Poetry Lightning Round
With:
- Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt, The Hospitality of Trees
- Alexei Perry Cox, Space
- Sabyah Seyam, On Occasion contributor
- Leigh Kotsilidis, Some of Us May Live
- Sina Queyras, On Occasion (ed.)
- Chanel Sutherland, On Occasion contributor
- Misha Solomon, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet
- Erín Moure, On Occasion contributor
- Nicole Rayiza Fong, SUBTEXT
Moderated by Jason Camlot
A wide range of local poets will share tasty snippets from their new books in a fun, fast-paced and festive Lightning Round of the most current Quebec poetry in English. Five authors of new books and five contributors to the anthology On Occasion will give you just enough to whet your appetite for more. Stay and get your new books signed after the event.
Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt is the author of the critically acclaimed Carrying War (Dundurn, 2026), featured in the Globe and Mail as one of the 36 Best Books of Summer. Her debut memoir, Peacekeeper’s Daughter (Thistledown, 2021), was a finalist for the Mavis Gallant Nonfiction Award. Tanya has two poetry collections: Chaos Theories of Goodness (Shoreline, 2022) and The Hospitality of Trees (Shoreline, 2025). She lives in North Hatley, QC.
Jason Camlot is the author of five collections of poetry including The Animal Library (DC Books, 2000), What The World Said (Mansfield, 2013), and Vlarf (McGill Queen’s, 2021), and most recently, a constellation of chapbooks (released by Vallum, Apartment 9, above/ground, No Press, and Turret House Press) presenting sections from the Shooky sessions, collaboratively composed by listening and writing, with Stuart Ross. Jason’s critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford, 2019) and the co-edited collections, Collection Thinking (Routledge, 2024), Unpacking the Personal Library (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2023), and CanLit Across Media (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019). He is Professor of English at Concordia University.
Leigh Kotsilidis has written two full-length collections of poetry, Hypotheticals (2011) and Some of Us May Live (2026), both with Coach House Books. Her poems have also appeared in journals and magazines, including The Malahat Review, Prism international, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and Hazlitt, as well as being anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English and IV Lounge Nights, among others. She is also an intermedia artist. Kotsilidis lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal).
Erín Moure is a poet and translator. She has published 19 books of poetry, and translations of more than 25 books of poetry by others from Galician, Spanish, French, and Portuguese (including Nicole Brossard, Andrés Ajens, Chantal Neveu, Rosalia de Castro, Chus Pato, Fernando Pessoa). Her most recent book is Theophylline: a poetic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (Anansi, 2023), and her most recent translation is of Galician poet Chus Pato’s Sonora (Veliz Books, 2026).
Sina Queyras is a Montreal/Tiohtià:ke-based writer, professor, editor, and literary organizer. Recent work includes Rooms (2022), a blend of memoir, poetry, and criticism offering a peek into the defining spaces of the author as a young queer writer, and My Ariel (2017), a collection riffing on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, reimagining, queering, and inhabiting its iconic poems. They are the author of multiple poetry collections, including Lemon Hound, which won the Pat Lowther and Lambda awards and Expressway, nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Queyras was also a co-editor of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (2020), which traces the essential feminist poet’s innovation, experimentation, and activism across her body of work. They recently edited On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House Books 2026).
Nicole Raziya Fong (they / she) is a poet, editor, and painter living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, Québec, Canada. They are the author of SUBTEXT (2026, Talonbooks), ORACULE (2021, Talonbooks), PERFACT (2019, Talonbooks), and other works. Writing appears in journals including The Capilano Review, carte blanche, and Social Text. Their work has received support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. Their work seeks to delimit and reconstruct immaterial ampoules of psychic experience, coaxing the incorporeal into inhabiting a more muscular physique.
Sabyah Seyam is a Palestinian writer born and currently based in Tiohtià:ke (so-called Montreal). She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University, where she is currently completing her MA in the same program. She was a poetry editor of Soliloquies Anthology. Her publications include Yolk, Frontier Poetry, The Malahat Review, and Coach House’s 2026 anthology, On Occasion: Poems for the People. Sabyah’s current writerly interests include colonized identities, the working class, the power of language, and the power of privacy in a hyper-connected world.
Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has appeared in journals across Canada and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, 2026, and 2027 (Biblioasis) and in On Occasion: Poems for the People (Coach House). He is a student in Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program. He is the author of three chapbooks and his full-length debut, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, was released by Brick Books in March 2026.
Chanel Sutherland is a Vincentian Canadian writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She won the 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize and was named one of CBC Books 30 Writers to Watch in 2022. Chanel is also the overall winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She has a BA in English literature from Concordia University and lives in Montreal, Quebec. Her first collection of short stories, titled Layaway Child, is out now from House of Anansi.