Toronto! Public reading: writers in exile!

- David Cozac -
(Coordinator, Programs and Writers in Exile Network PEN Canada)

Hello everyone, Please attend!

Date & Time: Nov. 21, 2005 at  8 pm
Location: Gladstone Hotel Ballroom (1214 Queen Street West) 
Fee: Suggested donation: $5 (to cover the cost of the event)

An evening of readings by: Steven Heighton, Emma Beltran and other writers in exile...this means you! We will be hosting an open mic for exiled writers after Steven and Emma read. Would you please attend and share your work with us? You can sign up before the event or at the event. We ask that you time your reading to 1-2 minutes so that we offer this opportunity to many writers. It would be wonderful to bring the club members together once again in flesh and blood, instead of just in cyberspace, so I hope that you will attend. I would like to meet all of you. I have enjoyed being a part of this list.

Also, we will be holding additional readings in the future. We have tentatively booked March 27 and May 29. If you would like to be involved with the planning, Maggie and I would love your input, experience, and help. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach me at pwright@pencanada.ca, or at the PEN office at 416-703-8448 ext. 25 on Thursdays and Fridays.

Cheers - Pike Wright

Writers' Biographies:

Steven Heighton
Steven Heighton is the author, most recently, of a novel, Afterlands, and a poetry collection, The Address  Book. He has also published The Shadow Boxer, a novel which appeared with Knopf in  Canada and was also published by Granta Books in Britain and Australia, by Houghton Mifflin in the USA (a Publishers' Weekly Book of the Year, 2002), and in Italy. Other books include Flight Paths of the Emperor (listed by Amazon.ca as one of Canada's ten best short  story collections) and The Ecstasy of Skeptics. His work is translated into eight languages, has been internationally anthologised, and has been nominated for the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, and Britain's W.H. Smith Award (best book of the year). He has received the Air Canada Prize, the Gerald Lampert Award, Gold Medals for Fiction and for Poetry in the National Magazine Awards, and the Petra Kenney Prize. He lives with his family in Kingston, Ontario.

Emma Beltran
is from Tilzapotla in the southern state of Morelos, Mexico. Since 1994, she was involved in the struggle of indigenous peoples throughout Mexico. Also in that year she began her studies in Social Communication at the Autonomous Metropolitan University Xochimilco in Mexico City. She went to work in different communities in Chiapas, including as a human rights observer, in the dialogue of the peace accords between the federal government and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN); facilitating poetry workshops, popular theatre and alternative journalism for women and children; and in literacy projects. In her collaborative work in Mexico City, Beltran engaged in different activities: disseminating information through lectures, writing articles, meetings, concerts, radio and in talks. Beltran's activism made her the subject of harassment, political charges, kidnapping and torture, by the Mexican National Army in March 2001. In addition to her Social Communication studies, she has a lot of experience in popular theatre and poetry.

David Cozac
Coordinator, Programs and Writers in Exile Network
PEN Canada for FREEDOM of EXPRESSION!
Tel: 416 703 8448 x24
E-mail: dcozac@pencanada.ca
Web: www.pencanada.ca

Informed by:
Thomas S. Saras
President, NEPMCC 
National Ethnic Press 
and Media Council Of Canada!
Phone: 416 – 921 4229 
416 854 4229 Cell 
saras@patrides.com                                                    saras@nepmcc.ca