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The Power of the Pen in Troubled Times: Crafting Change in Apocalypse

October 29, 2025

Date: October 29, 2025

Time: 8:00 pm EST

Free, online / Registration required

What is the writer’s role in a world of ongoing genocides, resurgent authoritarianism, and a worsening climate crisis? Is it to inform? To change minds? To encourage action, or just to write?

Riley Yesno (The Reconciliation Generation, Simon and Schuster, forthcoming) and Em Dial (In the Key of Decay, Palimpsest Press, 2024) will discuss the obligation of the writer to spur, stir, and bolster revolutions. They will consider how their respective genres – poetry and non-fiction – shape their choices in rising to these challenges, and how their desired audiences affect the writing process. Moderated by Jaclyn Desforges.

About the Panelists

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.

Jaclyn Desforges (moderator)

Jaclyn Desforges is the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower, winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC’s picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. Selected for the New York Times-featured Lunar Codex Project, Danger Flower is now archived on the moon. Jaclyn is also the author of the picture book Why Are You So Quiet? and has received Canada Council for the Arts support for both her forthcoming short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2026), and her novel-in-progress, Eyelash Person. A Bread Loaf alumna and RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner, Jaclyn teaches creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario with her partner and daughter.

This event is part of a webinar series, Drawn to the Page, meant for young writers to develop their craft and purpose as an author.

Occurring biweekly on Wednesdays in October, recent winners of the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award will discuss what pulls them to the page, and consider, in dialogue with their mentors, collaborators or award-winning peers, how writers respond to the social and political challenges of their time.

The webinars are free to attend. Registration is required for each session.

Learn more