The writer is viewed as a kind of arbiter, making sense of things, the world, and the self—especially when the dominant characteristics of the times are confusion and despair. As it relates to personhood and stewardship, storytelling during high-crisis moments in the world is about looking long and close at the root fractures of the moment and how they compel human action in all its complicated realms. Guest Curator Canisia Lubrin is joined for a luminous conversation about the role of the writer in times of crisis by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek (We, The Kindling), Saeed Teebi (You Will Not Kill Our Imagination), and Madeleine Thien (The Book of Records).
Saeed Teebi’s appearance presented thanks to the generous support of Catherine Ross and David Ewart.
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Event Participants:
OTONIYA J. OKOT BITEK has written three books of poetry—100 Days, A is for Acholi, and Song and Dread. She lives and works in Kingston, Ontario. We, the Kindling is her first novel.
CANISIA LUBRIN, author of Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst, has won the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Windham-Campbell Prize. She coordinates the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Guelph and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. Her debut fiction, Code Noir: Metamorphoses, won the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. She is the 2025 Vancouver Writers Fest Guest Curator.
SAEED TEEBI is an award-winning writer and lawyer. His debut short story collection, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for several awards, including the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize. His nonfiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail and The New Quarterly. Born in Kuwait, he resettled in the United States, then Canada. He now lives in Toronto.
MADELEINE THIEN has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. In 2024, she received the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award, honouring a writer in mid-career. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal and teaches part-time at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York.
