Priscila Uppal

“Canada’s coolest poet”, 91��ɫ English Professor Priscila Uppal (BA Hons. ’97, PhD ’04), has received one of the country’s highest forms of recognition – election as a Fellow to the (RSC).

Uppal has accomplished a great deal in her 39 years. She has published 10 collections of poetry, two novels, a memoir, a play, an academic monograph and several anthologies. Her poetry includes Traumatology (2010), Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (2010), Winter Sport: Poems (2010) and Ontological Necessities, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.

“This is a wonderful achievement for Professor Uppal, who exemplifies the excellence, dedication and engagement of our 91��ɫ faculty," says 91��ɫ President and Vice-Chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri. "A gifted poet, writer and teacher, she is an incredible role model for our students and for the arts community. On behalf of all of us at the University, I’d like to congratulate her on this special recognition of her contributions.”

Uppal's other work includes the critically-acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009); and the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (2009), as well as the memoir Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother (2013), which was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Hilary Weston Prize for Non-Fiction.

“It’s a big honour and it obviously puts me in the company of some very remarkable people, past and present,” says Uppal, who is one of 90 new Fellows announced Tuesday by the RSC. “I’m also thrilled to be inducted at such a young age, which I understand is quite rare.”

Uppal's work has been translated into Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Korean, Latvian and Serbo-Croatian. Uppal was the first-ever poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the summer and winter Olympics and Paralympic games, as well as the Rogers Cup tennis.

“I was very pleased to see that recognition for my work, but also the continued recognition…that creative work is a form of research that is highly respected and it is a field of knowledge that is important and vital to society and to Canadian citizenship,” adds Uppal.

She is looking forward to the opportunity to learn about research and discoveries in drastically different fields from her own. She believes one of the strengths of the RSC is that is brings people together from such diverse disciplines allowing for a cross-pollination of ideas and the spawning of innovative ways of thinking, adapting and approaching one’s work.

“I’m delighted to be a Fellow,” she says. “It’s a great honour to represent the arts at 91��ɫ, but also to represent the field of artistic production and inquiry. It should be seen as not only a legitimate form of research, but also as an incredibly important one that can stand side by side the hard sciences and other more conventional forms of scholarship."

The RSC website states that the “fellowship of the RSC comprises distinguished men and women from all branches of learning who have made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public life”. Uppal will join the ranks of more than 2,000 Canadian scholars, artists and scientists, who have been peer-elected as the best in their field.

Uppal will be inducted as a Fellow in the ’s Academy of the Arts and Humanities on Saturday, Nov. 22 in Quebec City.

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Once again, the 91��ɫ English professor is bridging the arts-sports divide as poet-in-residence. Sponsored by Canada Athletes Now (CAN) and other benefactors, she will make poetry of the games and the Olympians – two poems a day, published online.

You could call Uppal an old hand at this. Since CAN embedded her with the Canadian athletes at the 2010 Vancouver Winter and Paralympic Games (see YFile), she has also versified the Arctic Games and the 2011 Rogers Cup in women’s tennis at 91��ɫ (see ). It was her idea from the start, a novel way for this jogging sports fan and acclaimed poet and novelist to cross-pollinate two usually disparate worlds – arts and sports.

Priscila Uppal reads poetry at CAN Fund Athlete House in Vancouver 2010

She has immortalized speed skaters and lugers, hockey teams and skiers. Now she’s going to do the same for swimmers and divers, rowers and runners. It will be the first time she has ever attended the Summer Olympic Games and, for that matter, the Summer Paralympics, which she is also covering poetically. London will be a different experience for her than Vancouver. In London the venues are far apart, not centralized, so she’s going to travel by tube to take in events, but not hang out as much with competitors.

Every day, she will post one poem on the CAN website and one on the website. She will read her poems to athletes and – for something entirely different – to spectators watching events on giant screens in London’s Hyde Park. “My backpack will be filled with poems I can distribute. It’ll be fun. Most people will be in a good mood, not rushing to work. It’s a perfect situation for flash poetry or mob-style poetry.”

