The launch of Here We Are Among the Living (Tightrope Books) will take place Wednesday, June 20 at 7:30pm at Revival, 783 College St. in Toronto.�� A second launch will take place July 8 at 5pm in Dufferin Grove Park.

An inter-generational story, the book documents the first years of the 21st century, beginning with a conflict between Bernstein and her mother over the meaning of 9-11 and their responses to it. In another early scene, Bernstein finds a letter from her father to her mother written after their divorce in which he rails against flower child hypocrisy. Here We Are Among the Living is in part about our attempts to reconcile ourselves to history, both familial and cultural.

Samantha Bernstein

The epistolary form has for over 200 years been an outlet for social criticism and an expression of engagement, especially for young people.�� Bernstein’s memoir in e-mails captures both her generation’s political sensibilities and desire for instant communication.��

Bernstein started writing it while completing her master’s degree thesis in Interdisciplinary Studies in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Graduate Studies, and the story  includes her time as an undergraduate student in the University’s Creative Writing Program in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

Her poetry and prose has appeared in various publications, including Exile Literary Quarterly, Books in Canada, The Fiddlehead and the anthology TOK 3: Writing the New Toronto.��

In addition, Bernstein received federal funding for her dissertation this year, which considers some of the central questions about ethics and aesthetics posed in Here We Are Among the Living.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The mission, led by the Governor General of Canada David Johnston, is the largest of its kind in Canadian history, with more than two dozen Canadian university presidents making stops in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Campinas and Brasilia. It is organized by the Association of Canadian Colleges & Universities (AUCC).

Canadian university presidents will be visiting Rio de Janeiro as part of their tour of Brazil

In the next five years, Brazil is expected to become the fifth-largest economy in the world; the delegates will work to establish partnerships that will address the research interests of both countries and foster long-term prosperity.

As part of the mission, 91��ɫ will announce two undergraduate entrance scholarships for Brazilian students, along with a pair of scholarships to study English through the 91��ɫ English Language Institute (YUELI).

Shoukri will also be a signatory on a Memorandum of Understanding between 91��ɫ, Simon Fraser University, Ryerson University, Concordia University and the State of São Paulo research foundation, (FAPESP). The memorandum encourages collaboration between researchers at SFU, Concordia, 91��ɫ and Ryerson and those working in public or private research or teaching institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil.

“It is important that 91��ɫ participate in this mission,” Shoukri says. “Our aim is that our students become ‘citizens of the world’, by increasing their knowledge and skills through globally connected, internationalized programs, research and campuses. This new era of partnership with Brazil is an extension of 91��ɫ’s leadership in international education, international research and collaboration with international institutions.”

The Fundação Dom Cabral - Campus

91��ɫ’s Schulich School of Business will also sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Brazil’s Fundação Dom Cabral, a centre for executive development, for collaboration in research and teaching. The institutions will share knowledge around sustainability and responsible business, and jointly provide executive education training and development programs with Brazilian companies. Schulich will also establish the Brookfield Brazil Internship Program, an opportunity for up to four of the school’s MBA/IMBA students to participate in a structured work term in the Brazilian operations of a globally oriented Canadian-based firm.

In keeping with strengthening ties between Schulich and Brazilian institutions, Schulich Dean Dezsö Horváth will give a special address to the Federation of the Industries of Sao Paulo (FIESP), with introductory remarks provided by Shoukri.

Stephen Toope, chair of AUCC and president of The University of British Columbia, says the delegation aims to strengthen existing partnerships with Brazil and create new opportunities.

“This is the largest international mission of university presidents in Canadian history, which speaks to the importance of building connections with this emerging economic powerhouse,” says Toope. “Our focus is on establishing and strengthening partnerships in research and innovation. We will also enhance opportunities for student mobility between our countries, providing experiences that will better prepare students in both countries for the new knowledge-driven economy.”

Canada’s universities, including 91��ɫ, will welcome an estimated 12,000 Brazilian students between 2012 and 2016, through the Canadian component of Brazil’s ambitious Science Without Borders scholarship program. Through these scholarships, more than 100,000 Brazilians will study, undertake internships and conduct research in selected countries around the world over a four-year period.

The Brazil mission is being led by the Governor General of Canada David Johnston. AUCC is the national voice of Canada’s universities, representing 95 Canadian public and private not-for-profit universities. For more information, click .

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Cultures meet here in Canada, says Agnès Whitfield. Literary translation is an essential means of sharing heritages, yet it is a field too often overlooked and undervalued.

That situation is about to improve with the launch of the first volume in a new series called Vita Traductiva. A joint initiative of the Research Group on Literary Translation in Canada at 91��ɫ and , a small Quebec press Whitfield and her husband, artist Daniel Gagnon, have taken over, the series will be published in French and English, and focus on literary translators and translating around the world.

Cover illustration for Vita Traductiva, by Daniel Gagnon

“One of our goals is to bring into English or French important studies on translation from other languages,” says Whitfield. “These kinds of opportunities for international exchange are sadly lacking.”

