August 28, 2024 (Zoom): Cross-Pollinations

Join the League of Canadian Poets, the Health Arts Research Centre, and the Canadian Association for Health Humanities for the next iteration of the Cross-Pollinations Virtual Rounds Series.

August 28, 2024 | 3pm PT/6pm ET

The Wednesday, August 28, 2024 Cross-Pollinations event will feature poets Kama La Mackerel and Valérie Bah, with Sue Hranilovic from St. Michael's Hospital, for readings and a discussion on the theme of trans health and healthcare.
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Valérie Bah is a Tiohtià:ke-based artist whose work explores liberatory creative structures, intergenerational trauma & healing, as well as mundane/radical acts of survival. Couched in magical realism, their narratives are driven by Black feminist thought and lived experience.
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[2024] 3. Photo credit_ Ashvin Ramdin
Kama La Mackerel is a Mauritian-Canadian multilingual writer, visual artist, performer, educator and literary translator who believes in love, justice and self and collective empowerment. Their practice blurs the lines between traditional artistic disciplines to create hybrid aesthetic spaces from which decolonial and queer/trans vocabularies can emerge. At once narratological and theoretical, personal and political, their interdisciplinary method, developed over the past decade, is grounded ritual, meditation, ancestral healing modalities, auto-ethnography, oral history, archival research and community-arts facilitation.

Kama has lectured, performed and exhibited their work internationally in museums, galleries, theatres and universities. In 2021, they were awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for emerging and mid-career artists in Visual Arts. Their award-winning book ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) was named a CBC Best Poetry Book and a Globe and Mail Best Debut. Kama lives and loves in Tio’tia:ke, also known as Montréal.

Sue/Suza (pronouns she/her/hers) is a Primary Health Care Nurse Practitioner at St. Michael’s Hospital Academic Family Health Team (SMH AFHT) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada . She has called this her clinical home base since 1994.  She considers herself an “old nurse” of 35 years and a newer Nurse Practitioner of 13 years.  She has been a consultant trainer with Rainbow Health Ontario since 2014, expanding capacity provincially by teaching about trans and gender expansive medical and surgical primary health care.  Suza’s incredibly supportive work environment has provided the time and space needed to develop this clinical expertise.  She feels very lucky that her current clinical practice is almost exclusively devoted to the overall primary care needs of almost 1800 trans and gender diverse folk, which she endeavours to provide from an anti-oppressive, harm reduction, sex positive and health promotion perspective.  She has a commitment to continuing involvement in professional development and community-based volunteer activities which have included Board of Directors positions for the Canadian Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, the Ontario HIV Treatment Network and Fife House Foundation.  Sue is proud to have been one of the founding members of the Committee for Accessible AIDS Treatment and to have participated in volunteer nursing in Zimbabwe.  She has done over 60 presentations to colleagues, patients and community and has received ten awards related to excellence in academia and clinical care.   Sue’s high level of expertise and commitment to working with trans and non-binary folks has served her both locally and internationally, and she hopes to continue nurturing the resilience of the clients she walks with, learns from and serves.

Recordings from past events can be viewed on YouTube.