Shelagh Rogers, host of "The Next Chapter" on CBC Radio, to emcee

with John Asfour - inaugural writer in residence at Joy Kogawa House, George Stanley, Nilofar Shidmehr and Daphne Marlatt

George Stanley (Vancouver: A Poem), Nilofar Shidmehr (Shirin and Salt Man) and Daphne Marlatt

When: 7:30 p.m., Monday, April 20

Where: Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

Admission by donation. Space is limited. To secure a seat, please RSVP kogawahouse@yahoo.ca  

Three BC Book Prize-nominated poets—George Stanley, Nilofar Shidmehr and Daphne Marlatt—have accepted an invitation from writer-in-residence John Asfour to read at Historic Joy Kogawa House on Monday, April 20, as part of BC Book and Magazine Week. 

Asfour, a Montreal poet, is the first writer-in-residence at Kogawa House and will present poetry readings to a variety of audiences, in collaboration with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Simon Fraser University’s Writers Studio, Christianne’s Lyceum of Literature and Art and the Vancouver Public Library. 

Asfour is the author of four books of poetry in English and two in Arabic. He translated the poetry of Muhammad al-Maghut into English under the title Joy Is Not My Profession (Véhicule Press), and he selected, edited and introduced the landmark anthology When the Words Burn: An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, 1945–1987 (Cormorant Books). 

CBC Radio host Shelagh Rogers will emcee the event, which is a co-presentation of Historic Joy Kogawa House and the West Coast Book Prize Society. George Stanley (Vancouver: A Poem), Nilofar Shidmehr (Shirin and Salt Man) and Daphne Marlatt (The Given) are finalists for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. 

The event takes place the evening before National Al Purdy Day, and the League of Canadian Poets has invited all Canadian poets and lovers of Canadian poetry to host a Purdy party to raise funds for the Al Purdy A-Frame Project—Purdy’s former home on Roblin Lake, Ontario—and to create a poet-in-residence program there that is similar to the writer-in-residence program now under way in the childhood home of the author Joy Kogawa. 

This poetry reading will be held at 7:30 pm at Historic Joy Kogawa House, located at 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver. Entrance by donation. Space is limited. To secure a seat, please RSVP kogawahouse@yahoo.ca 

Writer-in-residence John Asfour welcomes novelist, playwright, and essayist Ann Diamond to read excerpts from My Cold War, stories from 1950s Montreal

Montreal writer John Asfour met the Historic Joy Kogawa House Society at a board meeting March 23.  John (with dark glasses) stands beside life-size photo of Joy Kogawa used in the Royal BC Museum exhibit "Free Spirit." - photo Deb Martin.

Monday, April 6, at 7:30pm, by donation

Historic Joy Kogawa House, 1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver

Ann Diamond's best-known work is a long poem, A Nun's Diary (1989), which was adapted for theatre by Robert Lepage and became the subject of a National Film Board documentary, "Breaking a Leg" directed by Donald Winkler. Her first novel, Mona's Dance, was chosen by CBC as the best small press novel of 1988. In 1994, a story collection, Evil Eye, won the Hugh MacLennan Award for fiction. As an experiment, she self-published her novel Static Control after it had been accepted by DC Books and Les Editeurs XYZ.

Since 2002 when Diamond began work on her memoir, My Cold War, she has reincarnated as a researcher and haunter of libraries, fine-tooth-comber of documents and files, and explorer of a forbidden chapter in recent Canadian history. This ongoing project has been, in many ways, about reclaiming her own history as the daughter of a Canadian Air Force intelligence officer, who came to Quebec from Sea Island, BC, in 1943 to "hunt for Nazi spies." Learning of her father's secret activities led her inevitably into a wide-ranging study of the history of that period, some of which remains classified to this day.

It has also changed Diamond's relationship to the community she came from--Anglo Montreal. It was a mixed blessing to live in a city with a rich cultural tradition and a multi-layered history. By the mid-1980s, when I began publishing fiction and poetry, Montreal had wandered off the literary map of Canada. Diamond waged a personal campaign to change that, writing for the Gazette, Books in Canada, Canadian Forum, CBC, Montreal Mirror, Room of One's Own, Geist, and so on.

Today Diamond continues to study the history of Cold War experiments on children, a secret program that spanned the country. Her birthplace, Montreal, was the epicentre of a project that has altered our future in countless ways which need to be faced. After five years of research and writing, Diamond is pleased to shared those stories with a Vancouver audience at Kogawa house.