The Disorientation of Discrimination: Kei Miller & Ian Williams

Kei Miller, Ian Williams and Fiona Raye Clarke

The Disorientation of Discrimination: Kei Miller & Ian Williams

Kei Miller, Ian Williams and Fiona Raye Clarke

3:00pm

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Jamaican poet, essayist and novelist Kei Miller presents his critical and lyrical collection of interconnected essays, Things I Have Withheld, as Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning writer Ian Williams brings fresh eyes to today’s urgent conversation on race and racism with his collection of essays Disorientation: Being Black in the World. This archived presentation from the Toronto International Festival of Authors (originally aired on October 21, 2021) illuminates and explores the experience of discrimination, the silences in which so many important things are kept, and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.

Interviewer: Fiona Raye Clarke

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

This event is currently re-released as part of Harbourfront Centre’s 2023 KUUMBA Presented by TD Bank Group, Toronto’s largest Black Futures Month celebration. The video is available to watch for free throughout the month of February. Learn more here.

Conversation
Reading

Jamaican poet, essayist and novelist Kei Miller presents his critical and lyrical collection of interconnected essays, Things I Have Withheld, as Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning writer Ian Williams brings fresh eyes to today’s urgent conversation on race and racism with his collection of essays Disorientation: Being Black in the World. This archived presentation from the Toronto International Festival of Authors (originally aired on October 21, 2021) illuminates and explores the experience of discrimination, the silences in which so many important things are kept, and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.

Interviewer: Fiona Raye Clarke

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

This event is currently re-released as part of Harbourfront Centre’s 2023 KUUMBA Presented by TD Bank Group, Toronto’s largest Black Futures Month celebration. The video is available to watch for free throughout the month of February. Learn more here.

Conversation
Reading

Featured Authors

Kei Miller
Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, essayist and novelist, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and winner of the prestigious Forward poetry prize for his collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature and in 2018 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter and, in 2019 he was the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa.

Read more about Kei Miller

Ian Williams
Ian Williams is the author of five books. His novel, Reproduction, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His last poetry collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. Not Anyone’s Anything won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. You Know Who You Are was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Award.

Read more about Ian Williams

Fiona Raye Clarke
Fiona Raye Clarke is an award-winning Trinidadian-Canadian writer and community-engaged artist. Her co-created screenplay, Intersecting won the 2017 CineFAM Short Film Challenge and her writing has appeared in various publications online and in print, including the Puritan Town Crier, the Room Magazine blog, and the League of Canadian Poets Chapbook edited by Chelene Knight: These Lands. Her plays have been produced by the rock.paper.sistahz festival and InspiraTo Festival and she is an alumnus of the Banff Centre. She holds a Creative Writing Certificate from Humber College and a Master of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School. 

Read more about Fiona Raye Clarke

3:00pm

Thursday, October 21

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