Spring ForeWord
Join us for five days of festival-like fun, bringing together readers, writers, storytellers and booksellers in Kjipuktuk/Halifax!
Schedule-at-a-Glance
All shows: Doors open at 6:30PM, event begins at 7:00PM.
Best Story Ever
Tuesday April 23 | Cafe Lara
Pamela Mulloy reading, Sharon Bala and Lisa Moore in conversation with Ryan Turner
Wednesday April 24 | Park Place Theatre
Brandon Taylor in conversation with Sharon Bala
Thursday April 25 | Park Place Theatre
Colleen Coco Collins in conversation with Luke Hathaway
Friday April 26 | Trident Bookseller & Cafe
Independent Bookstore Day
Saturday April 27 | All day!
Thursday April 25 | 7pm Park Place Theatre
Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. We are thrilled to have him in Halifax, in conversation with Sharon Bala, on Thursday April 25 at Park Place Theatre. Tickets are $8, or buy a Spring ForeWord all-access pass for $20.
Wednesday April 24 | 7pm Park Place Theatre
Lisa Moore
Lisa Moore is a writer of short stories and novels from St. John’s. She has won the Commonwealth Fiction Prize, CBC’s Canada Reads, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award and received nominations for the Man Booker Prize, Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her third novel, Caught, was adapted into a CBC television series. Moore often sets her stories in Newfoundland, where she was born, raised, and lives with her family. She is the editor of Best Canadian Stories 2024, and is a verified festival favourite. We could not be happier to welcome her back to Halifax to join Sharon Bala and Ryan Turner in conversation about the art and science of the short story. Tickets are $8, or buy a Spring ForeWord all-access pass for $20.
Wednesday April 24 | 7pm Park Place Theatre
Sharon Bala
Sharon Bala’s best-selling debut novel, The Boat People, won the 2020 Newfoundland & Labrador Book Award and the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, was short listed for several awards, and is in translation in four languages. She won the Writers’ Trust/ McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize in 2017. Her short fiction has been published in: Best Canadian Stories 2024, The Journey Prize 29, Hazlitt, Grain, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere. Sharon is a member of The Port Authority, a St. John’s writing group. We're big fans of Sharon's and we're excited to have her in town to join Lisa Moore and Ryan Turner in conversation on Wednesday, April 24, and then to interview Brandon Taylor on Thursday, April 25. Tickets for each event are $8, or buy a Spring ForeWord all-access pass for $20.
Wednesday April 24 | 7pm Park Place Theatre
Pamela Mulloy
Pamela Mulloy has published two novels, The Deserters (Véhicule Press, 2018) and As Little As Nothing (ECW Press, 2022). Her creative nonfiction book Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel will be published in April 2024. She is the editor of The New Quarterly and the creative director of the Wild Writers Literary Festival. She has lived in Poland, England, the United States and now lives in Ontario. We're delighted to welcome her to Halifax to read from Off the Tracks. Tickets are $8, or buy a Spring ForeWord all-access pass for $20.
Friday April 26 | 7pm Trident Cafe
Colleen Coco Collins
Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. She’s worked as a gallery director, in forestry, fossil preparation, and renovation; as an autism support worker, teacher, and women’s shelter counsellor. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. Hailing from Antler River/Deshkan Ziibiing/London, Ontario, Coco has studied at universities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Zealand, and Ireland. She lives litorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox. Her debut book of poetry, Sorry About the Fire, "is the story of a dark time, in which the strike of language on the texture of reality sounds a sharp off-note—and sparks; and/or the story of a light-drenched time in which a sensibility cracks open, beholding/becoming," says poet Luke Hathaway, with whom Colleen will be in conversation on Friday, April 26. Register in advance for this free event.
Tuesday April 23 | 7pm Cafe Lara
Best Stories Ever
Join us at Cafe Lara for four of the best stories we've heard, told by four of the best storytellers. The bar will be open, the laughs will be rolling, and the plot will be thickening. Tickets are $8, or buy a Spring ForeWord all-access pass for $20.
Saturday April 27
Indie Bookstore Day
Celebrate Independent Bookstore Day with our co-conspirator King's Co-op Bookstore. We can't reveal too much right now, but we're told you can expect some Indie Bookstore Day giveaways, discounts, and other fun surprises. Follow King's Co-op Bookstore on social media for more details: @kingscoopbookstore on Instagram, and @kingsbookstore on FB/twitter.
If you would like to attend the programming and cannot afford a ticket, please email us and we will give you a ticket, no questions asked.
