Literary Death Match – $20 Limited Seating

[gdlr_button href="https://shop.artscommons.ca/single/selectSeating.aspx?p=10988&id=3BD6B62D-0016-488E-8887-51D5CABC4D80" target="_self" size="medium" background="#358CCB" color="#ffffff" border_color="#999999"]Buy Tickets[/gdlr_button] [gdlr_space height="20px"] A thrilling mix of authors take the stage to perform their most electric passages in seven minutes before a judging panel made up of their peers and cheered on by a boisterious audience. Dubbed "the most entertaining reading series ever" by the Los Angeles Times, the event is co-created and hosted by Adrian Todd Zuniga. Cash bar available. Limited Seating.

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About the Lineup

Jillian Christmas

Born and raised in Markham, Ontario, Jillian Christmas serves as Artistic Director of Verses Festival of Words. An enthusiastic organizer and activist in the Canadian arts community, Christmas’s focus is to increase anti-oppression initiatives in spoken word. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, such as the Huffington Post, and in a number of collections including Matrix New Queer Writing (issue 98), The Post Feminist Post, Plenitude Magazine, Room Magazine and the celebrated anthology The Great Black North. Christmas has developed and executed programs in partnership with Toronto Poetry Project, Wordplay, Brendan McLeod’s Travelling Slam, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Opera, and the CULTCH Mentorship, and facilitated spoken word workshops for youth and adults across the country.

C.C. Humphreys

Born in Toronto, raised in London, U.K., C.C. Humphreys is an actor, playwright, fight choreographer and novelist. His first job out of school was as a motorcycle messenger, based in St Giles, where much of his most recents novels, Plague and now Fire, take place. Humphreys has written nine historical fiction novels, including The French Executioner, the Jack Absolute series, Vlad and Shakespeare's Rebel. He lives in Salt Spring Island, B.C.

Mark Leiren-Young

Mark Leiren-Young is the author of two comic memoirs, Free Magic Secrets Revealed and Never Shoot a Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo, which won the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and was also adapted for the stage. He won the Jack Webster Award for his CBC Ideas radio documentary Moby Doll: The Whale that Changed the World. Leiren-Young is currently finishing a feature length film on the Moby Doll, the subject of his new book. His other books include The Green Chain: Nothing is Ever Clear Cut and This Crazy Time written with the environmentalist Tzeporah Berman. His stage plays have been produced throughout Canada and the US and have also been seen in Europe and Australia. As a journalist Leiren-Young has written for TIME, Maclean’s, The Hollywood Reporter, The Walrus and most of Canada’s daily newspapers.

Kenneth Oppel

Kenneth Oppel is the Governor General’s Literary Award winning author of the Airborn series and the Silverwing Saga, which have sold over a million copies worldwide. Half Brother won both the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year for Children Award, as well as their Young Adult Book Award — the first time in the awards' history the same title has won both honours. Oppel lives in Toronto with his wife and three children.

Aaron Paquette

Aaron Paquette is a First Nations/Métis artist and public speaker. He is the founder of Cree8 Success, an artist-initiated Education & Engagement Conference directed toward youth and teachers. Lightfinder is written and illustrated by Paquette, and is his first novel in a planned series that follows the stories of two Cree siblings. The book won the 2015 Burt Award for First Nations, Metis and Inuit Literature.

Alissa York

Alissa York's past novels include the internationally acclaimed Mercy, Effigy (shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize) and Fauna. She is also the author of the short fiction collection, Any Given Power, stories from which have won the Journey Prize and the Bronwen Wallace Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Globe and Mail and Canadian Geographic among others. York's interest in the natural world permeates her work, and earlier in her life she once considered a career in zoology or biology. Born in Athabasca, Alberta, York has lived all over Canada and now resides in Toronto with her husband, artist Clive Holden.

Andi Zeisler

Andi Zeisler is the cofounder and creative director of Bitch Media, the nonprofit organization that since 1996 has published the award-winning magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. She has written about feminism, activism, and popular culture for Ms., Salon, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Women’s Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Oregon Humanities. She is the co-editor of BitchFest: 10 Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine, and the author of Feminism and Pop Culture. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. [gdlr_button href="https://shop.artscommons.ca/single/selectSeating.aspx?p=10988&id=3BD6B62D-0016-488E-8887-51D5CABC4D80" target="_self" size="medium" background="#358CCB" color="#ffffff" border_color="#999999"]Buy Tickets[/gdlr_button]