W&W Spring 2019 cover.qxp_Layout 1 11/20/18 7:44 AM Page 1 NOMINATED AND AWARD-WINNING TITLES S S H H O O R R T T W L L I I I N S S N T T E E E R D D 2018 Moonbeam Children’s 2018 Fred Cogswell Award for 2018 Raymond Souster Book Awards Excellence in Poetry Award S H O R T L W W I I I S N N T N N E E E D R R 2018 RBC Taylor Prize 2017 Alcuin Society Award 2017 Hamilton Literary for Poetry Award for Non-fiction W W W I I I N N N N N N WOLSAK & WYNN E E E R R R CatalogueCatalogue Spring Spring 20192019 2017 Governor General’s Award 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary 2017 Canadian Authors Assoc. for Poetry Award for Poetry Award for Poetry dedicated to Publishing clear, Passionate canadian Voices Wolsak and Wynn is an eccentric literary press based in the heart of Hamilton, Ontario. With steel mills on one side of us, the Niagara Escarpment on the other and Toronto somewhere off in the distance, we spend our time producing brilliant, highly individual and sometimes provocative books. With over thirty years of publishing behind us, we’ve won a number of awards for our books, from the Governor General’s Award for Poetry to the Pigskin Peter’s Award for Nominally Narrative Canadian Cartooning. Wolsak and Wynn publishes poetry, fiction and non-fiction for nearly every taste. About our imprints: Buckrider Books features cutting-edge poetry and genre- bending fiction that challenge everyday literary conventions. On the outskirts of the mainstream, we feel these books represent the best that contemporary literature has to offer. In 2017, senior editor Paul Vermeersch announced the formation of an editorial advisory board made up of poet Canisia Lubrin, novelist Jen Sookfong Lee and Griffin Prize– winning poet Jordan Abel. James Street North Books focuses on telling the stories of Hamilton, and the area around it, by the authors who live here. From histories of our institutions to collections of poems that capture the essence of our neighbourhoods, these books know our city intimately. Poplar Press is devoted to books you want to read, rather than the books you perhaps should be reading. Whether the stories involve young heroes fending off giant centipedes or childhood memories of snails escaping the cooking pot, along with a recipe for the snails, these books will keep you turning pages. • www.wolsakandwynn.ca • facebook.com/groups/ wolsakandwynn/ Follow us on twitter.com/wolsakandwynn instagram.com/wolsakandwynn/ sociAl mediA: • • • pinterest.com/wolsakandwynn/ • wolsakandwynn.tumblr.com/ • youtube.com/user/wandwynn Wolsak and Wynn gratefully acknowledges the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support. e Western Alienation Merit Badge By Nancy Jo Cullen A queer daughter returns home to save her family from the National energy Program. Set in Calgary in 1982, during the recession that arrived on the heels of Canada’s National Energy Program, The Western Alienation Merit Badge follows the Murray family as they struggle with grief and find themselves on the brink of financial ruin. After the death of her stepmother, Frances “Frankie” Murray returns to Calgary to help her father, Jimmy, and her sister, Bernadette, pay the mortgage on the family home. When Robyn, a long-lost friend, becomes their house guest old tensions are reignited and Jimmy, Bernadette and Frances find themselves increasingly alienated from one another. Part family drama, part queer coming-of-age story, e Western Alienation Merit Badge explores the complex dynamics of a small family falling apart. Praise for Nancy Jo Cullen “The book combines a plenitude of characters infrequently thrown together in CanLit with themes that have universal and enduring appeal. The 978-1-928088-78-3 5.5” x 8.5” Paperback collection balances a sensitive understanding of the perils and challenges 240 pp. $20 May Fiction women face with a sympathetic and affectionate take on flawed male characters; there’s not a weak story in the bunch. Cullen is a writer to watch out for.” – Quill & Quire on Canary Other Title of Interest: The Fishers of Paradise “Good fiction – and this collection is very good – concentrates the By Rachael Preston extraordinary in any given life. Overdone, the result can be mere 978-1-928088-16-5 eccentricity, a pitfall Cullen avoids. We have encountered her people in our 356 pp. $22 2016 lives. They stand frozen on street corners, unsure of their next move.” Fiction – Winnipeg Review on Canary “It’s the characters Nancy Jo Cullen is the fourth recipient of the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie that bring this Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing landscape to life; from the University of Guelph-Humber and her short story collection, characters whose motivations and Canary , was the winner of the 2012 Metcalf-RookeAward. Her poetry has needs are as multi-layered and murky been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s as the swamp that gives the book its Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book name.” – Hamilton Public Library’s Prize. She lived in Calgary for over two decades and still returns regularly to Voice of Older Adults Blog connect with family and friends. She now lives in Kingston, Canada. Frontlist : Fiction 2 Proof I Was Here By Becky Blake starting from scratch isn’t easy, but Barcelona might be the right place to try. What’s the point of trying to leave a mark when everything disappears? This question is at the heart of Proof I Was Here , a novel that tells the picaresque coming-of-age story of a young thief and aspiring artist who attempts to reboot her life on the streets of Barcelona after an unexpected breakup. Hailing from Toronto, where she has criminal charges waiting, Niki is outside of Canada for the first time. The pickpockets, squatters and graffiti artists she meets challenge her to reassess her ideas about luck and art. With the help of a passionate Catalan separatist who dreams of building a new country from the ground up, Niki realizes that starting her life over from scratch could be an opportunity – if she can just get back to Toronto in time to clear her name. Praise for Becky Blake “Becky Blake, a Toronto writer who is working on her first novel, has won the CBC Short Story Prize. Her winning short story ‘The Three Times Rule’ plunges readers into an encounter between a woman and her new lover with 978-1-928088-77-6 5.5” x 8.5” Paperback clear signs that the relationship is not going to work out.” 240 pp. $20 May Fiction – CBC Books on the 2013 CBC Literary Award for Short Fiction Becky Blake is a two-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize (for non-fiction Other Title of Interest: in 2017 and short fiction in 2013). Her fiction and essays have appeared in publications across Canada. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, In Search of the and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Perfect Singing Continuing Education. Becky currently lives in Toronto where she’s working Flamingo on a second novel and a memoir-in-essays. By Claire Tacon 978-1-928088-57-8 272 pp. $20 2018 Fiction “e plot twists here are hilarious and hopeful, even through excellently drawn, spine- tingling conflicts. Dialogue is snappy, and inner monologues humanize the characters, even as they make decisions with bad consequences.” – Foreword Reviews 3 Frontlist : Fiction TREATY# By Armand Garnet Ruffo Ruffo’s poetry is itself a treaty between art and its capacity to inform and heal. A treaty is a contract. A treaty is enduring. A treaty is an act of faith. A treaty at its best is justice. It is a document and an undertaking. It is connected to place, people and self. It is built on the past, but it also indicates how the future may unfold. Armand Garnet Ruffo’s TREATY# is all of these. In this far-ranging work, Ruffo documents his observations on life – and in the process, his own life – as he sets out to restructure relationships and address obligations nation-to-nation, human-to-human, human-to-nature. Now, he undertakes a new phase in its restoration. He has written his TREATY# like a palimpsest over past representations of Indigenous bodies and beliefs, built powerful connections to his predecessors, and discovered new ways to bear witness and build a place for them, and all of us, in his poems. This is a major new work from an important, original voice. Praise for Armand Garnet Ruffo “Ruffo verbally renders the mystical, visual experiences created by his tribal kinsman, whose paintings sustain the worlds the artist dreamed as he 978-1-928088-76-9 5.75” x 8.5” Paperback 80 pp. $18 March Poetry sought spiritual knowledge and struggled with alcoholism. In each poem, Ruffo connects an evocative painting with episodes in Morrisseau’s life. Ruffo’s own gift to the painter he admired is a compassionate representation Other Title of Interest: of his difficult life and celebrated work in verbal imagery accentuating the ‘dignity and bravery’ of the ‘Great Ojibway’ people.” A Difficult Beauty – Canadian Literature on The Thunderbird Poems By David Groulx 978-1-894987-57-8 Armand Garnet Ruffo was born and raised in northern Ontario and draws upon 104 pp.