Queer Arts Festival: A Night of Storytelling

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Cost: by donation
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Literary Readings

A Night of Storytelling is back for its fourth year, showcasing the talented LGBTQ2+ voices in the CanLit scene. Danny Ramadan brings prominent voices from the Queer and trans community of words to the stage to read from their art as they explore their identities through adult fiction, nonfiction, poetry and YA novels.

Each author will be reading from their own work, centering the stage around their talents, and framing their public art through their personal lens, before joining each other for an open conversation on representation of the LGBTQ2+ community in the Canadian scene, and presenting an authentic and genuine image of queer and trans lives under a literary examination.

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performance artist, and psychotherapist in Toronto. Her novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir was released by Metonymy Press in 2016, and her first poetry book, a place called No Homeland, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017. Her children’s picture book From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, illustrated by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li, will be published by Arsenal in the fall of 2017. Kai Cheng won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers in 2017.

Mey Rude is a writer, consultant, speaker, trans woman, Latina, and pop culture aficionado based in Los Angeles. You can find her writing at them.us, Autostraddle, Remezcla, OUT, and many other places. Rude has been one of the leading trans journalists in Queer Womens Media for over six years. For three of those years she guided the transgender content at the GLAAD Award winning website Autostraddle.com as the site’s Trans Editor.

She’s known for queer comics column Drawn to Comics, her writing and speaking on trans and Latinx representation, especially in all-ages media and comics, and for her writing on body positivity and sex. She has worked as a consultant on several best selling and award winning comic books and novels and has appeared on and moderated panels at several conventions and university programs.

Michael V. Smith is a queer writer, performer and Associate Professor teaching Creative Writing in the interdisciplinary department of Creative Studies at UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna, in BC’s Interior. Smith is an MFA grad from UBC’s Creative Writing program.

Smith has won a number of awards for both his writing and his short film work. His novel, Cumberland (Cormorant Books, 2002), was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Smith won the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers.

His first book of poetry is What You Can’t Have (Signature Editions, 2006), short-listed for the ReLit Prize. In 2008, he published a hybrid book of concrete poems/photographs, Body of Text (BookThug), created with photographer David Ellingsen. His new book of poetry BAD IDEAS was released in May, 2017, from Nightwood Editions.

Monica Meneghetti is a multilingual language professional and writer with a penchant for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Her translation of Simone Moro‘s adventure memoir, The Call of the Ice: Climbing 8000-Meter Peaks in Winter (Mountaineers Books), is the first-ever English edition among this renowned alpinist’s books. Monica’s poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and musical scores, as well on stage and online. She’s taught and mentored both youth and adults, offering custom-designed workshops at Fernie Writer’s Conference, Camp fYrefly, and independently. As an editor, she has a special interest in enabling marginalised voices to be heard. She often attracts clients for whom English is a second language, due to her linguistic expertise. She holds a BA in French & Linguistics, and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia.
https://monicameneghetti.wordpress.com/bio-2

Tash McAdam is a Welsh-Canadian author and teacher. They’ve been published in multiple anthologies, and their first personal release, a YA novella called SLAM was an international bestseller. Their debut series, The Psionics, is being released in full over 2019, from Nine Star Press.

When they’re not writing, they’re usually found teaching either Computer Science or English in Vancouver. Tash identifies as trans and queer and uses the neutral pronoun ‘they’. As an English teacher they are fully equipped to defend that grammar! They have a degree in computer science so their nerd chat makes sense, and a couple of black belts in karate which are very helpful when it comes to writing fight scenes.

Their novel writing endeavours began at the age of eight although they will admit that their first attempt was derivative, at best. Since then, Tash has spent time falling in streams, out of trees, juggling, dreaming about zombies, dancing, painting, learning and then teaching Karate, running away with the circus, and of course, writing.

They write fast-paced, plot-centric action adventure with diverse casts. They write the books that they wanted to read as a queer kid and young adult (and still do!)
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