Befriending the Monstrous (Inside & Out)

Speakers for this event

• David A. Robertson

  David A. Robertson

  DAVID A. ROBERTSON is the author of numerous books for young readers including Governor General’s Literary Award winners On the Trapline and When We Were Alone. The Barren Grounds, Book 1 of The Misewa Saga series, was a Kirkus, NPR, and Quill & Quire best middle-grade book of 2020, as well as a USBBY and Texas Lone Star selection. Winner of the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Freedom to Read Award, as well as the 2021 Globe and Mail Children’s Storyteller of the Year recipient, Dave is a member of Norway House Cree Nation and currently lives in Winnipeg, Canada.

  URL www.darobertson.ca

• Emily A. Weedon

  Emily A. Weedon

  Emily A. Weedon is the CSA award–winning screenwriter of Chateau Laurier and Red Ketchup, and the author of the epic dystopia Autokrator. She played Lucy in two separate productions of Dracula, and growing up probably checked out Dracula and other vampire books more than anyone else in the Coe Hill library, so it was inevitable that she would write a novel about vampires. Hemo Sapiens is her second novel. She lives in Toronto.

  URL https://emilyweedon.com/

• Jessica Popeski

  Jessica Popeski

  Jessica Popeski is a dis/abled opera singer, professor, and intersectional ecofeminist poet. Named one of Tkaronto’s “exceptional up and coming writers” by Open Book, she authored “Oratorio” and “The Wrong Place” with Anstruther Press. “the problem with having a body” was published with Gordon Hill Press, and “grenoside” is forthcoming in Fall 2026. She was raised in Moscow, Russia, and Sheffield, England, by her mother and grandmother, and lives with her pitbull-poodle on land which is covered by Treaty 13 and the Williams Treaties, the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.

• Matthew J. Trafford

  Matthew J. Trafford

  Matthew J. Trafford earned his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He has twice been a finalist for the CBC Literary Prize, and received an Honour of Distinction Dayne Ogilvie Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Douglas & McIntyre published his first collection of stories, The Divinity Gene, which Publishers Weekly described as “shot-through with moments of genuine pathos and even brilliance.” Trafford continues to publish stories as well as writing for the screen. He is an avid fibre artist in his alternate persona of Fairy Godfather Knits.