One Book One SFU 2021: Joshua Whitehead & Vivek Shraya
2021, Arts + Culture, Indigenous Voices
Simon Fraser University Library is pleased to announce this year's pick for One Book One SFU: Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed.
“Jonny Appleseed weaponizes story to bring the rez (and urban rez) to life, shrouding its characters in luminous layers so they're neither good nor bad but immersed in worlds and words. Unflinching and intimate, Joshua Whitehead takes his readers on a journey to the heart of an NDN glitter princess with generous, swooning prose. Unforgettable.” – Eden Robinson
“With only seven days until he returns home for his stepfather's funeral, Appleseed spends a pyretic week attempting to reconcile the competing factions of his life: sex, friends, work, sex, family, identity, sex. Throughout, memories of his kokum (grandmother) intrude upon the chaos, and these unexpected moments of remembrance prove most striking. A radically original new voice.” – Booklist
“Every so often, a book comes along that feels like a milestone, with revolution nestled beneath every sentence, every word. Oji-Cree/nêhiyaw two-spirit/Indigiqueer writer Joshua Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed is one of those books.” – The Globe and Mail
Join us for a free, online event featuring Joshua Whitehead in conversation with Vivek Shraya. Visit SFU Library to learn more about where to grab a copy of the book.
7:00 p.m. (PT)
Online Event
Closed captioning will be available for this event.
About One Book One SFU
Launched in 2015, One Book One SFU is an all-SFU reading experience that is, at its core, committed to the idea that libraries have a role in fostering ideas and facilitating dialogue toward a more just society.
Each year, we select a book and make copies available to our entire university community in Burnaby, Surrey, and Vancouver. We conclude this university-wide book club with a free public event featuring the author at our SFU Vancouver Campus.
To learn more about previous books and events, please visit Past events: One Book One SFU.
Joshua Whitehead
Joshua Whitehead (he/him) is a Two-Spirit, Oji-nêhiyaw member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate, lecturer, and Killam scholar at the University of Calgary where he studies Indigenous literatures and cultures with a focus on gender and sexuality. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Feral Fatalisms," is a hybrid narrative of theory, essay, and non-fiction that interrogates the role of "ferality" inherent within Indigenous ways of being (with a strong focus on nêhiyawewin). He is the author of full-metal indigiqueer (Talonbooks 2017) which was shortlisted for the inaugural Indigenous Voices Award and the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. He is also the author of Jonny Appleseed (Arsenal Pulp Press 2018) which was longlisted for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Indigenous Voices Award, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. Whitehead is currently working on a third manuscript titled Making Love with the Land, to be published with Knopf Canada, which explores the intersections of Indigeneity, queerness, and, most prominently, mental health through a nêhiyaw lens. Currently, Whitehead is premiering his newly edited anthology, Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. You can find his work published widely in such venues as Prairie Fire, CV2, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Grain, CNQ, Write, and Red Rising Magazine.
Vivek Shraya
Vivek Shraya’s best-selling book, I’m Afraid of Men, was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel,” and her album with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part‑Time Woman, was included in CBC’s list of Best Canadian Albums of 2017. Her newest book, The Subtweet: A Novel, was published in 2020.
She is one half of the music duo Too Attached and the founder of the publishing imprint VS. Books. A Polaris Music Prize nominee and four-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, Vivek was a 2016 Pride Toronto Grand Marshal, was featured on The Globe and Mail’s Best Dressed list, and has received honours from The Writers’ Trust of Canada and The Publishing Triangle. She is currently a director on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
