Guernica Editions Showcase

December 6, 2025, 3:30 – 5 pm
Rotunda

An event celebrating Guernica Editions’ longstanding presence in Quebec, featuring readings by authors with new releases this year, including fiction, memoir, and poetry. With the purchase of a book, guests will be entered into a raffle to win a selection of Guernica titles.

• Michael Carin, Edisson & Jeremiah
• Ann Cavlovic, Count on Me
• Jonathan Kaplansky and Francis Catalano, The Origin of the Future
• Andreas Kessaris, The Grand Tour of Park Ex
• Bunmi Oyinsan, A Ladder of Bones
• Meryem Yildiz, Backbone
• Contributors from The Nuances of Love

Michael Carin trained as a political theorist at McGill University, where he also studied under the godfather of Canadian literature, Hugh MacLennan. He is the author of several novels, including Five Hundred Keys, The Kremlin Papers, and the work of alternate history Churchill at Munich. His non-fiction response to the Holocaust, The Future Jew, won him wide recognition as a provocative secular humanist. Mr. Carin lives in Montreal.

Poet, novelist, short story writer and essayist born in Montreal, Francis Catalano won the Quebecor Prize of the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival for Qu’une lueur des lieux (2010) and the La Métropole Prize of Excellence for Climax (2022). As a translator of Italian poetry, he won the John Glassco Prize in 2006 for Instructions pour la lecture d’un journal de Valerio Magrelli.

Ann Cavlovic’s fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Canadian literary magazines and news media, such as Event, The Fiddlehead, Grain, PRISM International, The Globe & Mail, and CBC. She lives in Western Quebec. 

Connie Guzzo McParland, president and co-director of Guernica Editions, holds a BA in Italian Literature and a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University. She is the author of The Girls of Piazza D’amore (2013), The Women of Saturn (2017), Le Donne di Saturno (2019), An opera in 3 Acts/Un opéra en trois actes (2021), and The Twelfth Room, a translation of La Dodicesima Stanza.

Jonathan Kaplansky is a literary translator of French in Montreal. He won a French Voices Award to translate Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s Things Seen and was shortlisted for the David Booth Award for Jonathan Bécotte’s Like a Hurricane. He has also translated works by Hélène Dorion, Lise Gauvin, Louis- Philippe Hébert, Hélène Rioux and Lise Tremblay.

Andreas Kessaris grew up in Montreal’s Park Extension district, the son of Greek immigrants. He graduated from Dawson College and Concordia University, earning a BA in Communications & English. His column, Read On! with Andreas Kessaris, was a popular feature in the West-End community paper The Local Herald. His writing has also appeared on Suite101.com, in the literary journal The Write Place, on the Montreal entertainment website Curtainsup.tv, The Miramichi Reader, and The Montreal Review of Books. His first book, The Butcher of Park Ex & Other Semi-Truthful Tales, was released in 2020 to great acclaim.

Bunmi Oyinsan is a Nigerian/Canadian writer. From novels to scripts for radio, television, and the theatre, she has contributed to both the nonfiction and fiction canons of African literature. Oyinsan gained her MA focusing on orature and literature from Saint Mary’s University and a Ph.D. from York University. She is the writer, producer, and presenter for the Sankofa Pan African Series, which has over 100K subscribers and over 5 million views. She is a winner of the Matatu Prize for her YA novel Fabulous Four and has been nominated for THEMA’s Best Film Script. Her novel Three Women was nominated for the Flora Nwapa Prize for Women’s Literature in 2006. Born in Lagos, she lives in Bowmanville, Ontario.

Meryem Yildiz is a Turkish-Canadian poet from Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Her poems have appeared in journals across the country, including Arc Poetry Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, PRISM International, The Fiddlehead, and yolk, among others. In 2022, she won The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry as well as the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s carte blanche Prize. She’s also a poetry editor at LBRNTH, a queer literature and arts magazine, which she co-edits with Misha Solomon. In her debut collection, Backbone, Meryem explores the complexities of identity across geographies, and reveals how friendship and memory shape the search for home.