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Titles examining Canadian writing, cultural belonging, Truth and Reconciliation receive Canada Council 150 funding

Tessa McWatt (Christine Mofardin)

Tessa McWatt (Christine Mofardin)

Only a handful of publishing projects received funding in the first round of the Canada Council for the Arts’s New Chapter sesquicentennial-celebration program.

More than 500 proposals were received for the July 4 deadline. Fifty-two were selected for a grant through the program, which provides one-time funding of between $50,000 and $500,000 to individuals or organizations with projects that will “encourage public engagement in the arts and will promote outreach locally, nationally and internationally.”

Authors Tessa McWatt, Dionne Brand, and Rabindranath Maharaj received $65,000 to produce an anthology featuring 27 authors, to be published by Cormorant Books in 2018. The anthology will “address the idea of what writing here and now is and means,” says McWatt.

Montreal’s Véhicule Press received $50,000 to produce a poetry anthology, edited by Sonnet L’Abbé, tentatively titled Resisting Canada: Poems for Post-Multicultural Times. According to Véhicule publisher Simon Dardick, the book will feature the work of 40 poets examining “cultural belonging, environmental values, racial privilege, and cultural survival strategies.” The anthology will appear in 2018 under Véhicule’s Signal Editions poetry imprint, as part of the press’s 45th-anniversary celebrations.

Victoria’s Orca Books, which received $50,000, will publish the middle-grade title Speaking Our Truth: A Journey of Reconciliation, written by indigenous author Monique Gray Smith, with assistance from editor, publisher, and consultant Greg Younging. Orca publisher Andrew Wooldridge says, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action are important and timely and we wanted to be able talk about what reconciliation means to young readers and try and offer some hope for the future while understanding the past.” The book will include interviews with commissioners, allies, survivors, and their families. Wooldridge says, “We applied for a New Chapter grant so that we might have this book travel as widely as possible.” The funding will help provide for author touring, a comprehensive website, teacher resources, and other promotional efforts.

The second round of New Chapter funding recipients, for those who applied to the second and final Oct. 31 deadline, are still to be announced. The Canada Council received more than 1,600 for this second round.