Literary arts

This year’s Brunch and Learn features a panel of books each focusing on ideas and themes related to wellness, well-being, recovery and healing.

This event will be catered by Edmonton chef Holly Holt 

Featuring: Chyana Marie Sage, Quill Christie-Peters and Kate J. Neville
Moderator: Anna Marie Sewell

When: Sunday, October 19, 2025 @12 to 1:30 pm
Where: Citadel Theatre (Schoctor Theatre Lobby), 9828 101A Ave 
Tickets: $30

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/

Join Edmonton Arts Council on Sunday, October 19 at Boa & Hare, 127 – 10520 97 St NW, located in Pacific Mall for The Poetry of Public Art, presented with LitFest. Event begins at 10:30am.

Join us for a celebration of public art and poetry, as we mark 30 years of the Edmonton Arts Council and the addition of the 300th public artwork to the City of Edmonton Public Art Collection with a month of 300@30 activities and events!

Mary Burlie was a force of compassion, devoting her life to lifting up others. Known lovingly as the ​“Black Angel of Boyle Street”, she served on the front lines of inner-city Edmonton, offering food, shelter, support, and above all, dignity to those most in need.

As part of the City of Edmonton’s revitalization project of Mary Burlie Park in downtown Edmonton, the Edmonton Arts Council has selected three local poets to create poetry that will be incorporated into the park design. In advance of the park opening in 2026, join Edmonton Arts Council, the family of Mary Burlie, and poets Titilope Sonuga, Naomi McIlwraith, and Cui Jinzhe for a morning of stories and spellbinding poetry.

This event is free to attend, but please pre-register to reserve your spot.

If you require ASL interpretation or other access considerations in order to attend this event, please email support@​edmontonarts.​ca and we will do our best to accommodate you.

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/

Join us and discover some of this year’s most buzzed about books in this not-to-be-missed showcase!

Featuring: Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Amber Dawn, and Canisia Lubrin
Host: Kate Gibson

When: Saturday, October 18, 2025 @ 7 to 8:30 pm
Where: Citadel Theatre (Zeidler Hall), 9828 - 101A Ave, Edmonton
Tickets: $5 (student/low income), $15 (regular)

Stock, by Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Stock photographs are everywhere. With their contrived poses, unusual angles, and bizarre visual metaphors, they’re instantly familiar – and familiarly narrow in their vision of our society. Their ubiquity shapes and reinforces the biases, privilege, and stereotypes of their distinct aesthetic.

From found poems using metadata and keywords to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like ‘Good Mother Morning Family Happy,’ ‘Beautiful Woman Eating Salad,’ and ‘Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded,’ Delisle’s ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography’s clichés and delight in all its strangeness, while casting a critical eye on its representations of women.

Buzzkill Clamshell, by Amber Dawn

Amber Dawn’s latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power

As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.

With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby – gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer – not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with it.

The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, by Canisia Lubrin

“How incandescent the language is, each line emitting light through the membrane of time and anticipated grief. The work has a rigorousness, the poet pushing through the ache of experience from the first to the last word.”—Dionne Brand

In her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distills a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the blistering paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior, and inexpressible.

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/
 

An evening of literature, art, and music hosted by The Polyglot and Daaira House

LitFest, October 18, 2025, 5:00pm to 7:00pm, The Green Room (Unit 2-786, 10545 - 108 Street), Edmonton
This event is free to attend.

For the past nine years, The Polyglot—an award-winning local multilingual magazine—has offered a vibrant platform for artists, writers, and translators to experiment with language and art.

At LitFest, we are honoured to launch our fifteenth issue, Daaira—a collaboration with Daaira House, guest edited by Aaima Azhar and Zainab Azhar.

As the editors write: “This issue has been curated to capture what is well and unwell within us all and the rituals that play witness. The healing will come. Let us first call it what it is. Let us make for it a little space. Let us draw around it a circle, a دائرہ.”

