Write Now! Creative Writers Speaker Series featuring Nisha Patel and Matthew James Weigel

Everyone is invited to hear some of Canada’s best established and emerging writers read from their work and discuss their craft.

Presented by Writing 2520A: Write Now! Writers on Writing, the Department of English and Writing Studies, and the Creative Writers Speaker Series at Western.

Nisha Patel is a Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Edmonton and a Canadian Poetry Slam Champion. She is a disability advocate and diabetic. Her works (Coconut, A Fate Worse Than Death, For the Record) are available where books are sold. She currently works from Edmonton and Calgary.

Matthew James Weigel Dr. Matthew James Weigel is a Dene and Métis author and artist from Edmonton. His debut poetry collection Whitemud Walking was the winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the Indigenous Voices Award, and the Alcuin Society Award for book design as well as a finalist of the Writers' Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize. Matthew's multimodal work is situated in his relationship to the land and considers the historical, archival, and ecological connections between stories and place. His doctoral dissertation: On the Legibility of Trees works across genre and medium as Matthew endeavours to tell new stories in old ways, and share old stories in new ways. He currently works as an assistant professor of Indigenous literatures at the University of Calgary. Matthew holds a BSc in Biological Sciences and a Master of Arts in English from the University of Alberta. He is a bpnichol Chapbook Award winner, and as a Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists Community Artist in Residence his debut print exhibition mud map was longlisted for the City of Edmonton Visual Arts Prize.