An Evening with Author Canisia Lubrin
November 13, 2025
Upcoming Event
Date: November 13, 2025
Time: 6:00 pm EST
Where: William Doo Auditorium, University of Toronto (45 Willcocks St, Toronto, ON, M5S 2H3)
Free / Registration required
Join us for a special literary evening celebrating the forthcoming book The World After Rain by acclaimed poet, editor, and novelist Canisia Lubrin.
The evening will open with brief readings by The RBC / PEN Canada New Voices Award 2025 winners: Georgio Russell & Anna Sokolova, setting the stage for Canisia’s featured reading from her highly anticipated new collection. The conversation with Canisia will be moderated by Souvankham Thammavongsa.
A Carol Shields Prize winner for her collection of fictions Code Noir, Canisia Lubrin now brings readers a long-form poetic tribute to her mother, praised by Dionne Brand as “incandescent”. She is also the author of The Dyzgraphxst (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize) and Voodoo Hypothesis.
Don’t miss this opportunity to hear one of the most vital voices in contemporary literature share new work.
This event is brought to you by the Centre for Caribbean Studies, the Carol Shields Prize, PEN Canada, and New College at the University of Toronto.
About the Author + Book
Canisia Lubrin
Canisia Lubrin is the author of five books, including Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, The World After Rain (2025), and Code Noir. Her honours include a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Griffin Poetry Prize, Derek Walcott Prize, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and has been twice a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. She is Associate Professor and coordinator of the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA and the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart. Code Noir, Lubrin’s fiction debut and winner of the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, has 59 drawings by celebrated visual artist Torkwase Dyson.
The World After Rain
(McClelland & Stewart, 2025)
A Carol Shields Prize winner for her collection of fictions Code Noir, Canisia Lubrin now brings readers a long-form poetic tribute to her mother, praised by Dionne Brand as “incandescent”.
In this stunning new poem, Canisia Lubrin’s signature epic vision is distilled into an elegy to her mother, along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment that belongs as much to history as to today. Her lucid attention to what might be the oldest metaphor for grief is drawn from the searing gravity and resonance of the modern poet’s decisive, interior, and inexpressible meditation on love, time, and loss in the excesses of life’s ambitions.
About the Moderator + Guest Readers
Souvankham Thammavongsa (moderator)
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of the novel Pick a Colour, four poetry books, and the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, which won the Giller Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and Harper’s Magazine. She was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and lives in Toronto, Canada.
Georgio Russell (reader)
Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and graduate of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. He is a fellow of the Obsidian Foundation, the Undocupoets, and is currently supported by the Toronto Arts Council. Russell has won The Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023), the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry (2024), the Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry (2025), the Missouri Review’s Poem of the Year (2025), and the Rumpus Poetry Prize (2025), judged by Kaveh Akbar. He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2023), the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023), and ARC’s Poem of The Year contest (2025).
He is one of two winners of the 2025 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award.
Anna Sokolova (reader)
Anna is a Russian-Canadian writer raised in Toronto (and cyberspace). They hold an MA in English in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, for which they completed a poetry collection. They’re currently working on the latest issue of the program’s literary journal, echolocation. They’ve had poetry printed in publications including The Strand, The Foolscap, and re-mediate, received the Alta Lind Cook prize, and got honorary mentions in the Hart House Literary Contest and the ACCUTE poetry and prose creative writing contests.
They are one of two winners of the 2025 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award.
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