readings and chapbook launches by:
Stephanie Bolster (Montreal), Mark Goldstein (Toronto), Cara Goodwin (Ottawa), Sonja Greckol (Toronto), Harold Hoefle (Ottawa), James Spyker (Toronto) + Grant Wilkins (Ottawa)
lovingly
hosted by above/ground press editor/publisher rob mclennan
SATURDAY,
AUGUST 22, 2026 at Anina’s Café, 280 Joffre-Bélanger Way
7pm
door/7:30pm reading
$10
at the door / cash or e-transfer / includes 2 chapbooks (of your choice!
[see the report here from last year’s event; and don't forget the 33rd anniversary sale, happening until September 1st!]
Author biographies:
Stephanie Bolster’s latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, appeared with Palimpsest Press in fall 2025. Excerpts from the book were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2019. Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated into French as Pierre Blanche. Her poems have also been translated into Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.
Born in Cold Lake, Alberta, on a rainy April day in 1992, Cara Goodwin is the daughter of a beautiful Cree mother and a doting military father. Her early years were shaped by movement across the plains: visits to her mother’s relations on reserve and months spent with her Kokum in British Columbia; a move to Oromocto, New Brunswick, at age eight, where she developed an East Coast sense of humour; and a relocation to Yellowknife at fifteen, where she lived until high school graduation.
After a year abroad in Australia at eighteen—where she briefly fancied herself a mysterious foreign waitress before finding work milking cows—Cara moved to Ottawa at nineteen for school. There, she became roommates with her future best friend and has built a chosen family of her own. Now thirty-four, and a proud member of Fort McMurray 468 First Nation, she is focused on deepening her connection to her Cree heritage and considering how to leave the planet in a better place for her nieces.
An Ottawa-based poet, her work has appeared in Bywords, flo. literary magazine, and Room. Over the past five years, she has received two Honourable Mentions for the John Newlove Award and was shortlisted for Room’s Annual Poetry Prize in 2023. In 2025 read as a featured performer for the Riverbed Reading Series, where her poems traced her ancestral roots across what is now called Canada. Cara holds a BA (Hons.) in Social Communications and has completed numerous writing diploma and certificate programs over the years.
Cara Goodwin will be launching her above/ground press debut, Map of What Was Taken (2026).
Mark Goldstein is a writer, editor, translator, and graphic artist. His work includes the serial poem Endlossong (forthcoming), his book-length translation of poems by Paul Celan, Thricelandium (2024), his translation of Kafka's novel, The Trial, as Her Process (2021), poems, essays, and interviews published as Part Thief, Part Carpenter (2021), his long poem, Form of Forms (2012), which was a finalist for the International Stiftung Buchkunst 2014 competition in Lipzig, as well as his poem collection, Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (2010), and After Rilke (2008). Moreover, he co-edited AnyWord: A Festschrift for Phil Hall (2024), as well as the virtual anthology Paul Celan/100 (2020). He can be found online at markgoldstein.ca
Mark Goldstein will be launching his above/ground press debut, The Common Dark (2026).
Sonja Greckol lives in Tkaronto and is grateful for subways, LRTs and bike lanes wherever. No Hay Linea En El Tiempo / No Line in Time (Manofalsa Press (Lima/Mexico City) is her latest book. She published Monitoring Station (2023), No Line in Time (2018), Skein of Days (2014) and Gravity Matters (2008). Monitoring Station was listed for the Robert Kroetsch Award, No Line in Time for the LCP Raymond P. Souster Award. Her long poem 'No Line in Time' won the 2017 Briar Patch Writing in the Margins Poetry Contest. Her translation of Rosío Cerón’s ‘Trances’ appeared in Jan 2025 Asymptote Journal and above/ground press published her translation of Cerón's Materia Oscura as Dark Matter, Dark Matter —Diverted. She is the founding poetry editor of Women and Environments International and a member of the Feminist Caucus (LCP). sonjagreckol.com
Harold Hoefle’s poems have won the Bliss Carman Award, the Great Blue Heron Poetry Award (2014), and a National Magazine Awards silver medal. His debut collection of poems, The Night Chorus, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He has also published a collection of short-fiction called The Mountain Clinic (Oberon Press). Harold lives in Ottawa, teaches in Montreal.
Harold Hoefle will be launching his above/ground press debut, Leaning In (2026).
James Spyker is a book and paper artist based in Toronto. He lives in that building where you visited your great aunt when you were a kid. He occasionally returns to writing when blank pages become too much to bear.
James Spyker will be launching his above/ground press debut, Bedtime stories for my imaginary fans (2026).
Grant Wilkins is an occasional poet, printer and papermaker who has made a practice of doing strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History & Classical Civilization and in English, and he’s working on another one in Art History. He lives in Ottawa on the unceded and unsurrendered land of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people.
Grant Wilkins will be launching his sixth above/ground press chapbook, provocations (2026).
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