Vida Cross is a Visiting Fulbright Research Chair who has come to the University of Windsor at the invitation of Leddy Library and the Black Scholars Institute. She has been conducting intensive research towards a creative writing project, focusing on Underground Railroad journeys to the Detroit River Borderlands and especially to Canadian communities in the region. Vida is a blues poet, a two-time Pushcart nominee, a Carl Sandburg Literary Award honoree and a Cave Canem Fellow. Vida’s work references her ancestry as a third generation Chigagoan as well as the work of Archibald J. Motley Jr. and Langston Hughes. Vida’s work has appeared in multiple journals and anthologies such as The Creativity and Constraint Anthology for Wising Up Press, A Civil Rights Retrospective with the Black Earth Institute, Tabula Poetica with Chapman University, Transitions Magazine at the Hutchinson Institute, the Cave Canem Anthology XII, The Literary Review with Fairleigh Dickinson University, Reed Magazine at Reed College, and The Journal of Film and Video from The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry collection Bronzeville at Night: 1949 was published by Avst Press in 2017. Vida Cross holds an MFA in Writing and an MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in English from Iowa State University and a BA from Knox College. She is a faculty member at Milwaukee Area Technical College and Chairperson of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission.

https://vidacross.com/bio

The Virtual Black History Presentation Vida recorded for the museum can be found here: https://youtu.be/BlMchbCSPYA?si=0_ca3rOOnfPt-6uy

Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Since then, she’s produced a collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, a short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, and a poetry chapbook, the leaves of grass are dreaming. Her debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, is being published this month by Windsor’s Palimpsest Press.
Hollay is a board member of the League of Canadian Poets, the co-chair of the League's BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of the region in which she lives. She’s also a host on The New Books Network. and a host of HOWL—the literary arts show—on 89.5 CIUT FM.

https://www.hollayghadery.ca/

https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/the-unravelling-of-ou-hollay-ghadery/

Lisa de Nikolits is the award-winning author of twelve published novels.

She has appeared on recommended reading lists for Open Book Toronto, 49th Shelf, Chatelaine, Canadian Living, Hello! Canada, the Quill & Quire, and most recently, the CBC’s 65 works of Canadian fiction to watch for in Fall 2022. Her book The Occult Persuasion and The Anarchist’s Solution was longlisted for a Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of The Fantastic, and The Rage Room was a finalist in the International Book Awards, 2021. Her short fiction and poetry have also been published in various international anthologies and journals. Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits came to Canada in 2000. She lives and writes in the Beaches in Toronto. The book we’re talking about today is her latest, Mad Dog and the Sea Dragon, a modern noir novel from Inanna Press

https://www.lisawriter.com/

https://inanna.ca/product/mad-dog-and-the-sea-dragon/