Like the athletes competing, Uppal has been in training. She’s boned up on all the sports and created an enormous binder full of rules and vocabulary associated with each one. It will help stimulate her poetry-writing muscle so that she can perform every day and be ready for the unexpected – like the luger who died on a practice run at Whistler. Some poems will blaze with glory, others will fall flat, she says. “It’s all part of the process.”

As she has done in the past, Uppal will also be writing about books, film and visual art featuring summer sport for the Literary Review of Canada in her Poet's Corner blog. She’s going to start with a piece about a book written by French literary critic Roland Barthes asking what is sport and why do humans participate in it. Look for meditations on The Bone Cage, a novel by Angie Abdou about a swimmer; Will Ferrell’s comedies and why sports are funny; Haruki Murakami’s writing about running; and Murderball, a documentary about paraplegic rugby players.

Next spring, Uppal will publish a collection her poems in Summer Sport: Poems,  the companion volume to her Winter Sport: Poems published by in 2011.

Here are the first lines of a poem Uppal wrote at the request of the British Embassy one year before the Summer Olympic Games were to kick off:

London Calling

Is it just me, or have you noticed
the growing legion of rowers along the Thames,
singles and doubles, fours and eights,
cutting up waves on the way to Trafalgar Square,
where, it is rumored, gymnasts tumble from one embassy
to the next, balancing on beams, vaulting off
to trampoline up to Big Ben to set the clock

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

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The conference will take place March 23, from noon to 6pm, at 152 Founders Assembly Hall, Founders College, Keele campus. It is hosted by H20Congo, a non-governmental organization started by 91��ɫ alumni Barbro Ciakudia (BA Hons. ’11) and Nancy-Josée Ciakudia (BA Spec. Hons. ’08), and 91��ɫ.

Cuneyt, a singer, and Hamna Mughal, a human rights activist and poet, will kick off the conference, followed by talks with Nythalah Baker, senior adviser, education & communications for 91��ɫ's Centre for Human Rights, and Professor Justin Podur (left), the Faculty of Environmental Studies graduate program director. Podur will give an overiew of the confict in the DR Congo and provide the historical context, as well as show a video he's put together.

Podur has written on political conflicts and social movements and has reported from Palestine, Haiti, the DR Congo and others. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Haiti's New Dictatorship: From the Overthrow of Aristide to the 2010 Earthquake (Pluto Press).

Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize winning film, , shot in the war zones of the DR Congo in 2006, will be screened in the afternoon. The documentary breaks the silence surrounding the tens of thousands of women and girls who have been kidnapped, raped and sexually tortured in during the DR Congo’s ongoing civil war. In the film, rape survivor and filmmaker Lisa F. Jackon talks with activists, peacekeepers, physicians and with the rapists themselves. She travels to remote villages to meet rape survivors who have been shamed and abandoned, providing a piercing, intimate look into the horror, struggle and ultimate grace of their lives. 

Two more speakers will take to the floor, including Jim Karygiannis, the  Liberal member of parliament for Scarborough-Agincourt. There will be storytelling by Ellias Nabutete, singing by Kasim and Blandine, poetry by SobAbu, as well as dancing by Fumu Jamez and the Maria Bahru dance company.

For more information, visit the Centre for Human Rightswebsite.

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

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In the fall, the 91��ɫ community discussed and debated the political relevance and literary qualities of Michael Crummey’s Galore as the winning book in FES Reads! Next Tuesday, the author will read and discuss his own book.

Galore and Beyond: A Reading and Discussion will take place Feb. 14, from 12:45 to 2pm, at 140 Health, Nursing & Environmental Studies Building, Keele campus. The event is hosted by 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES).

A discussion of Galore at the FES Reads! event

A novelist, poet and short-story author, Crummey will also read from his latest works of poetry. In addition to Galore (Random House, 2009), a family saga and love story spanning two centuries in remote and isolated rural Newfoundland, he is the author of the novels The Wreckage (2005) and River Thieves (2000). Crummey’s poetry collections include Went With (2007) and Emergency Roadside Assistance (2001).

