What: Wordsfest: The Literary and Creative Arts Festival, featuring more than 40 authors, writers, poets and entertainers This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. That’s because we were talking about the big questions and people wanted to listen.” It was just an unbelievable explosion of interest during the pandemic, a silver lining in fact. Our audience actually grew by 120 per cent and we’ve been trying to figure how to honour that audience and bring in those who’d still like to engage us, in person or online. “We went into the pandemic as a regional festival and emerged with a national presence. “We’ve been online now for two years and we’ve developed a huge international audience,” said Lambier, noting they’ve added events throughout the year to maintain and build interest.

Lambier said the festival has pivoted to become a hybrid with about 90 per cent of the events available online to tap into the growing national and international audience for the festival. More than 40 writers and artists will be featured over the course of the festival, which includes several conversations with authors and poets, expert panels and performances by artists, including London-based Juno nominee Lorraine Klaasen with Frank Ridsdale Nov. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.He is a recipient of Canada's National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantànamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is an award-winning journalist and author who has traveled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. OMAR EL AKKAD was born in Cairo, Egypt and grew up in Doha, Qatar until he moved to Canada with his family. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place.

But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074.

Omar el akkad