour City Anthology (Black Moss Press.) Tiers is her first full book of poems. Visit her website: https://wordpress.com/view/swirl-yonders.ca.

Poetry Is a Piece of Cake, with Ellie Csepregi

Lainey Cameron is a debut author who has achieved great success with her novel, The Exit Strategy. It’s the winner of the 2020 Readers’ Favorite Award for women’s fiction and #1 Amazon Bestseller in Feminist books. The book has also been honored with: •      A Gold Medal in the 2020 Readers Choice Awards (for women&apos;s fiction) •      A Finalist designation in the 2020 Best Book Awards by American Bookfest •      A nomination as a notable indie for 2020 by Shelf Unbound•      And it was longlisted for Chanticleer Somerset Book Awards The story was inspired by Cameron’s decade of being the only woman in the corporate boardroom. It tells the story of a Silicon Valley investor who first meets her husband’s mistress across the negotiating table. Cameron was introduced to us by the folks at The Detroit Writing Room, and she also hosts a podcast, The Best of Women’s Fiction. A digital nomad, she  picks locations around the world to live, write and host podcast for months at a time. Originally from Scotland, she admits to a soft spot for men in kilts and good malt whiskey.  www.laineycameron.com 

The Exit Strategy with Lainey Cameron

Cecily Nicholson is the author of Triage, and From the Poplars, which won the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize. Her most recent book, Wayside Sang, won a Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. She volunteers with community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Her performances, talks and residencies have been hosted by educational spaces such as New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Centre for Indigenous Research Creation at Queen&apos;s University, Woodland Pattern Book Centre, Milwaukee, and the Surrey School District. Cecily is currently the (virtual) Writer-in-Residence for the University of Windsor.  She spoke to us from her home in British Columbia. https://talonbooks.com/authors/cecily-nicholson 

A Poetic Environment with Cecily Nicholson

Jade Wallace’s fiction, poetry, and essays have been published, or are forthcoming, in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Sweden, New Zealand, and India. They are the author of several chapbooks, most recently the collaborative ZZOO (Collusion Books, October 2020) and Test Centre (ZED Press 2019), and the solo Rituals of Parsing (Anstruther Press 2018). Jade’s most recent chapbook is Southern Ontario Gothic Tour in 2020. Their writing has won the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize and the Anita and Alistair MacLeod Prize, and has been nominated for The Journey Prize. A former legal worker, they are currently the Reviews Editor for CAROUSEL, an organizing member of Draft Reading Series, an M.A. student in Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, and one half of the collaborative writing partnership MA|DE. Note: at 40:45, there is a reference in a poem about suicide. Full website references: https://jadewallace.ca/http://carouselmagazine.ca/c42-lgbtqa-gta/http://ma-de.ca/

Writing, Editing, and Collaborating with Jade Wallace

Let's talk about writers and writing, right here in Sin City. Before we were the Motor City, one of the nicknames we were known by was "Sin City." Maybe that's why we've got so many great stories to tell. Our Windsor-Detroit region is full of inspiring poetry, first rate fiction, outstanding non-fiction, amazing writers, and exciting publishers. At All Write in Sin City, we aim to bring them to you. Check out our shows here, or take a listen wherever you listen to podcasts.

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All Write in Sin City

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