☀️August 9, 2025: Reading with Annick McAskill in Halifax, Nova Scotia at Trident Bookstore & Cafe. Starts at 7 p.m. local time
Join us!
Annick MacAskill is the author of four books of poetry, including Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), winner of the Governor General’s Award, and Votive (Gaspereau Press, 2024), which is currently shortlisted for the Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award and the J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award. MacAskill’s poems have appeared in journals across Canada and abroad and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series. MacAskill is a member of Room Magazine’s Growing Room Collective and the founder and publisher of Opaat Press. She lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.
Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I /knew and knew and knew.”
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health,moir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM and a host on The New Book Network. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.
The stories in Widow Fantasies deftly explore the subjugation of women through the often subversive act of fantasizing. From a variety of perspectives, through a symphony of voices, Widow Fantasies immerses the reader in the domestic rural gothic, offering up unforgettable stories from the shadowed lives of girls and women.
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