What's On Upcoming Events: 2024 / 2025

Anne Michaels‘ books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice longlisted for the IMPAC Award. Her novel, Fugitive Pieces, was adapted as a feature film. From 2015 to 2019, she was Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her newest novel, Held, was released in November 2023.

Omar Daniel was born in Toronto and raised in Don Mills, one of the first designed suburbs in North America. Although his Estonian refugee parents were not professional musicians, his mother managed to buy a Heintzman upright grand and have it moved to a small room on the second floor of their family home, where Omar attempted to read through piano reductions of Tchaikovsky’s ballet music. That became his first musical influence. As time went on, he became periodically obsessed with all the great composers, but the music of Beethoven, Bartók, and Ligeti were, and continue to be, steadfast musical inspirations. He began composing music at the piano, but not until his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto did he become keenly aware of the magical collaboration between composer and performer. He has composed extensively in solo, chamber, electronic, and orchestral idioms. He is also an active pedagogue, holds the position of Associate Professor in Composition at Western University, and is currently Chair of Music Research and Composition.

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, near the Black Loyalist and Afro-Metis community of Three Mile Plains, in 1960.  A graduate of the University of Waterloo (B.A., Hons.,1984), Dalhousie University (M.A., 1989), and Queen’s University (Ph.D., 1993), he is now the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.  An Assistant Professor of English and Canadian Studies at Duke University, North Carolina, 1994-1999, Clarke also served as the Seagrams Visiting Chair in Canadian Studies at McGill University, 1998-1999, and as a Noted Scholar at the University of British Columbia (2002) and as a Visiting Scholar at Mount Allison University (2005), and as the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at Harvard University (2013-14).  He has also worked as a researcher (Ontario Provincial Parliament, 1982-83), editor (Imprint, University of Waterloo, 1984-85, and The Rap, Halifax, NS, 1985-87), social worker (Black United Front of Nova Scotia, 1985-86), parliamentary aide (House of Commons, 1987-91), and newspaper columnist (The Daily News, Halifax, NS, 1988-89, and The Halifax Herald, Halifax, NS, 1992-2016).  He lives in Toronto, Ontario, but he also owns land in Nova Scotia.  His many honours include the Portia White Prize for Artistic Achievement (1998), Governor-General’s Award for Poetry (2001), the National Magazine Gold Medal for Poetry (2001), the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award (2004), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship Prize (2005), the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction (2006), the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (2009), appointment to the Order of Nova Scotia (2006), appointment to the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer (2008), appointment as Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto (2012-15), appointment as Parliamentary [National] Poet Laureate (2016-17), appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (2017), and the receipt of eight honorary doctorates.

James Rolfe has been commissioned and performed by ensembles, orchestras, choirs, theatres, and opera companies in Canada, the USA, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the K. M. Hunter Music Award, the Louis Applebaum Composers Award, the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music, Choral Canada’s Outstanding Choral Work Award, and the Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize. He holds composition degrees from Princeton University and from the University of Toronto, where he now serves as a composition instructor. He also works as a composer mentor. Rolfe’s operas have been performed in Toronto, Halifax, Vancouver, Banff, Edmonton, and New York. Beatrice Chancy (1998, with librettist George Elliott Clarke) played to sold-out houses and rave reviews; The Overcoat 18 (2018, with librettist and director Morris Panych) was premiered by Tapestry Opera with Canadian Stage and Vancouver Opera and nominated for 10 Dora Awards. Among his other collaborators are writers André Alexis, Anna Chatterton, Luke Hathaway, Steven Heighton, Camyar Chai, Alex Poch-Goldin, Dennis Lee, and Sophie Herxheimer, and choreographer James Kudelka. His solo CDs raW (2011) and Breathe (2017, nominated for a JUNO Award) are available on Centrediscs; Wound Turned to Light (2023, a songbook