Words on the Words: Writing About Language

Speakers for this event

• Cassidy McFadzean

  Cassidy McFadzean

  Cassidy McFadzean is the author of three books of poetry: Crying Dress (House of Anansi, 2024), Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and in Dead Writers, a collaborative anthology out this fall with Invisible Publishing. Cassidy was born in Regina and currently lives in Toronto, where she is the 2024-2025 Writer-in-Residence at Sheridan College. 

• Irene Marques

  Irene Marques

  Irene Marques is a bilingual writer (English and Portuguese) and Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University in the department of English. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, Masters in French Literature and Comparative Literature (University of Toronto) and a Bachelor of Social Work (Ryerson University, now TMU). Her published creative works include, among others, three collections of poetry and the novels Daria (Inanna Publications, 2021) and Uma Casa no Mundo (Imprensa Nacional/Portugal, 2021), which won Prémio Imprensa Nacional/Ferreira de Castro. Her fourth collection of poetry, The Bare Bones of Our Alphabet will be out in September, 2024 (Mawenzi House). Irene Marques was born and raised in Portugal and moved to Canada at the age of 20.

• Margaret Nowaczyk

  Margaret Nowaczyk

  Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatrician and a clinical geneticist. Her writing has appeared in Prairie Fire, Geist, Examined Life Journal, Intima, Broken Pencil, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Grain, Litro US, The Dalhousie Review, and others. Her non-fiction won thte 2020 CNFC/Humber Literary Review contest and was a finalist for the 2022 National Magazine Awards. Her memoir “Chasing Zebras” won the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Memoir. “Marrow Memory”, a collection of essays, was published by Wolsak&Wynn in June 2024. She lives in Hamilton, ON with her husband, two sons, two cats, and a rescue greyhound.

• Stuart Ross

  Stuart Ross

  Moderator

  Stuart Ross has published over 20 books of fiction, poetry, and personal essays, most recently the memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award, the poetry collection The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky, and the short story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub. His poetry has been translated into Nynorsk, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovene, and Estonian. Active in the Canadian micropress world since the mid-1970s, Stuart lives in Cobourg, Ontario, and blogs infrequently at bloggamooga.blogspot.ca.

  Moderator