The THIN AIR Aboriginal Writers Tour, featuring Michael Kusugak, Beatrice Culleton Mosionier, and Jordan Wheeler, will be making a stop at Thompson Public Library Oct. 20 at 7:30 p.m.
Thompson is the last Northern Manitoba stop after they travel to Flin Flon and The Pas in a three stops in three days whirlwind visit. They will be at The Pas Regional Library on Edwards Avenue Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. and the Flin Flon Public Library on Main Street Oct. 19 at 7 p.m.
Michael Kusugak, an award-winning writer and storyteller lives in Rankin Inlet, and shares his experience of a traditional Inuit upbringing in books like A Promise Is a Promise, Northern Lights: The Soccer Trails, and his most recent, The Littlest Sled Dog.
Jordan Wheeler is of mixed Cree, Ojibway, Assiniboine, Irish, English, Scottish and French ancestry and is a member of the Gordons First Nation in Punnichy, Sask. He has written several books, including Brothers in Arms and Just a Walk, which explore contemporary aboriginal experience in both serious and light-hearted ways. He has written for shows like North of 60. Wheeler lives in Winnipeg.
Métis writer Beatrice Culleton Mosionier has written for both children and adults. Her 1983 novel, In Search of April Raintree, a story of young sisters who are removed from their family and placed in foster care, has become a classic and is still taught widely in schools 26 years later. She lives in Winnipeg.
Mosionier is a last-minute replacement on the THIN AIR Aboriginal Writers Tour for Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, an Anishinaabe writer born in Toronto of mixed blood, who is from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation. She has lived and worked at Neyaashiinigmiing, Cape Croker Reserve on the Saugeen Peninsula in southwestern Ontario since 1994. She is managing editor of Kegedonce Press and author of Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica and My heart is a Stray Bullet, among other publications Kegedonce Press.
The THIN AIR Aboriginal Writers Tour, the second such event, is sponsored by the Winnipeg International Writers Festival.
THIN AIR director Charlene Diehl says she is excited about the Aboriginal Writers Tour. "These writers are at the top of their game," she says. "They're contributing to one of the most dynamic movements in Canadian writing at the moment. We're so pleased to be able to share writing of this caliber with communities in the north."
All three writers will read and talk about their work at the free public events.
The Winnipeg International Writers Festival launched their 13th annual THIN AIR festival from Sept. 20 to 27 with main stage readings at the CanWest Global Performing Arts Centre at The Forks in Winnipeg, afternoon book chats at the McNally Robinson Polo Park Mall bookstore and Nooner and Big Idea series at the Millennium Library.
Campus events also were held in Winnipeg and Brandon.
Christian Bök, author of Eunoia, the best- selling Canadian poetry book of all time, attended, as did Giller Prize winner Bonnie Burnard, who returned with her a new novel, Suddenly.
There is also a Rural Tour component with events in Portage la Prairie, Brandon and Carman.