He won the inaugural Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry and the Writer’s Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry. Having grown up in Newfoundland mining towns, much of Crummey’s work takes in the characters, nuances and essence of his birth place. Galore begins in Paradise Deep, on the coast of Newfoundland, as the body of a man is sliced from the belly of a beached whale.

At FES Reads! Part II, a collective discussion about Galore was led by FES Professors Gail Fraser, Tim Leduc and Cate Sandilands. They were interested in people’s personal responses to the book, how the novel spoke to them, if it did, and how might it shine new light on their work in FES.

For more information, visit the FES website.

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

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Bartlett identified a gap in the online realm, arguing that a need existed for a digital “nature calendar”. He is currently constructing a collection of 365 short prose pieces – one piece for each day of the year – which he is posting to Facebook where hopes to include something of the “natural” world into the social networking sphere.

Right: From left, poets and keynote speakers Brian Bartlett, Armand Garnet Ruffi and Rita Wong discuss issues in contemporary environmental literature

The purpose of the Green Words/Green Worlds: Environmental Poetry & Environmental Politics conference, which took place at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel in late October, was to examine the relationship between literature and environmental politics in Canada. A keynote panel featuring prominent Canadian poets Bartlett, Armand Garnet Ruffo and Rita Wong opened the conference presented by the Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES).

FES Professor Cate Sandilands, the Canada Research Chair for Sustainability & Culture, introduced the three speakers. Making reference to Bartlett’s essay, Sandilands addressed the tension between “savouring and saving the world.” This idea became a unifying thread amongst the three speakers, who offered additional insights on environmental literature today.

Bartlett recounted the challenges of mastering the 420 character limit for Facebook wallposts. He read a selection of his Facebook poetry to the audience and addressed the feeling of being torn between sensuous desires for the earth and a motivation to “save the world”. This tension between desire and concern, he noted, could be fused into a unified way of looking at the environment through literature. Grounding one’s passion for the earth in the earth itself was a concept that Bartlett emphasized throughout his presentation.

Left: A member of the audience addresses the speakers during the keynote Q&A period at the Gladstone Hotel

Native Canadian poet Armand Garnet Ruffo also spoke, drawing attention to the Anishinabe land that the Gladstone Hotel was built upon. This acknowledgement, later echoed by Wong, served to remind the audience of the choice involved in deciding which stories one shares, and ultimately sustains. The dominant narrative portrays the Gladstone Hotel being situated on private property, while Ruffo’s “alternate narrative” frames the venue as residing on Mississauga Anishinabe soil.

“So much of our lives are spent in narrative…we use narrative to explain our existence and our place in the world,” Ruffo pointed out. He stated that stories are now more important than ever, as a new story can change the way one approaches the environment. Ruffo called for more stories to encourage empathy, suggesting that one should approach a narrative by asking: “is this a story for me?”

Wong, whose environmental justice poetry has been considered a kind of literary activism, seeks to uncover environmental racism rooted in fact, exploring these issues through her poetry.

Central to Wong’s presentation was an exploration of water as a metaphor and a material reality that connects people. Those who live downstream, for example, know something of those upstream. Wong argued that watersheds can teach a lot about our environment and communities, as they are “to the land what the voice is to the body.” She coined this idea as “watershed wisdom”.

The panel concluded with a Q&A period and a discussion of how we embrace the more challenging stories of today’s environment. Wong urged that people find joy in what they do, suggesting that writers should embrace both the beauty and the despair inherent to environmental stories. Ruffo concluded, “We are tearing up the earth and the tar sands because we have told ourselves the wrong stories…we have told ourselves that oil is more important than blood.” Creating literature mindful of the environmental context, to correct these “wrong stories”, was a strategy that the keynote speakers promoted throughout the evening.

Submitted to YFile by Mike Young, FES communications graduate assistant

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

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After five years of transnational research by educators and artists in Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, the United States and Canada, the VIVA! Project is launching its new book, iVIVA! Community Arts and Popular Education in the Americas, edited by project lead Deborah Barndt, a professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES) and coordinator of the Community Arts Practice certificate.

