The Writers' Collective

Anthology Reading Series

Sandra Birdsell with Valerie Reed & Sarah Klassen

Wednesday May 25, 2011

7:00 p.m. at Aqua Books

Cost: FREE!

Aqua Books presents the Anthology Reading Series in conjunction with the Manitoba Writers’ Guild.

The 2011 edition of the series will celebrate the upcoming 30th anniversary of the MWG and will bring some of the writers who helped found the organization to the stage at Winnipeg’s Cultural City Hall.

Valerie Reed was a member of the Riverview Writers Group whose members included Victor Enns, Armin Wiebe, Sandra Birdsell, Andris Taskans, Kate Bitney, and Smaro Kamboureli; this group dreamt up the MWG on Victor Enns’ farm in 1981/82. Reed’s When the Dogs Bark at Night, published in 1980, was the first chapbook Turnstone Press ever published. More recently, she published a long poem in A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing, the 25th anniversary anthology put out by the MWG in 2007. She has three degrees and three sons and lives in Winnipeg.

Sarah Klassen is a former English teacher now writing, editing and reading in Winnipeg. She writed both poetry and fiction and also enjoys editing and mentoring in the writing community. Her latest publications are A Feast of Longing (stories) and A Curious Beatitude (poetry). Her work has, in 2010, appeared in the anthologies  Pith & Wry (ed. Susan McMaster) and Tonguescrews and Testimonies (ed. Kirsten Beachy).

Sandra Birdsell, among Canada’s finest fiction writers, was born in Manitoba, and lived for many years in Winnipeg. She is the author of eight works of fiction that have been nominated for the Giller Prize and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Birdsell’s most recent novel, Waiting for Joe (Random House, 2010) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction. She lives in Regina.