“Another issue for translation scholars is getting research circulating quickly,” says Whitfield. “Traditional presses have long wait times, library budgets are declining and scholarly books are expensive.”

For this reason, the international peer-reviewed series will be published via the Internet on Open Access sites for scholars, as well as in traditional book form.

Agnès Whitfield

These days, “if a librarian in Canada wanted to organize an exhibition on Romanian culture, she would have a difficult time,” says Whitfield. She wouldn’t know where to find Romanian works translated into English or French, or works written by Canadian writers of Romanian origin, or how the translations were done.

On a broader level, the new series is important because “literature provides a rich source of knowledge about human activity and aspirations, and literary translation plays an essential role in building understanding between communities with different languages and cultures,” argues Whitfield. “Vita Traductiva aims to make an important contribution to the creation, promotion and dissemination of such vital cultural knowledge.”

Following her 2009 study, Whitfield helped found , an international research group based at the University of Oslo, focusing on the different voices in the translation process. Those voices will be expressed in Vita Traductiva.

The name is a reference to the Latin term vita activa (active life) to reflect the active, empirical orientation of the collection and its aim to generate and share more knowledge about translation – particularly between smaller countries – and greater intercultural understanding and respect, says Whitfield.

As series editor, she plans to solicit essays on literary translation and translators from scholars all over the world. Such international reach will be guaranteed with editorial and advisory boards representing 15 countries – from Finland to New Zealand, Portugal to Turkey. Whitfield also draws on 91��ɫ expertise; English Professor Priscila Uppal and humanities and translation studies Professor Susan Ingram are on her editorial and advisory boards.

The first volume of essays will appear this summer and two more in the fall.

The summer volume will focus on the translation of Polish, Czech and Romanian literature for Canadian audiences – and vice versa – and how to find works by Canadians of Polish, Czech and Romanian heritage.

The fall volumes, edited by European colleagues, are based on proceedings of recent Voice in Translation conferences. The first highlights the challenges of capturing narrative voice when translating between Arabic, Polish, English, Finnish, German, Spanish and French.

Whitfield with Voice in Translation group in Copenhagen

The second will probe the role of authorial and editorial voices in translation. It will include a piece by Whitfield on how small Canadian English presses edit and revise translations.

As a new international peer-reviewed publication series, Vita Traductiva is a perfect fit with 91��ɫ’s strategic goal to improve its participation in emerging international research networks and enhance its reputation as a research-oriented university, says Whitfield.

She has played a leading role in compiling previously unavailable bio-bibliographical data on eminent Canadian Francophone and Anglophone literary translators as editor of Writing Between the Lines. Portraits of Canadian Anglophone Translators (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006) and Le Métier du double. Portraits de traducteurs et traductrices francophones (Fides, Collection du CRILCQ, 2005), shortlisted for the Canadian Federation of the Humanities Raymond-Klibansky Prize. (See YFile, April 11, 2006) She was also the editor of L’écho de nos classiques (Éditions David, 2009) on the international translations of two great Canadian novels, Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute) and Hugh McLennan’s Two Solitudes.

Whitfield is former president of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies and was bilingual joint chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University in 2009-2010.

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Lover Through Departure, the newest collection of poetry by 91��ɫ English and education Professor Rishma Dunlop, offers up an enticing glimpse of lovers as they weave a world of secrets with their affairs of the heart.

The book, published by Mansfield Press, is a powerful overview of Dunlop's career-to-date and will launch Monday, Nov. 14 at 7:30m at The Boat, Kensington Market in Toronto.

Dunlop has staked her poetic landscape in the sensual territory of love in the urban environment. Lover Through Departure features new and selected work about encounters in cities around the world, in hotels, motels and on the road, where identity and authenticity come face to face with desire and the refusal to betray the heart's most intimate instincts.

Travel is central to this book. As Dunlop writes: “Love is to imagine, to be complicit with distance. I speak to you across cities. My mouth is on your pillow.”

This new collection by the diasporic poet is sophisticated and tender, a poetry of love and mortality, captured by a compelling witness to the beauty and violence of the 21st century.��At every turn, the reader discovers an undeniable radiance, a sense of grace tinged with an erotic edge, a riveting, distinctive voice.

Lover Through Departure includes “Paris”, an innovative lyric story in the form of a traveller’s journal that was a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards and the Vanderbilt-Exile Fiction Prize.

A finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in 1998 and again in 2009 and winner of the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry in 2003, is also a playwright, translator and essayist. Her poetry collections include Metropolis (Mansfield Press, 2005), Reading Like A Girl (Black Moss Press, 2004) and The Body of My Garden (Mansfield Press, 2002). White Album (Inanna Publications, 2008) combines Dunlop’s poems with paintings by Suzanne Northcott. Her radio play, The Raj Kumari's Lullaby, was commissioned by CBC Radio in 2005.

Left: Rishma Dunlop

Dunlop was also the 2009-2010 Canada-US Fulbright Research Chair in Creative Writing at the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. In 2011, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for her achievement in the arts and humanities.

Launches of Lover Through Departure are also scheduled in Vancouver on Nov. 17 for the Robson Reading Series, Montreal on Nov. 20, Ottawa at the Raw Sugar Café on Nov. 21 and in Kingston at the Grad Club on Nov. 22.