“The book is the culmination of years of research and rich exchange with partners,” says Barndt of the 2003-2007 Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded participatory action research VIVA! Project. “Each partner undertook research of a community arts project and annual transnational workshops allowed them to reflect critically and creatively, collectively and comparatively, on their diverse educational and artistic practices.”

(SUNY Press and Between the Lines), which includes a DVD that brings the projects to life, will launch Friday, Oct. 28, from 6:30 to 9pm, at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, 16 Spadina Rd., Toronto. The launch, co-sponsored by the Catalyst Centre, will include performances, poetry and video screenings at 7pm and 8pm, as well as displays of VIVA! partner organizations and local community arts groups. Refreshments will be served.

The launch is part of a larger Arts & Communities Network event, which will run from Oct. 27 to 31. Five of the international VIVA! Project partners will facilitate professional development workshops over the five days, a cross-faculty initiative funded by 91��ɫ’s Academic Innovation Fund.

The workshops represent unique community-University partnerships, says Barndt. Community partners include the West-Side Arts Hub, Nomanzland Theatre, Young Peoples Theatre, Centre for Indigenous Theatre, Regent Park Focus, Digital Storytelling Toronto, Latin American Art Centre Collective, Latin American Canadian Art Projects and Mural Routes. Academic partners include 91��ɫ’s Community Arts Practice program, 91��ɫ's Faculty of Environmental Studies, the TD – 91��ɫ Centre for Community Engagement, 91��ɫ’s Department of Theatre and Department of Dance in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Destination Arts in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Education, the Centre for Research on Latin America & the Caribbean and the Centre for Refugee Studies.

Left: Deborah Barndt

The first workshop, Sharing Lives and Cultures: Community Media on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, an evening dialogue with Margarita Antonio, will take place on Thursday, Oct. 27, from 6 to 9pm, at Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre, 38 Regent St. (lower level), Toronto.

Antonio is a Miskitu journalist, a leader in regional Indigenous women’s networks and the UNESCO Officer on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. She is founder of the Institute for Intercultural Communication of URACCAN University and she helped develop BilwiVision, a youth-run community television program. Antonio will share Central American experiences and open up a dialogue with Toronto community media activists.

The second workshop, Movement and Poetry Workshop, will be with Amy Shimshon-Santo on Friday, Oct. 28, from 1 to 4pm, at West-Side Arts Hub, 91��ɫ Woods Library, 1785 Finch Ave. W., Toronto. Shimshon-Santo is a Los Angeles-based performing artist, educator and researcher. As director of ArtsBridge for University of California, Los Angeles, School for the Arts & Architecture, she prepared arts educators, built arts education infrastructure and cultivated K-20 community partnerships.

On Saturday, Oct. 29, the Community Mural Production Workshop with Checo Valdez will take place from 10am to 4pm, at the Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood Centre, 1900 Davenport Rd., Toronto. Valdez is a well-known graphic artist, political cartoonist and muralist who teaches at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. He has recently developed a training program in community-based mural production and has coordinated mural projects all over Mexico.

On Sunday, Oct. 30, The Arrivals Creation Process: Recovering the Lost Body with Diane Roberts will take place from 2 to 5pm at West-Side Arts Hub, 91��ɫ Woods Library, 1785 Finch Ave. W., Toronto. Roberts is a Caribbean Canadian theatre artist working from an AfriCentric perspective. She is currently artistic director of urban ink productions, which develops and produces aboriginal and diverse cultural works of theatre, writing and film, integrates artistic disciplines and brings together different cultural and artistic perspectives and interracial experiences.

The final workshop, Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way with Monique Mojica, JoséÁngel Colman Pérez and Alberto Guevara, will take place on Monday, Oct. 31, from 6 to 8pm, at 612 Markham St., Toronto. VIVA! Project partners Pérez, Mojica and Guevara will speak about the collaborative and intercultural creation process in producing the groundbreaking play Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse in May.

