The Art Gallery of Calgary

117 8th Avenue SW

Calgary

May 2, 2008, Friday 8:00 PM

Tickets: $10

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

Talon Book Launch!

Some of the best avant-garde writers will launch their latest poetic collections against one of the finest backdrops Calgary has to offer. Language will rocket! Talonbooks Ltd., founded in Vancouver, Canada in 1967, publishes authors of international stature, writing in poetry, fiction and drama, as well as non-fiction books in the fields of ethnography, environmental and social issues, literary criticism and selected titles in architecture, regional geography and history and photography.

Featured Artists: Colin Browne (Vancouver) / Weyman Chan (Calgary) / Stephen Collis (Vancouver) / Sachiko Murakami (Vancouver) / Fred Wah (Vancouver)

MC: Aritha van Herk

Colin Browne (Vancouver)

Writer, filmmaker, teacher, critic and poet Colin Browne is the co-founder of the Kootenay School of Writing and the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters. He teaches production, screenwriting and film history at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. He was also an editor of Writing magazine.

His documentary films include Father and Son and White Lake, which was nominated for a Canadian Film Award for Best Feature Documentary. Most recently he completed a documentary portrait of jazz musician Linton Garner, Linton Garner: I Never Said Goodbye, which was screened at the Vancouver Film Festival and aired on CBC’s Opening Night series.

Weyman Chan (Calgary)

Weyman Chan, a laboratory technician by trade, wrote his first poem when he was thirteen years old. Distilling a unique voice and ethnic point of view in the spiraling, non-sequential and non-temporal nature of poetry remains the most liberating form of expression he has found to engage in. “Every writer must come to terms with their own inner language—and it takes time to learn how to use it to best effect.”

Stephen Collis (Vancouver)

Stephen Collis is a poet, critic and scholar. Author of two books of poetry, Mine (New Star 2001) and Anarchive (New Star 2005), which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, as well as numerous chapbooks, including The Birth of Blue (1997), Anima/lung (1998) and Blackberries (2005), his essays on contemporary poetry and poetics have appeared in many Canadian and American journals including the Capilano Review and the Chicago Review. He has edited Companions & Horizons: An Anthology of Simon Fraser University Poetry (WCL 2005), and is the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions 2006). A member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective and the Modernist Studies Association, he teaches American literature, poetry and creative writing at Simon Fraser University.

Sachiko Murakami (Vancouver)

Sachiko Murakami received her MA in English and Creative Writing from Concordia University. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in various Canadian journals such as Event, Prairie Fire, the Fiddlehead, filling Station, CV2 and the Antigonish Review. She has been an editor at Room and Matrix magazines. The Invisibility Exhibit is her first collection of poetry. She lives in the midst of her exhibit.

Fred Wah (Vancouver)

Fred Wah is a Governor General’s Award-winning poet who has taught literature and creative writing for decades, mentoring a generation of some of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. A founding member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he is a pioneer of on-line publishing and has increasingly turned to collaborative mixed media work over the past decade.