Archives Out Loud: Italian-Canadian Literature

December 7, 2025, 11:30 – 12:30 pm
Main Stage, Salle des célébrations

Licia Canton
Lianne Moyes
Carmine Starnino

Moderated by Nancy Marrelli

There is a significant body of excellent Italian-Canadian literature available from a variety of sources in English, French, and Italian. The panel will discuss some established works as well as new voices emerging from the next generation. This session is part of the Archives Out Loud series organized by the Italian-Canadian Archives of Quebec. The panel will be followed by a reception in the office of the Italian-Canadian Community Archives of Quebec, in the basement level of Casa d’Italia.

Licia Canton has published short stories, nonfiction and poetry in English, French, Italian and a Venetian dialect. She has been translator-in-residence at the University of Hull, UK, and Writer-in-Residence at Università della Calabria, Italy. She is co-founder of Accenti Magazine and co-director of the Queer Italian-Canadian Artists Research Project (U of Toronto). She is the director of the documentary film Creative Spaces: Queer and Italian Canadian (2021). She mentors emerging writers through the Quebec Writers’ Federation Hire-a-Writer directory. For her work in culture, she was awarded the Italy in the World Prize (2018). She holds a Ph.D. from Université de Montréal and an M.A. from McGill University.

Nancy Marrelli is Director of the Italian-Canadian Archives of Quebec at the Casa d’Italia, and Archivist Emerita, Concordia University. She is also co-publisher of Véhicule Press. Her family left Italy and settled in Montreal in 1909.

Professor of English Studies at the Université de Montréal, Lianne Moyes specializes in Canadian and Anglo-Quebec literatures. She is interested in the porous and contested borders between the literatures that emerge in Montreal and has worked on writers such as Antonio D’Alfonso, Fanie Demeule, Mary di Michele, Mavis Gallant, Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, A. M. Klein, Robert Majzels, Erín Moure, and Gail Scott. She has an ongoing commitment to women’s writing and to fostering spaces for reading across languages, and was co-editor at the feminist magazine Tessera from 1993 to 2003. Since the late 1990s, she has been a member of the Association of Italian Canadian Writers.

Carmine Starnino is the Editor in Chief of The Walrus. He is the author of eight books, including Dirty Words: Selected Poems 1997–2016.