Canadian Writing Comes to You -- Live!

The Reading Series has been bringing cutting-edge Canadian writers to St. Jerome's University since 1984.

Each year we strive to offer a range in our slate of visiting writers: well-established and up-and-coming, from the local area and from sea to sea, working in verse and prose and beyond. Experimental and traditional, serious and playful, beautiful and stark, cynical and celebratory -- come and sample the wealth and variety that is Canadian literature today.

These readings are special opportunities to get inside the book -- to hear writers read their own words, and speak about their own writing. Every reading includes an open question and answer session.

All readings are free and open to the public. And there's free parking!

St. Jerome's is located at 290 Westmount Road North, Waterloo, Ontario.

From its beginnings through 2018-19, the Reading Series has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and St. Jerome's University. It now continues to be funded by St. Jerome's.

26 March 2013

Adam Dickinson reads 4 April!

Photo by Scott Turnbull
For some time, we expected
the end of the world
to be a mushroom.
A vengeful good, a good
of fire, clouded thought.
But every spring they come out of the ground
like universal suffrage,
a writ of habeas corpus,
speech before writing.
They say, dirt. They say, get up.

- from Adam Dickinson's "The Good, part I"


It's Spring -- Get up and come hear Adam Dickinson read! We welcome him to bring to a rousing close another great year of The Reading Series at St Jerome's -- and to celebrate the release of his latest book, The Polymers (a poetry collection "structured as an imaginary science project"), hot off the presses from Anansi. 

Please join us on Thursday, 4 April at 4:30pm in STJ 3014.

Chrissy Brown will be the opening act.

Adam Dickinson is a writer, researcher and teacher. His poems have appeared in literary journals in Canada and internationally as well as in anthologies such as Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets and The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science. His collection Kingdom, Phylum was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He is the author most recently of The Polymers (Anansi 2013). He is also working on another poetry project that involves testing his blood and body for chemicals and microbes. When not giving his body to science, he teaches at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he researches intersections between pataphysics and ecopoetics.

11 March 2013

Vincent Lam reads 19 March!

Photo: Barbara Stoneham
What do emergency medicine and fiction writing have in common? More than you might think! And who could take on both as simultaneous careers? Vincent Lam. We are delighted to welcome Dr Lam as part of this year's series, on our theme of the intersections of literature and science. 

Please join us Tuesday, 19 March, at 8pm, in the St Jerome's Community Centre.

The opening act will be Kenzie Reid.

Vincent Lam is a practicing physician whose first book of short stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has recently been adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada. His first novel, The Headmaster’s Wager, was a finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award. Lam is from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam, and was born in Canada. He is a Lecturer with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. He has also worked in international air evacuation and expedition medicine on Arctic and Antarctic ships.