This week our guest is Renee Sgroi. Renee was born and raised in Toronto. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and her poetry has been published in numerous Canadian journals and anthologies. A member of the League of Canadian Poets, The Writers Union of Canada, an executive member of the Canadian Authors Association (Toronto branch), as well as a contributing editor for Arc Poetry, Renée’s poems have been published in The Windsor Review, the /tƐmz/ review and The Prairie Journal among others. She recently won 2nd prize in the Carmen Ziolkowski Poetry Prize and continues to make long and short lists worldwide including that for the Fish Poetry Prize. In 2019, her unpublished novel was shortlisted for Canada’s Guernica Prize. She recently read at an Ontario Poetry Society event held in Cobourg. She lives in the GTA with her husband and children.

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This week we are re-broadcasting a show we made last spring with Antony Di Nardo. Antony has written six books of poetry. His work appears widely in journals and anthologies across Canada and internationally, and has been translated into several languages. His long poem suite “May June July” was winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for 2017 and was short-listed for a National Magazine Award. He spent the last years of a teaching career in Beirut where he launched his first book of poetry “Alien, Correspondent” in 2010. He is an active member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Cobourg Poetry Workshop. His collection “Forget – Sadness – Grass” was released by Ronsdale Press this summer. The winner of the inaugural Don Gutteridge Poetry Award, “Through Yonder Window Breaks” has recently been published by Wet Ink Books.

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Kim Aubrey is a poet and short story writer.  Kim’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Stories, Event, Numero Cinq, Room and The New Quarterly. Her collection of stories What We Hold in Our Hands, published in 2013 by Demeter Press, received excellent reviews and she received an honorable mention for her work at the Bermuda Literary Awards. Kim is a wonderful organizer and is deeply involved in preparations for Northumberland Festival of the Arts 2022 which will run from September 16^th until October 2^nd in locations across the county. She heads up the committee developing the poetry programme at this festival. This year she was the recipient of a Distinguished Civic Award from her home town, Cobourg, for her volunteer work in the arts.

Felicity Sidnell Reid is the author of a book for teachers, a series of textbooks for language learners, a novel: Alone: A Winter in the Woods (Hidden Brook Press, 2015, e-book in 2020), and a poetry collection, The Yellow Magnolia (Glentula Press, 2021). Her poetry and short fiction have been published in anthologies, online journals and collections. Her new collection of poems The Many Faces will be released by Aeolus House in September. She chaired two Spirit of the Hills Arts Festivals in 2017 and 2019 and was recognized with a Distinguished Civic Award from the Town of Cobourg in 2021. She is a director and secretary of the rebranded Northumberland Festival of the Arts 2022.

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This week we talk to Tom Gannon Hamilton, poet, musician and academic. Tom Gannon Hamilton (Urban Folk Art Salon — Founder/Curator/Host) has been published extensively in literary periodicals and anthologies: Dalhousie Review, Vallum (Canada) Lummox (USA), Verse&Voice (Hong Kong), Voices of Israel and numerous others. His poem Non-Consultant won First Prize in The Ontario Poetry Society (2021) “As Love Lies Bleeding” competition, judged by George Elliot Clarke. El Marillo was awarded First Prize in the 2018 Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Contest. Tom’s full length collections are the critically acclaimed Panoptic (2018) and The Mezzo Soprano Dines Alone (2021), both from Aeolus House. Dr. Hamilton’s scholarly works include an MA Thesis (Inside the Words: The Rise of Dub Poetry 1984) and PhD dissertation (A Poetics of Possibility, 2001). Career Musician since age 14, multi-instrumentalist, virtuoso violinist, Dr. Tom appeared in the TV series Murdoch Mysteries, Netflix production American Gods and feature film Shape of Water which swept the Oscars in 2018.

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Meet Judita Pamfil. Judita was born in Romania, Transylvania, Cluj of mixed Jewish, Greek. French, Romanian ancestry and grew up playing along two elongated shadows: The communist dictatorship and family accounts of the Holocaust. She studied Art History at the University of Bucharest, worked briefly as a curator at the Fine Arts Museum in Cluj and wrote poetry and prose in Romanian. She left Romania with a husband and baby daughter for Israel and left Israel for Greece as a political refugee. She came to Canada as a landed immigrant where she worked as a curator at Nexus Art Gallery, pursued further studies in Art education and French, and taught art and French with the TDSB. She continued writing poetry and prose but now did it in English. After moving to Port Hope, she self- published Moon Songs; a Selection of Poems

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