Wordstock Sudbury Literary Festival gave the community an update this week on the planning for the ninth edition of the festival, which is set to take place Nov. 3-5.
Organizers say this year’s festival will be hybrid once again, with both in-person and virtual events.
“We discovered in 2021 that offering both in-person and virtual sessions was important to our audience and therefore we have made a commitment to hybrid events for the future,” said festival director Heather Campbell.
“As Northern Ontario’s premier English-language literary festival, we are making a greater effort to attract bibliophiles and creators from across northeastern Ontario.”
As many festivals and events return to their regular programming, the festival is prioritizing health and safety and following pandemic protocols in place at the time.
Wordstock Sudbury is planning for engaging and inspiring conversations about what is important to Canadians. Events for both readers and writers, getting signed books and opportunities to share their own writing.
The annual Youthwords Writing Contest is now open for submissions. The theme for Youthwords 2022 is Emerge. The contest encourages high school students across Northeastern Ontario to submit their best writing in either poetry or short story.
Winners receive a cash prize and publication in The Sudbury Star. For more information about submissions visit our website. The deadline is October 23.
Early festival highlights for authors who will be joining the festival line up in 2022:
David A. Robertson was the 2021 recipient of the Writers’ Union of Canada Freedom to Read Award. He is the author of numerous books for young readers including “When We Were Alone”, which won the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award and the McNally Robinson Best Book for Young People Award.
“The Barren Grounds”, the first book in the middle-grade The Misewa Saga series, received a starred review from Kirkus, was a Kirkus and Quill & Quire best middle-grade book of 2020, was a USBBY and Texas Lone Star selection, was shortlisted for the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch Award, and was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award.
His memoir “Black Water: Family, Legacy, and Blood Memory” was a Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire book of the year in 2020, and won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction as well as the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award at the 2020 Manitoba Book Awards. “On The Trapline”, illustrated by Julie Flett, won David's second Governor General's Literary Award and was named one of the best picture books of 2021 by the CCBC, The Horn Book, New York Public Library, Quill & Quire, and American Indians in Children's Literature. Robertson is also the writer and host of the podcast Kíwew, winner of the 2021 RTDNA Praire Region Award for Best Podcast. He is a member of Norway House Cree Nation and currently lives in Winnipeg.
Casey Plett is the author of “A Dream of a Woman”, “Little Fish”, “A Safe Girl to Love”, the co-editor of “Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers”, and the Publisher at LittlePuss Press. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Winnipeg Free Press, and other publications. A winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award, her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ontario.
Rod Carley: Rod Carley’s second novel, “Kinmount”, won the Silver Medal for Best Regional Fiction from the 2021 Independent Publishers Book Awards and was one of ten books longlisted for the 2021 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medallion for Humour. His first novel, “A Matter of Will”, was a finalist for the 2018 Northern Lit Award for Fiction. His short stories have appeared in Cloud Lake Literary, Blank Spaces Magazine, the non-fiction anthology 150 Years Up North and More, and HighGrader Magazine. Latitude 46 Publishing is releasing his new interconnected collection of short stories, Grin Reaping in June of 2022. Rod is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and resides in North Bay, ON.
Danielle Daniel is a writer, an award-winning children's book author and illustrator of settler and Indigenous ancestry. Like many Francophones with origins in Quebec, she shares a family link to an Indigenous ancestor, an Algonquin woman who inspired her first adult novel, “Daughters of the Deer”. Her debut middle grade novel, “Forever Birchwood”, flows out of her connection to the land where she was born and raised, her environmental concerns and her interest in Indigenous ways of stewardship. Her picture books include “Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox” (winner of the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award and a Best 100 title at the New York Public Library) and “You Hold Me Up”, shortlisted for the 2018 Marilyn Baillie award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and recently moved to Mnidoo Mnis (Manitoulin Island) with her family.
Aimee Wall is the author of We, Jane, a novel, out now from Book*hug Press. She is the translator of the novels Testament and Drama Queens by Vickie Gendreau (Book*hug 2016 and 2019), Sports and Pastimes by Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard (Book*hug 2017), Prague by Maude Veilleux, in a co-translation with Aleshia Jensen (QC Fiction 2019), and Open Your Heart by Alexie Morin (Véhicule Press 2021). Her essays and reviews have appeared in Maisonneuve, Lemon Hound and the Montreal Review of Books, among other publications. Originally from Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland and Labrador, she currently lives in Montréal.
Tanis MacDonald’s memoir via instruction, Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City, is now available from Wolsak and Wynn. Tanis is also a co-editor (with Ariel Gordon and Rosanna Deerchild) of the multi-genre anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House), and her book The Daughter’s Way (WLUP, 2012) was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Tessera, Prairie Fire, Studies in Canadian Literature, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The New Quarterly, and in Far and Wide: Essays from Across Canada (Pearson), and in the forthcoming anthology Far Villages (Black Lawrence Press). She is the author of three books of poetry, with a fourth, Mobile, now available from Book*hug.