For more information, visit Dunlop's .

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Uppal (BA Hons. ’97, PhD ’04) is the guest editor of this year’s Best Canadian Poetry in English series (Tightrope Books) set to launch Wednesday, Oct. 26, at 7pm at , 783 College St. at Shaw St. in Toronto. The 91��ɫ launch will take place Monday, Oct. 31, from noon to 2pm, in the Paul Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune College, Keele campus.

As the series’ fourth editor, Uppal follows Governor General’s Literary Award-winner Stephanie Bolster, Griffin Prize winner A.F. Moritz and Lorna Crozier. The 2012 guest editor will be announced at the first launch. Poet Molly Peacock, the author of six volumes of poetry, is the series editor.

“We write a lot of humorous poetry,” says Uppal. The problem is there seems to be a bias toward the more serious poems. “Humour and comedy are not always appreciated for how hard they are to write.” Take John Creary’s poem “Horoscopes”: “that’s the kind of poem people would share with others and would put up on their bulletin boards.”

In addition to humourous works in the 2011 edition of Best Canadian Poetry, Uppal was determined to look beyond lyrical poems to some more avant garde work. “This is the first anthology in the series with collages of text and images, as well as visual poetry by Christian Bök.” There is even a sound poem on the long list.

The short list of 50 poems is what’s published in the anthology, while the long list is bibliographic information for an additional 50 poems of note. “I’ve tried to include a vast range of poems that would please any poetry reader,” says Uppal.

To come up with the 100 poems, however, was no easy task. Uppal read everywhere. “I dog-eared any poem I was interested in,” says Uppal. “I had two to three hundred poems by the end.” And those had to be whittled down further still. “I reread that stack several times. There were poems that were shoo-ins because they just stood out that much.” She tried to choose a range of styles, subject matter and writing traditions that represented Canadians writing today. “It was a really satisfying and interesting process,” says Uppal.

Left: Priscila Uppal

As for the Canadian penchant for bears and guns and fruit, Uppal decided to include the best poem for each category. So there is a poem, a philosophical mediation, by 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize-winner Karen Solie, who taught at 91��ɫ last year, called “Birth of the Rifle”. Another is a delightful ode to fruit by Al Rempel, called “We Love Bananas”, and a beautiful parable by Tom Wayman, “Fable of the Child Who Went into the Mountain”, about a girl left alone at a cottage who is forced to kill a bear that breaks in. Later in life, it’s a man who comes after her.

Also in this year’s anthology are poems by Steven Heighton, Dennis Lee, Eric Ormsby, Patricia Young, 91��ɫ humanities Professor Richard Teleky, Shane Rhodes, Jonathan Ball, as well as emerging poets Peter Chiykowski, who wrote “Notes from the Canary Islands” about doing environmental research, Andrew Faulkner, who wrote the drinking poem “Bar Fight” – what Uppal calls a “playful and surreal poem” – Julie Cameron Gray, who wrote the tongue-in-cheek “Widow Fantasies”, Sean Howard and Andrea Ledding.

“I now have some new favourite poets,” she says.

Uppal is the author of eight books of poetry, including Winter Sport: Poems (2010) and Traumatology (2010); the novels To Whom It May Concern (2009) and The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002), as well as a critical study on elegies, We Are What We Mourn (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). In 2010 she was CANFund poet-in-residence during the Vancouver Olympics and Paralympics.

For more information, visit the website.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

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The reading will take place Wednesday, Sept. 21, from noon to 2pm, in the Paul Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune College, Keele campus. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Considered one of Canada’s great journalists, Callaghan has received every major award in North America, including more than a dozen National Magazine Awards – seven of them gold – the inaugural W. O. Mitchell Award, the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters Award for Fiction, which he won twice, the Lowell Thomas Award and the Pushcart Prize. He also won Toronto’s One Hundred Outstanding Citizens Award.

Raise You Twenty (McArthur & Company), follows the critically acclaimed Raise You Five: Essays and Encounters 1964-2004, Volume One and Raise You Ten: Essays and Encounters 1964-2004, Volume Two. The series reflects on the significance of literature to the past and to the future and Callaghan prompts readers to think about the function of literature in the digital age. It includes extended essays on Saul Bellow, basketball player Vince Carter, the city of Munich and some of the great writers of the 20th century – Mavis Gallant and John Steinbeck.

Left: Barry Callaghan

Callaghan, who , founded the literary quarterly, Exile, and imprint, Exile Editions, while he was a war correspondent in the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. He is a novelist, poet and man of letters and his work has been much anthologized.

His works includes The Hogg Poems and Drawings (1978), The Black Queen Stories (1982), When Things Get Worst (1993), A Kiss is Still a Kiss (1995), Barrelhouse Kings: A Memoir (1998), Hogg: The Seven Last Words (2001), Between Trains (2007) and Beside Still Waters (2009).��

The Studio Speaker Series is sponsored by 91��ɫ’s Creative Writing Program in the Department of English, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies.

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