Central Library (John Dutton Theatre)

616 MacLeod Trail SE

Calgary

April 24, 2008, Thursday 8:00 PM

Tickets: CA $10.00

For Tickets and more information Contact Caroline Szpak via E-mail: caro@ciswf.com

OH CANADA! MARTINI MADNESS

This is a high-performance evening celebrating some of Canada's strongest storytelling voices. David Bateman and Hiromi Goto present The Cowboy & the Geisha, a collaborative performance integrating elements of drama, semi-autobiographical storytelling, and fictional narrative created for the symposium Performing Identity - Crossing Borders, organized by the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada (CiCAC).

Featured Artists: David Bateman (Toronto) / Ivan E. Coyote (Vancouver/Ottawa) / Hiromi Goto (Vancouver) / Karen Hines (Toronto) / Jordan Scott (Toronto)

David Bateman (Toronto)

David Bateman is a spoken word artist who performs his work across the country. His two collections of poetry (Invisible Foreground, 2004; Impersonating Flowers, 2006) are published by Frontenac House Press, Calgary. Bateman received a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary in 2001 and literature and creative writing, and performance at a variety of post-secondary institutions. Based in Toronto, he currently teaches in the Cultural Studies Department at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

Ivan E. Coyote (Vancouver/Ottawa)

Ivan Coyote was born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. An award-winning author of four collections of short stories and a renowned performer, Ivan’s first love is live storytelling, and over the last twelve years she has become an audience favourite at music, poetry, spoken word and writer's festivals from Anchorage to Amsterdam. The Globe and Mail called Ivan "a natural-born storyteller" and Ottawa X Press said "Coyote is to CanLit what k.d. lang is to country music: a beautifully odd fixture." Toronto Star praises Coyote’s “talent for sketching the bizarre in the everyday,” and Quill’s Magazine says Ivan has a “distinctive and persuasive voice, a flawless sense of pacing, and an impeccable sense of story.” A columnist for Xtra West magazine, Ivan also writes regularly for The Georgia Straight and CBC Radio, and pops up in periodicals all across the continent. Ivan is currently at work writing a graphic novel with her cousin – artist and illustrator Dan Bushnell, and recording a CD of live stories with music by songwriters Veda Hille, Dan Mangan, and Rae Spoon. Her first novel, Bow Grip, was released in the fall of 2006.

Hiromi Goto (Vancouver)

Hiromi Goto is an award-winning author whose short stories and critical writing have appeared in Ms. magazine, Nature, and the Oxford University Press anthology, Making A Difference. Her most recent book, Hopeful Monsters, is a collection of short stories released with Arsenal Pulp Press. Her first novel, Chorus of Mushrooms, was the 1995 recipient of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best First Book Canada and Caribbean Region and the co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Hiromi’s second novel, The Kappa Child, won the 2001 James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award and was short-listed for the regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, Best Book Award, the Sunburst Award and the Spectrum Award. She has also co-written and performed a criticomical introspection on race, representation, queer identities and popular culture with David Bateman entitled “The Cowboy & the Geisha”. This performance was showcased in Victoria, BC, sponsored by Uvic’s Queer and Trans Studies Research Collective and the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada. Her latest young adult novel, Half World, will be published by Penguin Canada in 2009. She is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the Vancouver Public Library.

Karen Hines (Toronto)

Karen Hines is a multi-faceted, award-winning performer, writer and director in film, television and theatre. A Second City alumna, she co-starred for three seasons in Ken Finkleman’s Emmy and Gemini Award-winning Newsroom (CBC), Foreign Objects (Rhombus), and Married Life (Comedy Central). The Pochsy Plays, which she created and performed, was nominated for two Alberta Writers Guild Awards and the Governor General’s Award for Drama. My Name is Pochsy: An Industrial Film (Bravo!FACT 2007), one in a series of short films featuring the character Pochsy, is currently screening at film festivals across the continent. Karen started work on her first feature film, Crazy Like a Girl, at Banff Centre’s Women in the Director’s Chair program.

Jordan Scott (Toronto)

Originally from Coquitlam, British Columbia, Jordan Scott now lives and works in Toronto. Jordan’s first book of poetry, Silt, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Sections of Blert have appeared in filling Station, drunken boat, and nypoesi. In the fall of 2006, Jordan worked on the final sections of Blert while acting as the writer in residence at the International Writers’ and Translators’ Centre in Rhodes, Greece.