Daaira (circle) moves between ritual (Rasm-e-Dil, Ritual of the Heart) and remembrance (Yaad-e-Dil, Re-membrance of the Heart), creating a space where wellness is not individual but communal. For this reason, we’re thrilled to be hosted by the Green Room.

✨Join us for an evening of multilingual readings, music, and visual art
✨Participate in a guided writing session led by Aaima Azhar
✨Share light refreshments in community
✨Witness performances that embody healing and creativity

Hosts: Aaima Azhar & Zainab Azhar
Authors: Illyana Cardinal, Muhammad Azhar, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Leilei Chen, Tamara Aschenbrenner
Musicians: The Calamansi Club
Artists: April Angeles, Maryam Lary, Niabi Kapoor

Come sit in the circle with us. All are welcome. ✨

More information: https://litfestalberta.org/event-1/showcase-daaira-the-healing-will-come-polyglot-magazine-launch/

LitFest is thrilled to partner with Edmonton’s Agatha Press to bring you the launch of their fall releases – Sincerely, Sincerely by Rayanne Haines and Carolyne Van Der Meer, AS LONG AS I’M ALIVE I HAVE INFINITE CHANCES by ryan fitzpatrick, and i give birth to my body by Leilei Chen.

Featuring: Leilei Chen, ryan fitzpatrick, Rayanne Haines and Carolyne Van Der Meer
Host: Matthew Stepanic

When: Saturday, October 18, 2025 @ 5 to 6:30 pm
Where: Edmonton Public Library - Stanley A. Milner branch (Muttart Theatre), 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square
Tickets: $5 (student/low income), $15 (regular)

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/

Join us for this very special reading and conversation with graphic memoirists Teresa Wong and Sarah Leavitt, featuring their latest graphic memoirs, All Our Ordinary Stories and Something, Not Nothing.

All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Odyssey
WINNER of 2 Alberta Literary Awards (the Memoir Award and the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction)

When: Saturday, October 18, 2025 @ 3 to 4:30 pm
Where: Citadel Theatre (Zeidler Hall), 9828 - 101A Ave, Edmonton

From the author of Dear Scarlet comes a graphic memoir about the obstacles one daughter faces as she attempts to connect with her immigrant parents. Beginning with her mother’s stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories – some epic, like her mother and father’s daring escapes from communes during China’s Cultural Revolution, and some banal, like her quitting Chinese school to watch Saturday morning cartoons – Wong carefully examines the cultural, historical, language, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family, seeking answers to the questions “Where did I come from?” and “Where are we going?” At the same time, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life.

A book for children of immigrants trying to honour their parents’ pasts while also making a different kind of future for themselves, All Our Ordinary Stories is poignant in its understated yet nuanced depictions of complicated family dynamics. Wong’s memoir is a heartfelt exploration of identity and inheritance, as well as a testament to the transformative power of stories both told and untold.

Something, Not Nothing:A Story of Grief and Love
Finalist, Will Eisner Award; Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes

A poignant and beautifully illustrated graphic memoir about love and loss and navigating a new life. In April 2020, cartoonist Sarah Leavitt’s partner of twenty-two years, Donimo, died with medical assistance after years of severe chronic pain and a rapid decline at the end of her life. About a month after Donimo’s death, Sarah began making comics again as a way to deal with her profound sense of grief and loss. The comics started as small sketches but quickly transformed into something totally unfamiliar to her. Abstract images, textures, poetic text, layers of watercolour, ink, and coloured pencil – for Sarah, the journey through grief was impossible to convey without bold formal experimentation. She spent two years creating these comics.

The result is Something, Not Nothing, an extraordinary book that delicately articulates the vagaries of grief and the sweet remembrances of enduring love. Moving and impressionistic, Something, Not Nothing shows that alongside grief, there is room for peace, joy, and new beginnings.

