James Baldwin said, “If history were past, history wouldn’t matter. History is present… You and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history.” Writers are often thought of as existing between worlds. These writers and their books cross the livewires of recent history, attending to fractures of time, chance, and place—all streams that heighten our experiences of the present world. How do these impact the way we see ourselves, and by extension, how we make stories and lives despite these fractures? Jeremy Tiang (State of Emergency), Kyle Edwards (Small Ceremonies), and Maria Reva (Endling) discuss, in conversation with Guest Curator Canisia Lubrin.
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KYLE EDWARDS is an Anishinaabe journalist and writer from the Lake Manitoba First Nation and a member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation. He has won two National Magazine Awards in Canada and was named Emerging Indigenous Journalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists. His work has appeared in CBC, Toronto Star, and Global News, among others.
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.
MARIA REVA was born in Ukraine and grew up in Canada. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney's, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, earning a National Magazine Award. She also works as an opera librettist.
JEREMY TIANG is a novelist and playwright, and the translator of over thirty books from Chinese. He was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel State of Emergency and for his translation of Zhang Yueran's Cocoon, and he recently won an Obie Award for his play Salesman之死. Originally from Singapore, he now lives in New York City.
