Join the Rowers team on Tuesday, Feb 5 for a fabulous February evening of poetry and prose featuring Kath MacLean, Leila Marshy, John Miller, Concetta Principe, and Aaron Tucker. (see bios below)

Note: Start time 6:45pm, readings begin at 7pm. Glad Day Bookshop's entrance is wheelchair accessible. The washroom is partially accessible. The nearest TTC subway station is Wellesley and street parking is available. Admission is free. A jar is passed for voluntary donations.

Rowers acknowledges financial assistance from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, The Toronto Arts Council. Individual features may be funded The League of Canadian Poets' Canada Poetry Tours or The Writers' Union of Canada's National Public Readings Program.

Kath MacLean writes poetry, performance art, film, creative-nonfiction, drama, and prose. She is the author of For a Cappuccino on Bloor (1998), Kat Among the Tigers (2011), and Translating Air (McGill-Queen’s UP 2018). MacLean has won numerous awards across the country for her work in all genres including the Anne Green Award for best multi-genre artist in Canada, (2012), the New Muse Award, the Kalamalka Award (declined), the Bronwen Wallace Award (declined), Best of the Fest for her poetry video, Doo-Da-Doo-Da, and was runner-up for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She has served as WIR for the CAA, Kalamalka Press and the Mackie House, and the Purdy A-frame in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, and has performed in reading series and festivals across Canada and abroad. Previously a professor of English and creative writing in Edmonton, Kath recently returned to her roots in Toronto and has rediscovered the delights of teaching kindergarten where she gets to celebrate the world of pretend each and every day. In Translating Air, MacLean relives conversations H.D. might have had with Dr. Freud during her sessions with him in 1933-34.

Montrealer Leila Marshy is of Palestinian-Newfoundland heritage—she can tell a good joke, but it bombs. She has been a filmmaker, a baker, an app designer, a marketer, a farmer, and editor of online culture journal Rover Arts. She founded the Friends of Hutchison Street, a groundbreaking community group bringing Hasidic and non-Hasidic neighbours together in dialogue. She has published stories and poetry in Canadian and American journals and anthologies. The Philistine is her first novel.

John Miller’s third novel, Wild and Beautiful is the Night, (Cormorant: October 2018) is the story of an unusual friendship between two women struggling to find their way in Toronto’s sex trade. The Featherbed (Dundurn, 2002) received stellar reviews and earned a devoted readership upon its release and A Sharp Intake of Breath (Dundurn, 2007) won the Beatrice and Martin Fischer Award in Fiction for 2008. John grew up in Toronto and holds a B.A. from McGill University and an M.A. in International Development from the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. In addition to writing, he is an organizational development consultant with non-profits.

Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and academic scholarship. Her most recent project, titled This Real (2107), was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet’s Raymond Souster Award. The other publication published by Pedlar Books, Hiroshima: A Love War Story, was used for the Humber College Theatre Department’s program, Performing Poetry, in the fall of 2017. She has several other publications, including a novella (Stained Glass, 1997) and an academic monograph (Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s Real, 2015) and her creative work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Grain, Lemon Hound, Puritan, and Minola Review, and is forthcoming in the Capilano Review. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Trent University.

Aaron Tucker is the author of the novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) as well as two books of poetry, Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Book*hug Press) and punchlines (Mansfield Press), and two scholarly cinema studies monographs on represetions of Internet use in Hollywood movies. His current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed; he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems. Currently, he is a guest on the Dish with One Spoon Territory, where he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson University (Toronto). He began his doctorate as an Elia Scholarin the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University in Fall of 2018.