Wordsfest: Reimagining Disability

The Words Festival is pleased to present “Reimagining Disability,” featuring Amanda Leduc (Disfigured: On Fairy Stories, Disability, and Making Space), Shane Neilson (Constructive Negativity), and poet Brandon Wint (Divine Animal). Our host for the afternoon will be London poet Kevin Heslop.

Brandon Wint is a poet, spoken word artist and teacher who is devoted to the articulation of the beauty within the human condition. His intricately-rendered performance pieces present a passionate, sincere and whimsical version of humanity. His writing, performance, and pedagogical approach all affirm, in their different ways, that there is beauty to be found in the struggle, and solace to be found in sincerity-of-spirit. He is an artist who uses poetry to harness empathy within himself, and have each of his words, deeds, creations and performances reflect that empathy unambiguously. He is a two-time national champion slam poet, a nationally published writer, as well as arts-educator and curator of artistic events.

Amanda Leduc is a disabled writer and author of the non-fiction book DISFIGURED: ON FAIRY TALES, DISABILITY, AND MAKING SPACE, out now with Coach House Books. She is also the author of the novel THE MIRACLES OF ORDINARY MEN, published in 2013 by ECW Press. Her new novel, THE CENTAUR’S WIFE, is forthcoming with Random House Canada in the spring of 2021. Her essays and stories have appeared in LitHub, The Rumpus, Little Fiction | Big Truths, The National Post, Open Book Ontario, and other publications across Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. She has previously been longlisted for both the CBC Nonfiction Prize (2019 and 2014) and the CBC Fiction Prize (2014), the StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize (2015), the Thomas Morton Memorial Prize in Fiction (2015), the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest (2014), and the 2007 PRISM International Short Fiction Contest.

Shane Neilson is a poet, short story writer, critic, and family physician. Much of his writing is on pain, mental health, and disability. His second trade book of poems, Complete Physical, was shortlisted for a Trillium Award in 2010. He will appear in Best Canadian Poetry 2015 from Tightrope Books, and he won the Robin Blaser Award from the Capilano Review this year. At the moment he is working on a PhD in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, with a focus on representations of pain in Canadian prose and poetry, for which he has secured a Vanier grant. His new book of poems from the Porcupine’s Quill, On Shaving Off His Face, uses affect theory to consider the iconography of the face in mental illness.