You are invited to the 35th session of The Tartan Turban Secret Readings curated by Archna Sahni and featuring Anita Anand, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca, Bhaswati Ghosh, Mohineet Kaur Boparai and Zen Alladina.

Writers will be participating virtually. Attendees will be able to join the event by clicking here on the day of the reading during the hours scheduled.

Curator

Archna Sahni identifies herself as a Toronto poet who lives between India and Canada. She was born in India and raised in the cities of Delhi, Chandigarh, Kuala Lumpur, and Bombay. She immigrated to Canada in 1991 to make Toronto home, but karma keeps taking her back to India for long periods. She is the author of First Fire (Calicut, India: Yeti, 2005) and Another Nirvana (Toronto: Mawenzi, 2018). Archna has published her work in literary magazines across the world and performed her work in Canada, India, and USA. In her other avatar as life coach Archna empowers persons by helping them shift from self-doubt to self-trust.

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Featured writers

Anita Anand is the author of a newly released novel named A Convergence of Solitudes. Her 2015 short story collection entitled Swing in the House and Other Stories won the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Relit Prize and the Montreal Literary Diversity Prize. Anita is also a literary translator and language teacher—but she is not the Minister of Defence, merely her namesake!

Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca is a published poet. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and Journals. Her first book of poems, Family Sunday and other poems, was published in 1989, and her chapbook Light of The Sabbath, in September 2021. Her poem, How to Light up a Poem, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was born and raised in a Bene- Israeli Jewish family in Bombay and writes many poems dedicated to her love for the city of her birth, among other subjects like memories of her ancestors, nature, and light. Her teaching career spanned over four decades, and she has taught English in Indian colleges and international schools in India, and English French and Spanish in Canada. She was educated in both Bombay and England. Kavita is the daughter of the late poet Nissim Ezekiel.

Bhaswati Ghosh writes and translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her first book of fiction is Victory Colony, 1950. Her first work of translation from Bengali into English is My Days with Ramkinkar Baij, for which she received the Charles Wallace (India) Trust Fellowship at the British Centre for Literary Translation in the University of East Anglia. Bhaswati’s writing has appeared in several literary journals, including Literary Shanghai, HELD, Cargo Literary, Pithead Chapel, Warscapes, The Maynard as well as in Indian Express, Scroll, The Wire, and Dhaka Tribune. Bhaswati lives in Ontario, Canada and is currently working on a nonfiction book on New Delhi, India.

Mohineet Kaur Boparai is a poet, teacher, and academic. She has published five books of poetry and a book of criticism. Her most recent work, The Fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah: Journeys Through Subalternity and Agency (2021), was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, U.K. Her most recent poetry collection titled, Polychromasia (2019), was published by Mawenzi House Publishers, Toronto. Her poetry has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has been published widely in journals in the US and India. Zymbol Magazine named her “India’s Rising Star” in a 2014 interview. Mohineet moved to Canada in 2018 and currently lives with her family in Brampton.

Zen Alladina is a South Asian writer, poet, and tea sommelier, living on the land known as t’karonto|Toronto, Canada. Her work draws from (yet dreams beyond) history, re-imagining the ancestral to contextualize the speculative. She is the 2022 winner of Art Bar Poetry’s Discovery Night, and her writing is featured (or forthcoming) in projects from Solarpunk Magazine, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, UKAI Projects, Soap Box Press, and more. Her current explorations include co-developing a series of poems viewed in Virtual/Augmented Reality, and facilitating arts workshops that prompt pre-colonial (re)imagination while communally drinking tea and sharing stories. When she isn’t lost in words, she’s likely lost in the woods.