Place and Identity: Joanna Eleftheriou & Mia Kankimäki

Joanna Eleftheriou, Mia Kankimäki and Wendy O’Brien

Place and Identity: Joanna Eleftheriou & Mia Kankimäki

Joanna Eleftheriou, Mia Kankimäki and Wendy O’Brien

7:00pm

Tuesday, October 26

Longing for travel? Take a virtual journey around the world with memoirists Joanna Eleftheriou and Mia Kankimäki in discussion with Wendy O’Brien. The authors will share their real-life travel adventures from around the world, as told in their acclaimed new books. In This Way Back, Eleftheriou documents her search for identity through a life of travel between her family’s mountain village in Cyprus and her experience growing up in Queens, New York. In The Women I Think About at Night: Traveling the Paths of My Heroes (translated to English by Douglas Robinson), Finnish author Kankimäki blends literature with history in a meditation on life at a crossroads, as she documents her expedition to follow the footsteps of female historical icons. Both books emphasize the personal impacts of place and its imprint on female identity.

Interviewer: Wendy O’Brien

English captioning is available for this video. Please click the ‘CC’ button in the video toolbar to turn it on.

This event is generously supported by the Hellenic Canadian Academic Association of Ontario (HCAAO) and the Hellenic Heritage Foundation (HHF).

HCAAO logo       Hellenic Heritage Foundation logo

Conversation
Reading

Longing for travel? Take a virtual journey around the world with memoirists Joanna Eleftheriou and Mia Kankimäki in discussion with Wendy O’Brien. The authors will share their real-life travel adventures from around the world, as told in their acclaimed new books. In This Way Back, Eleftheriou documents her search for identity through a life of travel between her family’s mountain village in Cyprus and her experience growing up in Queens, New York. In The Women I Think About at Night: Traveling the Paths of My Heroes (translated to English by Douglas Robinson), Finnish author Kankimäki blends literature with history in a meditation on life at a crossroads, as she documents her expedition to follow the footsteps of female historical icons. Both books emphasize the personal impacts of place and its imprint on female identity.

Interviewer: Wendy O’Brien

English captioning is available for this video. Please click the ‘CC’ button in the video toolbar to turn it on.

This event is generously supported by the Hellenic Canadian Academic Association of Ontario (HCAAO) and the Hellenic Heritage Foundation (HHF).

HCAAO logo       Hellenic Heritage Foundation logo

Conversation
Reading

Featured Authors

Joanna Eleftheriou
Joanna Eleftheriou is author of the essay collection This Way Back. Her poems and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Arts and Letters, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America. She has studied at Cornell University, the Center for Ottoman, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies in Birmingham (UK) and the University of Missouri, where she earned a PhD in English. A contributing editor at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and book reviews editor at The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Joanna teaches at Christopher Newport University and the Writing Workshops in Greece. Joanna Eleftheriou’s Festival appearance is generously supported by the Hellenic Canadian Academic Association of Ontario (HCAAO) and the Hellenic Heritage Foundation (HHF).

Read more about Joanna Eleftheriou

Mia Kankimäki
Mia Kankimäki has worked with books all her life: she has a Master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Helsinki, and she has worked as a copywriter and editor at various publishing houses. Her travels in Tanzania, Kenya, Italy and Japan in the footsteps of inspirational, historical female figures inspired her book The Women I Think About at Night. When not traveling for her next book project, Mia Kankimäki lives in Helsinki, Finland. Mia Kankimäki’s Festival appearance is generously supported by Nordic Bridges.

Read more about Mia Kankimäki

Wendy O’Brien
Wendy O’Brien is a philosopher with an avid interest in the ways philosophy, literature and the visual arts overlap. After over 30 years in academe teaching and lecturing at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, Harvard and Oxford, she recently retired to be able to explore these points of intersection in non-academic settings.  Her work explores subjects including power, violence, the relation to the Other, home, silence and creativity. She is presently working on a long-term project on the concept of wonder. An active member of the Ontario literary scene, she has been an interviewer for organizations including By the Lake Book Club, the Toronto International Festival of Authors and GritLit, as well as hosting Bourbon and Books book club in both Toronto and Hamilton.

Read more about Wendy O’Brien

7:00pm

Tuesday, October 26

What to read

The Women I Think About at Night: Traveling the Paths of My Heroes by , This Way Back by ,
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