Writers Read Presents Canisia Lubrin and Christina Sharpe

On Wednesday, March 27th, Writers Read will be joined for a reading by Griffin Prize-winning poet and novelist Canisia Lubrin and writer, Professor, and Canadian Research Chair member in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University Christina Sharpe. The event will take place in Concordia University’s John Molson Building (1600 Boulevard De Maisonneuve Ouest), Room 9D from 7pm-9pm. This event is free and open to all.

Canisia Lubrin is an acclaimed poet, editor, and writer. Her books of poetry include Voodoo Hypothesis (2017), which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book and was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and The Dyzgraph*st (2020), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. Lubrin’s fiction debut, Code Noir (2024), has been described by Dionne Brand as “storytelling at its deepest and most intimate.” Lubrin’s writings explore ideas of social justice and the relationship between limitation and possibility in regards to art, form, and language.

Christina Sharpe is a writer, professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg, and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian and the Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010), and Ordinary Notes (Knopf Canada, 2023), which won the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for The National Book Award.

Writers Read is part of Concordia University’s Creative Writing program and is supported by the Department of English and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Writers Read, directed by Professor Sina Queyras since 2011, invites renowned and emerging authors, both Canadian and international, to read from and discuss their work with students and local audiences. In addition to readings, the series includes Master Classes and professional developmental activities spanning the school year. For updates, follow our Instagram @writersreadconcordia

*Credit for the photograph of Canisia Lubrin goes to Rachel Eliza Griffiths