TIFA Presents: Searching for the Sustainable Life

Roland Gulliver, Norma Dunning, Ivan Coyote, Carmella Gray-Cosgrove and Hasan Namir

5:30pm

Thursday, June 17, 2021

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have all faced immense amounts of anxiety, loneliness and grief, which has spurred many to re-evaluate their aspirations and redesign their daily lives. Now has become a prime time to collectively search for resilience and resolve to live more sustainable existences. With this in mind, TIFA Presents a selection of Canadian writers from across the country, reading works that explore the human capacity for resilience through adversity, offer new perspectives on our times, and celebrate the stories of our unique experiences. Following their readings, each writer will respond to the question: “How has your creativity sustained you through these times?”

Hosted by TIFA Director Roland Gulliver, this broadcast will feature readings from Norma Dunning, Ivan Coyote, Carmella Gray-Cosgrove and Hasan Namir.

This event is free to watch with registration and will be available to view for 72 hours. Both Book Summit registrants and the general public are welcome to watch.

Reading

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have all faced immense amounts of anxiety, loneliness and grief, which has spurred many to re-evaluate their aspirations and redesign their daily lives. Now has become a prime time to collectively search for resilience and resolve to live more sustainable existences. With this in mind, TIFA Presents a selection of Canadian writers from across the country, reading works that explore the human capacity for resilience through adversity, offer new perspectives on our times, and celebrate the stories of our unique experiences. Following their readings, each writer will respond to the question: “How has your creativity sustained you through these times?”

Hosted by TIFA Director Roland Gulliver, this broadcast will feature readings from Norma Dunning, Ivan Coyote, Carmella Gray-Cosgrove and Hasan Namir.

This event is free to watch with registration and will be available to view for 72 hours. Both Book Summit registrants and the general public are welcome to watch.

Reading

Featured Authors

Roland Gulliver

Roland Gulliver is the Director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and a leading international figure in the literature sector with over 12 years’ experience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as Associate Director. His programming explores the potential of live performance, alongside commissions for new multimedia storytelling. Gulliver champions communities by facilitating access and empowerment, and creating spaces for authors and audiences to engage in discussion. He is on the Board of Directors for the Toronto Arts Council and Chair of their Literary Advisory Committee, and is a Member of the Academy for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Read more about Roland Gulliver

Dr. Norma Dunning is an Inuk writer as well as a scholar, researcher, professor and grandmother. Her short story collection Tainna: The Unseen Ones won the 2021 Governor General’s Award for literature, and her previous short story collection, Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (University of Alberta Press, 2017), received the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Howard O’Hagan Award for short stories and the Bronze Foreword INDIES Award for short stories. She lives in Edmonton, AB.

Read more about Norma Dunning

Ivan Coyote is a writer and storyteller who was born and raised in Yukon, Canada. In 2019, Coyote marked 25 years on the road as an international touring storyteller and musician, and released their 12th book, Rebent Sinner. Coyote’s stories grapple with complex and intensely personal topics of gender identity, family, class and queer liberation, but always with a generous heart and a quick wit. Coyote’s stories handle both the hilarious and the historical with reverence and compassion, and remind us all of our own fallible and imperfect humanity, while at the same time inspiring us to change the world.

Read more about Ivan Coyote

Carmella Gray-Cosgrove

Carmella Gray-Cosgrove was raised in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver on the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and lives in St. John's, on Ktaqmkuk, the traditional territory of the Mi'kmaq and the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk, with her partner and their child. Her fiction has appeared in Prism international, Broken Pencil, Freefall Magazine, the Antigonish Review and elsewhere. Nowadays and Lonelier was shortlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers. She was the 2020 writer in residence for Riddle Fence Magazine. She holds a master's degree in geography from Memorial University and was an F.A. Aldrich Fellow.

Read more about Carmella Gray-Cosgrove

Hasan Namir is an Iraqi-Canadian author. He is the author of three previous books: God in Pink, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction; War/Torn, recipient of the 2020 Barbara Gittings Honor Book Award from the Stonewall Book Awards; and the children’s book, The Name I Call Myself. His latest book is Umbilical Cord. Hasan lives in Vancouver with his husband and child.

Read more about Hasan Namir