Writing Jewish Today: Three Canadian Authors Discuss
Schwartz/Reisman Centre for Adult Jewish Learning and the Koffler Centre of the Arts
March 29, 8:00 pm, at Holy Blossom Temple, Mishkan (2nd Floor)
In this lively reading and conversation, a novelist, a short story writer, and a poet discuss what it is to write Jewish. What is it to be Jewish in the modern world? Is there a specifically Jewish way of writing—or of thinking? What are the issues that absorb Jewish writers today? Is there something in the culture that can speak to larger global concerns? Join novelist Gary Barwin, short story writer Kathy Friedman, and poet Adam Sol, three acclaimed contemporary Canadian authors writing out of an international Ashkenazi Jewish experience, as they explore these questions and present powerful, comic and moving excerpts from their latest books.
Moderated by Cynthia Good, Publishing Consultant, Book Club Facilitator & Leader of HBT’s Good Books.
$15 for HBT members, $25 for non-members
Gary Barwin is a writer, performer and multimedia artist including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and forthcoming, Portal (visual poems.) His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long-listed for Canada Reads.
Kathy Friedman is the author of the short story collection All the Shining People (Anansi, 2022). She was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She teaches in Humber College’s Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program and is the co-founder and artistic director of InkWell Workshops. Originally from Durban, South Africa, she now lives in Toronto.
Adam Sol’s latest collection is Broken Dawn Blessings, published in 2021 by ECW Press. He has published four other books of poetry, and one collection of essays, How a Poem Moves: A Field Guide for Readers of Poetry. He teaches at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College and lives with his wife, Rabbi Yael Splansky, and their three sons.