An established senior artist, Pérez is a master storyteller and oral historian and was the first professionally trained theatre artist of the Kuna people in Panama. Best known for his work in cultural recovery through theatre, Pérez was a major leader in the Kuna Children’s Art Project. Mojica (Kuna and Rappahannock nations) is a Toronto-based actor, playwright and artist-scholar spun directly from the web of New 91��ɫ’s Spiderwoman Theater. Her first play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots was produced in 1990 by Nightwood Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille. Guevara, a 91��ɫ theatre professor, is the coordinator of the Community Arts Practice (CAP) certificate offered by the Faculties of Fine Arts and Environmental Studies and was the assistant director of the play Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way. Originally from Nicaragua, he integrates performance and politics. His research has focused on the theatricality of violence in Nicaragua and Nepal.

All the events are open to the public and admission is free. To RSVP for the launch, visit the . For more information about the workshops, visit the  website.

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

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This is the third time Uppal (BA Hons. ’97, PhD ’04) has collaborated with Ehrenworth, a former fine arts and cultural studies student at 91��ɫ. The book, Curse. Sleep., is a manifestation of an earlier exhibit by the pair and will launch on Thursday, June 2, from 5 to 7pm at Sweaty Betty’s, 13 Ossington Ave., Toronto. The event is free and everyone is welcome. The book is designed by Justin Broadbent.

Written in cursive under another photo with a willowy impression of sunlight against a fence, it says, “My mother still asks about you.” “They’re inner confessions,” says . Unlike the full lyrical poems she wrote for Ehrenworth’s 2003 exhibit Holocaust Dream, which was also made into a book, this time they are brief poetic expressions that help tell the story of a boy and a girl, two halves of the same person, struggling to return to wholeness after an unnamed trauma splits them apart.

Left: Art and poetry run together in the book, Curse. Sleep. (That’s the Thing About Trouble)

“There’s very much a graffiti feel to the writing,” says Uppal. Most of the art from the exhibit is in an eclectic mix of sizes and dimensions, but the writing doesn’t necessary correspond to the piece closest to it. “They are almost free floating between images,” says Uppal. “So the narrative is a little different from the exhibit. They are scattered like a dreamscape, as if you can hear some sounds, but can’t quite make them out. The impact is still haunting.”

It is with this work that Ehrenworth has returned to his photographic exploration of dream states, trauma, sexuality and texture. He is currently at work on Curse. Sleep. (Away Away Away), the second part in the Curse. Sleep. trilogy, expected in 2013.

And Uppal has provided “the verbal subtext, which goes along with the images.”

Right: Artist Daniel Ehrenworth and English Professor Priscila Uppal collaborated on an exhibition, which led to the new book

Uppal’s publications include seven collections of poetry, including the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted Ontological Necessities (Exile Editions, 2006), Traumatology (Exile Editions, 2010), Winter Sport: Poems (Mansfield Press, 2010) and Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). She is also author of critically acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (Algonquin Books, 2002) and To Whom It May Concern (Doubleday Canada, 2009); and the study We Are What We Mourn: The Contemporary English-Canadian Elegy (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). She was poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic games. She was dubbed “Canada’s coolest poet” by Time Out London.

Ehrenworth works as both a commercial photographer and a photo-based artist in Toronto, Canada. He has exhibited work at numerous galleries across Canada and was the co-curator of Stranger than Fiction: The Delicate Art of Faking History at the Forest City Gallery in 2007. His artwork has been published in Maisonneuve, Applied Arts, Black and White Magazine, numerous art blogs, and is collected among various private collectors throughout Canada and the United States. He has also won awards for his commercial work.

For more information or to order the book, Curse. Sleep. (That’s the Thing About Trouble), visit ’s website or contact him at dan@dephoto.org.

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

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As with previous 91��ɫ Circle Lecture & Lunch events, organizers have planned a full day of inspiring lectures by some of the University’s leading thinkers. For full details, download a PDF of the 91��ɫ Circle schedule.

In her lecture, “The Bird Detective: Investigating the Private Lives of Birds”, 91��ɫ Professor Bridget Stutchbury (left), Canada Research Chair in Ecology and Conservation Biology, will explain why some birds readily divorce their partners, why females sneak out to have sex with neighbouring males and why some mothers sometimes desert their babies. Based on her book (2010), this lecture promises to raise the blinds on the secret lives of birds.

