Pivot returns August 11

Pivot returns next Wednesday, and I will be your host. After careful reflection, I realized that the previous host, Carey Toane, was channeling the power of gods unknown to me when she ran the bimonthly series. I invited the lovely and talented Angela Hibbs to be my Pivot partner in crime. Join me in welcoming her and our fab readers next Wednesday! Hooray!

Pivot with Jill Battson, Mat Laporte, and Rebecca Rosenblum
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
8 p.m. at the Press Club
850 Dundas Street West
Hosted by Sachiko Murakami
PWYC ($5 suggested)

Jill Battson is an internationally published poet and poetry activist who is currently the Poet Laureate of Cobourg, Ontario. She was responsible for creating and running the successful poetry reading series The Poets’ Refuge and has initiated and produced many poetry events and was the poetry editor for Insomniac Press from 1999 to 2001. Her first book, Hard Candy, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. She has written severalplays and solo works, libretti for two short operas. Dark Star Requiem, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at Toronto’s Luminato Festival in June 2010. Jill’s third book of poems, Dark Star Requiem, was recently published by Folded & Gathered Press. Her blog is jillspoetbureau.blogspot.com.

Mat Laporte is part of an elite, one person task force called The Psychedelic Ninjas. Don’t talk about it. He hails from The Soo but has lived in many places including Montreal and Guelph, a monastery in the middle of a forest somewhere and Edmonton where among other things he sang in experimental punk bands Hypertext;theTongues, rotbottyrot and chomskyhash and started the spzw reading series. He is now doing an english undergrad degree at York University and is cofounder and coeditor of ferno house books.

Rebecca Rosenblum‘s fiction has been short-listed for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Danuta Gleed Award, longlisted for the Relit Award, and she was herself a juror for the Journey Prize 21. Her stories are have recently appeared in Maisonneuve, Room Magazine, and Canadian Notes and Queries, among others. Her first short-story collection, Once, won the Metcalf-Rooke Award and was one of Quill and Quire’s 15 Books That Mattered in 2008. Her second collection, The Big Dream, is forthcoming from Biblioasis and a chapbook, Road Trips, was just released from Frogs Hollow Press. Her blog is www.rebeccarosenblum.com