Literary Artshare at Artword Artbar, 15 Colbourne Street, hosted by poet James Deahl.
Wednesday Oct 20 at 7:30: featured authors Michael Mirolla, Karen Shenfeld and Tim Quinn. Also reading: Gertrude Olga Down, G.W. Down, David Haskins, Shane Neilson.
Wednesday November 17 at 7:30 pm: “The Dream Catcher” evening, featuring authors published in the Canadian writing issue of The Dream Catcher, a British literary anthology. Featured readers: Paul Sutherland and Afifa Emutallah Sutherland. Also reading: James Deahl, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Cornelia Hoogland, David Haskins, Donna Langevin
Michael Mirolla, biography:
Born in Italy, and arriving in Canada at the age of five, Michael Mirolla calls himself a Montreal-Toronto corridor writer (because he spends so much time travelling between the two cities). He’s a novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. Publications include the novel Berlin (a finalist for the 2009 Indie Book and National Best Books Awards), two short story collections The Formal Logic of Emotion (recently translated into Italian) and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales, and two collections of poetry the English-Italian bilingual Interstellar Distances/Distanze Interstellari and Light And Time. A second novel, The Facility, is scheduled for publication in December 2010. His short story, A Theory of Discontinuous Existence, was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, while another short story, The Sand Flea, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A poem, Blind Alley,was shortlisted for the Winston Collins/Descant Prize for the Best Canadian Poem in 2007. His short fiction and poetry has been published in numerous journals in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, including several anthologies such as Event’s Peace & War, Telling Differences: New English Fiction from Quebec, Tesseracts 2: Canadian Science Fiction, The Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing, New Wave of Speculative Fiction Book 1, and The Best of Foliate Oak.
Three of his plays Gargoyles, Snails, and A Revised Experiment have received professional production. Gargoyles was awarded the Solange Karsh Medal as first prize winner of the Canadian Playwriting Competition. He has also been the recipient of the Macmillan Prize in Creative Writing; and a Canada Council Arts Award.
After decades of maintaining his sanity despite being holed up in the garret of his own mind, Michael finally flipped in January of this year with the purchase, along with partner Connie Guzzo McParland, of a literary publishing house: Guernica Editions.
