Meet Our 2025/2026 Keynote
Merilyn Simonds
Merilyn Simonds is the internationally published author of three e-born works of fiction and 20 books, including the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and continuously in print for 30 years. Among her best-selling nonfiction is A New Leaf, the story of her gardens north of Kingston, and Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, a meditation on reading, writing, and the future of the printed book. Her innovative memoir/biography, Woman, Watching, won the 2022 Foreword Indies Nonfiction Award. Walking with Beth: Conversations with my 100-Year-Old Friend, published in September, 2025, became an instant bestseller.
Featured Panels (2025/26)
01
Disrupting Meaning: Language, Form, and the Limits of Interpretation
Featured Speakers:
Brooke Morgan, Samantha Arrowsmith, Annika Putman, Sheana Tchebotaryov
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Featured Papers:
Bartleby: The Semiotic Collapse of the Symbolic; The Lack of Female Empowerment in Katherine Mansfield's "Prelude" and Virgina Woolf's To the Lighthouse"; The Representation of Residential School Trauma within Louise Halfe's Poetry; Critical Essay, Making Order out of Disorder
02
Resistance Under Constraint: Ideology, Subjectivity, and Survival
Featured Speakers:
Grace Codrington, Julia De Libera Van Damme, Olivia Lanc
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Featured Papers:
The History of Uplift Suasion: Olaudah Equiano; Rebels are the Most Important Reinforcers of Ideology; How Emasculation can Warp Capitalist Reality
03
Rewriting Power: Identity, Culture, and Social Transformation
Featured Speakers:
Meyhavi Jeyabalan, Alissa Neydenova, Madalyn Bennett, Emma Smyth
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Featured Papers:
House of Leaves: A Rhizomatic Analysis; A Postcolonial Analysis and Interpretation of Foe; Childhood Mourning: Sentimentality and Nostalgia in William Wordsworth's "We Are Seven"; The Collapse of Time and Memory in Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
