About this Course

Join award-winning writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo in conversation with award-winning poet, writer and scholar, Pamela Mordecai, as they discuss the vast landscape of own voices literature and their roles as storytellers. This program is presented as part of the Ancestral Voices series. Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and grew up in Trinidad. She is an author and multimedia visual artist. Her first collection of short stories, Out on Main Street, was published in 1993, beginning her literary career. Mootoo’s most recent novel Polar Vortex, was also shortlisted for the Giller Prize. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Predicament of Or and Cane|Fire. Mootoo was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and the Writers Trust Engle/Findley Award. She lives in Southern Ontario. Pamela (Pam) Mordecai was born in Jamaica and educated there and in the USA. Her family immigrated to Canada in 1994. A former language arts teacher with a PhD in English, she was for fourteen years editor of the Caribbean Journal of Education. The author of over thirty books including textbooks, children's books, anthologies, nine collections of poetry, a reference work on Jamaica, a collection of short fiction and a novel, her creative and critical writing appears in numerous journals, as well as in major anthologies of Caribbean and African-Canadian literature. Mordecai is known internationally for her children's poems, and in 2010 her play, El Numero Uno had its world premiere at the Loraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People and in 2016 at the Edna Manley School for the Performing and Visual Arts. In spring 2014, she was a fellow at Yaddo artists' community in upstate New York (yaddo.org). Pamela’s debut novel Red Jacket was one of 5 books shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award in 2015. She lives in Toronto.