On a more serious note, Stutchbury will examine whether bird behaviour can help species adapt to the drastic changes humans are making to the environment. Since the 1980s, Stutchbury has studied the ecology and conservation of migratory songbirds. In addition to The Bird Detective, she is author of the book (2007) – a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award.

"The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, the African, and the Abolition of the British Slave Trade" is the intriguing title of the presentation by 91��ɫ history Professor Paul Lovejoy (right), Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History and director of the . In his lecture, Lovejoy will explore the pivotal role of Gustavus Vassa, better known by his African name, Olaudah Equiano (c. 1742-1797), in advancing the abolition of the British slave trade. Many scholars consider William Wilberforce (c. 1759-1833) and Thomas Clarkson (c. 1760-1846) to be the pioneers of the British abolitionist movement, but Lovejoy posits that it was Equiano who was the seminal influence in advocating the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of those in slavery.

Lovejoy is a member of the executive committee of the UNESCO “Slave Route” Project, co-edits African Economic History and Studies in the History of the African Diaspora – Documents (SHADD), and is research professor and associate fellow of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.

Acclaimed Canadian poet and 91��ɫ Professor (left) will discuss her experiences as Canadian Athletes Now Fund’s first poet-in-residence during the 2010 Vancouver Olympic and Paralympic Games. In her lecture, which is aptly titled, "My Gold Medal Experience: Olympic Poetry", Uppal will describe how she celebrated with the Canadian athletes and their families by writing poetry about winter sports, the games, and the personalities and performances that captured a nation’s imagination.

How she designed and then “trained” for her position, how the athletes responded to daily poetry readings, and other initiatives she’s undertaken to bridge the sometimes separate worlds of sport and art, will all be addressed. In addition, Uppal will read a short selection of the some of the 50 poems written at the games and recently collected in the book Winter Sport: Poems (2010).

"A World of Suburbs? Finding the Heart of the Urban Century in the Periphery" with 91��ɫ environmental studies Professor Roger Keil (right) will offer 91��ɫ Circle members insights into urbanization. The 21st century has been heralded as an urban century. Indeed, urbanization is now the most tangible shared experience of humanity. Keil will explore what is behind the story of the "urban revolution". He will uncover an important and perhaps astonishing truth: Most urban dwellers now live in the periphery. From the squatter settlements of the Global South to the wealthy gated communities of North America, from the tower block peripheries of Europe or Canada to the newly sprawling cities of Asia, a common theme emerges: where cities grow, they grow at the margins.

Keil is the director of the City Institute at 91��ɫ and professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. Among his publications are In-Between Infrastructure: Urban Connectivity in an Age of Vulnerability (2010) and The Global Cities Reader (2006). Keil’s current research is on global suburbanism and regional governance. He is the co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and a co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action.

This free series includes two events annually – in the spring and fall each year – and provides opportunities for learning and networking in a relaxed environment.

Lecture & Lunch events are open to members of the 91��ɫ Circle and their guests, each of whom are offered a complimentary lunch sourced from 91��ɫ Region as part of the day.

The 91��ɫ Circle receives generous support from 91��ɫ's Alumni Office (program partner) and the Toronto Community News and Metroland Media Group 91��ɫ Region (print media sponsors).

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

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To do this, Mukherjee-Reed, director of South Asian studies at 91��ɫ, became a core member of the Tagore Anniversary Celebrations Committee Toronto (TACCT), which will organize a series of events throughout the year to celebrate Tagore. The first is a tribute to Tagore in conjunction with the ’s (ROM) 3rd annual South Asia Heritage Day tomorrow. Mukherjee-Reed will deliver an introduction to Tagore at the ROM theatre.

“Our primary objective is to bring Tagore's work and his worldview into the mainstream, particularly in North America,” says Mukherjee-Reed. “His brilliant work and his profound philosophical worldviews based on equality, humanism and justice have much to offer to us today.”

Right: A photo of Rabindranath Tagore taken during his visit to Canada. Photo by John Vanderpant, Library and Archives Canada.

