Summer Literary Seminars: Friday, October 11th at 7pm!

The Montreal-based, Concordia-affiliated Summer Literary Seminars, one of the world’s most dynamic international literary programs, and the only one operating on three continents, will be bringing the writing of its outstanding international faculty and participants to its hometown audience in a monthly reading series at Drawn and Quarterly. The opening (readings combined with hazy recollections, misty water-colored memories) will feature people who have directed the program over the 15 years of its existence: past program directors Jeff Parker and Mike Spry, the current director Ann Ward, and the SLS founding director Mikhail Iossel.

USSR-born Mikhail Iossel is the author of “Every Hunter Wants to Know,” a collection of stories (W.W.Norton), and co-editor (with Jeff Parker) of “Amerika” (Dalkey Archive) and “Rasskazy” (Tin House / Bloomsbury), anthologies of contemporary Russian writing. He has been awarded the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among others. His stories have appeared, both in English and in Russian, in numerous publications, such as The New Yorker, The Literarian, Agni Review, The North American Review, and others, and were translated into a number of languages and anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. He teaches writing at Concordia University.

Jeff Parker is the author of the novel Ovenman and the story collection The Taste of Penny. He worked with the SLS St. Petersburg, Russia, program from 1999-2008, serving many years as the Russia Program Director. With Mikhail Iossel he co-edited two collections of contemporary Russian writing, and his new nonfiction book about Russia will be published by Harper Collins Canada in Summer 2014. He previously taught and the University of Toronto and currently teaches in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Mike Spry is the Editor-in-Chief of The Barnstormer and co-host of Kaufman & Spry. He's the author of JACK (Snare Books, 2008), which was shortlisted for the 2009 Quebec Writers’ Federation A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and he was longlisted for the 2010 Journey Prize. His most recent work is Distillery Songs (Insomniac Press, 2011), which was shortlisted for the 2012 ReLit Award. Bourbon & Eventide is forthcoming from Invisible Publishing in the spring.

Ann Ward is a writer and editor, as well as Program Director for the Summer Literary Seminars. She co-founded Montreal chapbook press WithWords in 2006 and now edits and freelances for several literary magazines. You can find her most recent writing in Stroboscope, Dragnet, and Contemporary Verse 2.

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Friday, October 11th at 7 pm! 211 Bernard Ouest!