Upcoming Event

Riley Yesno

Riley Yesno (she/her) is a queer Anishinaabe scholar, writer, and commentator, from Eabametoong First Nation and Thunder Bay, Ontario.

She has been a contributor and commentator for some of the largest media outlets in Canada and the world, including the New York Times, BBC World News, The Globe and Mail, and CBC National News. Riley has also travelled the globe speaking at internationally renowned institutions and events, including the UN climate negotiations, the Stockholm Forum on Gender Equality, TEDx stages, and many others.

She has taught at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto where she is completing her PhD at the University of Toronto. She studies Indigenous / Canadian politics and is a Vanier Scholar. Riley is at work on her first book of non-fiction, which will look critically at reconciliation in Canada, interwoven with her lived experience.

Em Dial

Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (Nightboat Books, 2025), and elsewhere.

Ira Wells (moderator)

Ira Wells is a critic, essayist, and associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he serves as Academic Programs Director and teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One Program. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, The New Republic, and many other venues. His most recent book is On Book Banning: How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy. He is the president of PEN Canada.