In addition to poetry, Tagore wrote novels, short stories, essays and plays, and composed music and became a painter in his late sixties. He was also a leading social philosopher and fought for equality and justice for all, striving to build ties beyond borders of race, class, caste, ethnicity and culture. “He had a profound influence on the making of modern India,” says Mukherjee-Reed. His ideas of de-colonization, local self-reliance and autonomy, and a cooperative way of life deeply inspired India’s anti-colonial struggle. His views have influenced Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi.

Mukherjee-Reed says as she watches the events in Egypt and Libya, she is reminded of Tagore's words. “No matter how mighty a power is and how much artillery it has at its disposal, if there is a collective will to challenge its illegitimacy, it eventually cannot endure." These thoughts permeate the vast repertoire of poetry and music that became household chants during India’s struggle for independence. "Tagore saw colonialism as one major impediment to equality, but also feared that nationalist, elitist visions of progress would be equally problematic,” she says.

Tagore had great faith in the power of youth and those who would challenge established norms. “One of our aims is to engage the young with Tagore’s ideas,” says Mukherjee-Reed. “Unleashing the creativity inherent in people, particularly the young, was something Tagore strongly advocated.”

Left: Ananya Mukherjee-Reed

His strong belief in the power of education saw him establish two universities in India. “We have a lot to learn from Tagore’s ideas of education,” says Mukherjee-Reed. The first, he named Visva-Bharati, a Sanskrit name meaning "where the whole world forms its one single nest". It brought scholars, artists and students from every part of the world together to create a community, and even touched the lives of ordinary people.

“Tagore’s objective was to break with the traditional model of the university where the elite pursued knowledge for its own sake. It was no accident that Visva-Bharati was located in a village and not in a city, not amidst the urban, British-schooled affluent classes,” says Mukherjee-Reed.

“Very close to Visva-Bharati, Tagore established the Institute of Rural Reconstruction, yet another university designed specifically to serve the rural economy. The predicament of rural India was at the heart of Tagore’s work. His views on this remain very salient in today’s India where the benefits of ‘development’ still elude millions of its citizens.”

For more information or to hear Mukherjee-Reed’s discussion about Tagore on CBC Radio’s Fresh Air and CHRY Radio, visit the website.

For more information about the performances, live music, children’s activities and poetry readings during South Asia Heritage Day tomorrow at the ROM, visit the ’s website.

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

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�ٳܲԱ��DZ�’s Home, Roses, Hauntings and Smith-McGregor’s The Infinity Pool are both vying for top spot in the non-fiction category, along with 24 other finalists. In the poetry category, Smith-McGregor’s Body Temperature is competing against 23 others. The third category in the contest is for short stories.

Right: Kilby Smith-McGregor. Photo by Laura Jane Petelko

Last year, Smith-McGregor won the Writers’ Trust of Canada (see YFile, July 23, 2010), for writers under 35 who have yet to be published in book form. Her work has appeared in Brick, A Literary Journal, the Dublin Quarterly International Literary Review and The Cyclops Review.

She won the Tarragon Theatre’s inaugural , and while at 91��ɫ, the President’s Creative Writing Award for Poetry and the Sylvia Ellen Hersch Memorial Award, both in 2009, and the Sorbara Award in Creative Writing in 2008.

Left: Rishma Dunlop

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 a poet, playwright, translator and essayist. She has several poetry collections, including 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 �ٳܲԱ��DZ�’s poems with paintings by Suzanne Northcott. Her radio play, The Raj Kumari's Lullaby, was commissioned by CBC Radio in 2005.

Coordinator of 91��ɫ's Creative Writing Program, Dunlop was also the 2009-2010 Canada-U.S. Fulbright Research Chair in Creative Writing at the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

The CBC Literary Awards short list of finalists in each category will be announced next Monday, Feb. 28, with the final winners announced by Shelagh Rogers March 24, on CBC Radio One’s "Q", hosted by Jian Ghomeshi.

The first place winner in each of the three categories will come away $6,000 richer, while the second place winner will take home $4,000, courtesy of the Canada Council for the Arts.

To view the complete list of finalists, visit the website.

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

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