Spring Literary Festival
May 9-13, 2011
Great Hall, Canadian Mennonite University, 500 Shaftesbury Blvd.

All events are free and open to the public

Monday, May 9 7:00 p.m.
Charlene Diehl, Ian Ross, and Deborah Schnitzer

Charlene Diehl – Writer, editor, critic, and director of the Winnipeg writers’ festival THIN AIR, Charlene Diehl has published essays, poetry, non-fiction, reviews, and interviews in many Canadian journals. She received her PhD from the University of Manitoba in 1992 and taught English for seven years at the University of Waterloo. Now residing in Winnipeg, Diehl edits dig! Magazine and has recently published the memoir Out of Grief, Singing. The book recounts the 1995 birth of her daughter Chloe, Chloe’s death a short six days later, the arduous process of grieving, and the discovery of new joys.
 
Ian Ross – Ian Ross says, “I write to share my ideas and hopefully help people, including myself.” Born in McCreary, Manitoba, Ross lives in Winnipeg and is well-known for his work on CBC Radio, including his famous “Joe from Winnipeg” segments, which became The Book of Joe and Joe from Winnipeg. He earned a degree in Film and Theatre from the University of Manitoba, and among his many successful plays are The Gap and An Illustrated History of the Anishinabe. Ross’s play FareWel won the 1997 Governor General’s Award for Drama, making Ross the first Métis to win that award.
 
Deborah Schnitzer – Activist, provocateur, performer, and award-winning English professor at the University of Winnipeg, Debbie Schnitzer specializes in the modernist literature of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. She is also the co-director of the Global College Institute for Literacy and Transformative Learning and the co-creator of the films rifting/blue and Canoe, with Shelagh Carter. She has written the novel Gertrude Unmanageable, the poetry collections Black Beyond Blue and Loving Gertrude Stein, and co-edited (with Debbie Keahey) The Madwoman in the Academy, a gathering of women’s writing about higher education. Her 2010 novel An Unexpected Break in the Weather won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction at the Manitoba Book Awards.


Tuesday, May 10 7:00 p.m. Special Event

Di Brandt, Diane Driedger, Joanne Epp, and Sarah Klassen
read from Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems, Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror
A new collection edited by Kirsten Eve Beachy, published by Herald Press
A refreshing, reflective, heartbreaking, humourous—and sometimes irreverent—anthology of poems, creative essays, and fiction by new and noted authors with connections to the Anabaptist tradition.



Wednesday, May 11 7:00 p.m.
Marina Endicott, Christina Penner, and Lloyd Ratzlaff

Marina Endicott – Marina Endicott of Edmonton is the author of Good to a Fault (2008), winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Canada and Caribbean) and finalist for the Giller Prize. Good to a Fault was also part of Canada Reads in 2010. Her first novel, Open Arms (2001), was a finalist for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was featured on CBC Radio's Between the Covers. Marina has taught creative writing at the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. Her first career was as an actor and director, and she worked for several years as the dramaturge of the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre.

Christina Penner – Christina Penner has lived in Saskatchewan, California, and currently resides in Winnipeg. She has degrees in Biology and Literature, and teaches at the University of Manitoba in the Computer Science Department. Her first novel, Widows of Hamilton House, was published by Enfield and Wizenty in 2008. She is working on a second novel about a hospital architect who is compelled to build a secret room.
 

Lloyd Ratzlaff – In addition to writing in many different fields, Lloyd Ratzlaff has been a teacher, minister, and counselor. His column in the Prairie Messenger Catholic Journal has been ongoing since 1999. Lloyd’s intimate essays have been described as offering “renewed praise of the profound depths of the spirit and the natural world” and have been published as The Crow Who Tampered with Time (2002) and Backwater Mystic Blues (2007) by Thistledown Press. He lives in Saskatoon.



Friday, May 13 7:30 p.m.
Keynote Speaker Warren Cariou: “Life into Stories and Stories into Life”

Warren Cariou – Warren Cariou was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan into a family of mixed Métis and European heritage. He has published two books: a collection of novellas, The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs, and a memoir/cultural history entitled Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging. He has also co-directed two films about Aboriginal people in western Canada’s oil sands region: Overburden and Land of Oil and Water. His books have won and been nominated for numerous awards, including the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction and the Drainie-Taylor Prize for biography. Cariou is a Canada Research Chair in Narrative, Community, and Indigenous Cultures at the University of Manitoba, where he also directs the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture.

We acknowledge the support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts through the Writers Union of Canada.