Presented in partnership with Vancouver Public Library.
This Incite event is all about love—romantic, familial, tender, fierce, gut-wrenching, and wondrous love. Three LGBTQ+ authors join us on-stage to discuss their highly anticipated novels, which boldly explore love in all its expressions.
In Christina Cooke’s searing debut novel, Broughtupsy, Akúa returns home to Jamaica for the first time in ten years and is forced to confront the difficult reality of being gay in a deeply religious family, and of what it means to feel at home.
Anne Fleming’s Curiosities is a genre- and gender-bending historical novel with a modern twist. We follow a present-day amateur historian, Anne, as she pieces together seventeenth-century manuscripts that tell conflicting stories about two lovers, living in a time when there were no labels for who they might truly be.
What if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out? Myriam Lacroix’s How It Works Out explores just this, as a queer love story plays out in many alternate realities to paint a darkly comic portrait of love’s many promises and perils.
Join us for a vivacious conversation, as the authors sit down to discuss their books with author Candie Tanaka.
Books will be for sale at the event courtesy of Book Warehouse, a division of Black Bond Books. Can’t make the event time? Register for the livestream option and we’ll send you a link to watch the recording!
Join us for Incite all season, in-person or online! This readings series offers conversations with celebrated authors and emerging talents every two weeks from January to June. Incite is free and open to all.
Participants and Speakers
Christina Cooke
CHRISTINA COOKE’s writing has previously appeared in PRISM international, The Caribbean Writer, Prairie Schooner, Epiphany: A Literary Journal, and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, Writers’ Trust M&S Journey Prize winner, and 2022 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award winner, she holds an MA from the University of New Brunswick and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Born in Jamaica, Christina is now a Canadian citizen who lives and writes in New York City.
Anne Fleming
ANNE FLEMING is the author of Pool-Hopping & Other Stories (Raincoast, 1998), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Award, as well as the much-praised novel, Anomaly (Raincoast, 2005). She is also the author of a middle-grade novel, The Goat (Groundwood, 2017), which was named one of the Top Ten Children’s Books of the Year by The New York Public Library and the Wall Street Journal. Anne lives in Victoria, BC.
Myriam Lacroix
MYRIAM LACROIX was born in Montreal to a Québécois mother and a Moroccan father, and currently lives in Vancouver. She has a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was editor in chief of Salt Hill Journal and received the New York Public Humanities Fellowship for creating Out-Front, an LGBTQ+ writing group whose goal was to expand the possibilities of queer writing.
Candie Tanaka
CANDIE TANAKA is a multiracial trans writer, artist and librarian challenging the binaries continually reconstructed between self and other while exploring archive and memory in a socio-political context. They are a creative writing graduate of The Writer’s Studio program at Simon Fraser University and have a BFA in Intermedia from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. Their first YA book, Baby Drag Queen was published with Orca Books in April 2023. They’ve also published work in Resonance: Essays on the Craft of Life and Writing with Anvil Press and This Will Only Take A Minute: Canadian Flash Fiction with Guernica Editions.