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/

*This is a free workshop for BIPOC authors
14 spaces available

Facilitator: Justine Abigail Yu

When: Saturday, October 18, 2025 @ 2:30 to 5 pm
Where: Edmonton Public Library - Stanley A. Milner branch (EPL Community Room), 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square

As hyphenated individuals living in between cultures, we are, as activist Eboo Patel describes it, “standing at the crossroads of inheritance and discovery, trying to look both ways at once.” In this writing workshop, we write to honour our ancestors and imagine the path we lay for generations to come. 

We ask ourselves, who are our ancestors? For those of us from communities that have largely been displaced – on this land or another, by force or by choice – what connections do we hold to our past and to those who came before us? We look to our ancestors – biological or chosen – and honor all they have given us, while letting go of what no longer serves us.

We then turn to the future, to the possibilities that lay before us. Have you ever considered yourself as a future ancestor? As an elder with wisdom to share and possibilities to create? In the second part of our workshop, we ask ourselves, what riches do we inherit, and what discoveries are left for us to bestow upon future generations? 

No writing experience is necessary – only an open heart and an open mind with a readiness to give and receive vulnerability. We’ve carefully and intentionally designed this workshop to be intimate and generative. We’ll give you writing prompts to spark your creativity in a supportive environment. All writing materials will be provided.

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/
 

Take part in this exciting workshop with Julie Sedivy. 

When: Saturday, October 18, 2025 @ 12 to 2 pm
Where: Edmonton Public Library - Stanley A. Milner branch (Community Room), 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square
Tickets: $15

Sentences are the foundation of all writing, and mastering the sentence is essential to developing a strong writing voice. In this workshop, Sedivy will bring in gorgeous, surprising, intriguing, devastating sentences from a variety of genres, including romance, sci-fi, fantasy, young adult and children’s books, in addition to more traditional literary genres. She will discuss what makes a wonderful opening sentence, what kinds of final sentences leave the reader satisfied while also keeping the work alive in the mind. You will talk about sentence structure, how it can be exploited to create pacing or heighten certain emotions, and how varying the structure of sentences can make a passage more interesting or beautiful. You will discuss how some parts of the sentence highlight information more than others, much like throwing a spotlight on some of the content, making that portion of the sentence especially memorable. Or how certain devices subtly allude to background information that the reader can quickly construct, without bogging the prose down with boring exposition. This session will begin by having participants free-write a short passage, and then we would play with various structures and devices to alter their original sentences and observe the effects. This interactive workshop will have very broad appeal for writers across genres, and will be useful for beginning and advanced writers alike.

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/

This panel discussion brings together the founders of Laberinto Press, Hungry Zine and Living Hyphen to discuss the need for and the challenges of publishing multicultural, multilingual, and hyphenated authors in the ever-evolving landscape of Canadian publishing. This panel will be moderated by translator and Edmonton’s 11th Poet Laureate, Medgine Mathurin.

Featuring: Justine Abigail Yu, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Kathryn Lennon
Moderator: Medgine Mathurin
When: Saturday, October 18, 2025 @ 12 to 1:30 pm
Where: Edmonton Public Library - Muttart Theatre (7 Sir Winston Churchill Square)
Tickets: $5 (student/low income), $15 (regular)

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/

In conversation event with Julie Salverson to talk about her book, A Necessary Distance: Confessions of a Scriptwriter’s Daughter.

When: Friday, October 17, 2025 @ 7:30 to 9:30 pm
Where: Citadel Theatre (Zeidler Hall), 9828 - 101A Ave
Tickets: $5 (student/low income) or $15 (regular)

George Salverson had written over a thousand radio plays for the CBC before he became the first television drama editor for the corporation. He wrote scripts for such beloved series as The Beachcombers and The Littlest Hobo, but he kept very little of his writing, being decidedly unsentimental about his work. So when his daughter Julie found a series of notebooks from a round-the-world trip he’d taken in 1963 to work on a documentary about world hunger, she knew she’d found something important. But the writer of these notebooks is not the father she thought she knew. From there Julie Salverson traces a fascinating web of personal and political history, of storytelling, of culture and it’s shaping and of a man caught in a time of great change.

For more information please visit: https://litfestalberta.org/events/