Tertulia: No Amnesia

Tertulia: No Amnesia will take place on Thursday, March 26, at Bread & Circus, 299 Augusta Avenue. Doors open at 7 pm, and the performance begins at 7:30 pm. Pay What You Can. Bread & Circus is located at 299 Augusta Avenue, in Kensington Market.

Featuring Victoria Freeman, Lee Maracle and M. NourbeSe Philip - three extraordinary writers, who have given us essential texts that map the legacies of colonialism and slavery. We read them as individual and interlocking stories, acts of the imagination that confront the history of an amnesiac nation. Freeman, Maracle and Philip will read and participate in a discussion with the audience facilitated by Aisha Sasha John.

Music by Not the Wind Not the Flag: Brandon Valdivia and Colin Fisher. On any occasion their music could echo the traditions of Balinese music, West African music, Persian or Turkish music or it could be devastatingly loud Post-Hardcore, Noise, Free jazz eruptions. Or all of the aforementioned at once! The music refrains from being derivative but comes from a place of deep respect for the music that has lifted and guided their spirits.

The Tertulia Reading Series is generously supported by the Toronto Arts Council. Victoria Freeman's participation is supported by the Writers Union of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts.
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Victoria Freeman is the author of Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America. She is a Ph.D candidate in History at the University of Toronto, just completing her dissertation on the historical memory of the Indigenous and colonial past of Toronto. She is working with Metis actor and director Jani Lauzon and other Indigenous artists to create and stage a theatrical production on Toronto's Indigenous history.

Lee Maracle, Sto: Lo nation, grandmother of seven, mother of four, was born in North Vancouver, B. C. and now resides in Ontario. Her works include: the novels Ravensong, Bobbi Lee, Sundogs, and Daughters are Forever, Will’s Garden, the short story collection Sojourner’s Truth, the poetry collection, Bent box, and the non-fiction work I Am Woman. She is Co-editor of My Home as I Remember and Telling It: Women and Language across Cultures, editor of a number of poetry works and of Gatherings journals, and has published in dozens of anthologies in Canada and America. Ms. Maracle is a both an award winning author and teacher. She currently Aboriginal writer-in-residence for First Nation’s House, and Visiting Scholar in the Aboriginal Studies and English Department at the University of Toronto.

M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer. Born in Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago, NourbeSe Philip was educated at the University of the West Indies. She pursued graduate degrees in political science and law at the University of Western Ontario, and practised law in Toronto, Ontario for seven years. She left her law practise in 1983 to devote time to her writing. NourbeSe Philip has published three books of poetry, two novels, three books of collected essays and two plays. Her short stories, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in magazines and journals in North America and England and her poetry has been extensively anthologized. Her work - poetry, fiction and non-fiction is taught widely at the university level and is the subject of much academic writing and critique. NourbeSe Philip is currently the Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor.
Aisha Sasha John is a writer and performer living in Toronto. Her work has appeared in such places as Exile Quarterly, Contemporary Verse 2, Carousel and TOK 3: Writing the New Toronto. In her second year of the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing program, Aisha is working on a poetry manuscript about self-portraiture. She is proud to be part of the 2008/2009 Obsidian Theatre Company Playwrights Unit. Visit her at ai5ha.blogspot.com.
Not the Wind, Not the Flag is a duo consisting of Colin Fisher (guitar, bouzouki, ney, tenor sax, guzheng, hulusi, misc percussion) and Brandon Valdivia (trap set, mbira, slit drum, percussion).