March 29, 2023 Cross-Pollinations event will feature Inuk poet Ashley Qilavaq-Savard and psychiatrist Dr. Allison Crawford. Ashley will read from her 2022 poetry collection "Where the Sea Kuniks the Land" which explores colonization, intergenerational trauma, and grief, as well as celebrates her love for the land and culture from which she is from. Meanwhile, Dr. Allison Crawford will present on her decades-long work with Inuit and circumpolar youth in life/health promotion using arts-based methods.

Ashley Qilavaq-Savard is an Inuk writer, artist, and emerging filmmaker born and raised in Iqaluit, Nunavut. She writes poetry about decolonizing narratives, healing from intergenerational trauma, and love of the land and culture. Her first collection of poetry, Where the Sea Kunik the Land explores grief, colonization, and finding identity in between it all. 

Allison Crawford is a is a psychiatrist, and associate scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), where she is the Chief Medical Officer for Talk Suicide Canada, the national distress line. She is also an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, and Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

With a PhD in English, Allison also brings the arts into her research and practice as part of her team with HeART Lab www.healthequityART.ca. She is also editor-in-chief of Ars Medica, a literary journal that explores the interface between the arts and healing.

April 26, 2023 Cross-Pollinations event will feature poet Sandra Huber and health humanities scholar Amala Poli. Sandra will read from her book "Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep" (Talonbooks, 2014), which is a poetic and scientific exploration of sleep. Meanwhile, Amala Poli will present on her doctoral research on sleep paralysis in the context of the modern sleep crisis and its possibilities for a health humanities intervention.

Sandra Huber is a writer, researcher, and educator. She has a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University, where she focused on the media and techniques of contemporary witchcraft. She wrote Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014), based on a collaboration with sleep scientists in Lausanne. Sandra currently lives in Tio'tia'ke / Montreal and is trying to find more time for fresh air, astrology, cats, and sunsets. www.sandrahuber.com.

Amala Poli is currently a doctoral candidate in the English department at Western University. Her research examines narrative as a form of evidence for sleep paralysis through a health humanities perspective. She is a writer for Synapsis, an online health humanities journal, and the author of Writing the Self in Illness (Manipal Universal Press, 2019) on life writing and how it reshapes knowledge about disease.

May 31, 2023 Cross-Pollinations event will feature poet Mallory Tater and health humanities scholar Laureanne Willems. Mallory will read from her book This Will Be Good(Book*hug Press), which tells the story of a young woman and her eating disorder. Meanwhile, Laureanne will present some of her doctoral research on anorexia, autobiographical illness narratives, and feminism.

Mallory Tater (she/her) is the author of two books—poetry collection This Will Be Good (Book*Hug Press and The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins). She lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and stolen territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tseil-Watuth Nations. She was the recipient of the Contemporary Verse 2’s 2016 Foster Poetry Prize and current teaches as a lecturer at The UBC School of Creative Writing.

Laureanne Willems is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, and enrolled in the Collaborative Specialization in Women’s Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She is also a member of the Flourish Collective at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on intersectional experiences of mental ill-health in contemporary women’s writing. 

June 28, 2023 Cross-Pollinations event will feature Dr. Felske-Durksen (an Indigenous physician and medical educator) and Dr. de Leeuw (a white settler medical educator and health researcher) — both whom are poets and anti-oppression advocates. The session will include them reading their poetry and discussing the roles poetry plays in their professional and personal lives. This session will also importantly consider poetics as an anti-colonial and anti-oppressive tool in medical education, practice, and research.

Dr. Sarah de Leeuw is a professor and the Research Director of the Health Arts Research Centre. She holds two CBC Literary Prizes for creative non-fiction and the Dorthey Livesay BC Book Prize for poetry. Author/editor of eleven books, de Leeuw is a Professor and Canada Research Chair (Humanities and Health Inequities) with the Northern Medical Program in Prince George, a distributed site of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine. She grew up on Haida Gwaii and now divides her time between Lheidli T’enneh/Dakelh Territory (Prince George) and Syilx Territory (Okanagan Centre), BC.

Dr. Cass Felske-Durksen is Otipemisiwak and her family’s Homeland is the Northern Prairies of Turtle Island. She identifies as a cis-gender androphilic Indigenous woman. She is Stepmother to 3 firecracker kids and Partner to a Samoan traditional Polynesian tattooist and Matai (Chief). Cass loves the water and has been known to bring an entire planned day to a halt just to jump in a pool, river or lake. She is an expert at building backyard waterparks.

Cass is a GP with the Alberta Health Services Indigenous Wellness Program and her home clinic is the Indigenous Wellness Clinic located at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (settler Edmonton). She has admitting and consulting privileges at Royal Alexandra Hospital and Lois Hole Hospital for Women. Likewise, she does outreach to community (both downtown and surrounding Nations) and has done prenatal visits all over the zone, meeting patients where they’re at, literally!

Cass was trained as a full service rural and remote GP with the University of British Columbia’s Indigenous Family Practice Site (still the only of its kind in Canada!), for which she is now the Site Co-Director – and just might be one of her favorite jobs ever.

Cass’ area of clinical interest is reproductive and sexual health within oppressed populations and genocide survivors. Believing strongly in partnership, she works closely with patients, families, community, and outpatient and inpatient settings to facilitate continuity of comprehensive trauma informed, healing centered and culturally driven care.

July 26, 2023 Cross-Pollinations event will feature Anna Quon (a middle-aged, mixed race and Mad poet and novelist) and Dr. Sarah Blanchette (Assistant Professor in English and Cultural Studies at Huron University College). This session will include a poetry reading by Anna Quon and a presentation by Dr. Blanchette—both on themes related to madness and race.

K’jipuktuk (Halifax) poet and novelist Anna Quon likes to create paintings and short animated films of her original poetry. Middle-aged, mixed race and Mad, Anna is also a Baha'i and a writing workshop facilitator. Self-employed, Anna has worked in the not-for-profit sector for more than two decades, except for several years as a freelance writer. Her chapbook, Body Parts was published in 2021 by Gaspereau Press and her latest novel Where the Silver River Ends was released by Invisible Publishing in 2022. Since winning the Lunenburg doc fest’s pitch competition The Launch in November 2022, Anna had been working on a short animated documentary film called Me and My Teeth.

Sarah Blanchette is an Assistant Professor in the English and Cultural Studies Department at Huron University College, located in London, ON. Her most recent publications include being a contributor to Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice (2020), co-editing Narrative Art and the Politics of Health (2021), and “Black Girlhood Persists: Pecola’s Persistence as Non/Child in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye” in Women’s Studies (2023).

August 30, 2023 Cross-Pollinations event will feature Dr. Laurence Laneuville (psychiatry resident at McGill University), Paul Cormier (transplant recipient and patient partner), and André Charbonneau (retired ESL teacher). This session will explore the theme of transplant medicine through a presentation by Dr. Laneuville on creative writing workshops with kidney transplant recipients, donors, and candidates, as well as professional writers. Paul Cormier and André Charbonneau will also speak about their experience participating in the workshops and read some of their poetry.

Dr. Laurence Laneuville is a fifth year psychiatry resident at McGill University. She holds a master’s in French literature from Université de Montréal and has experience in leading narrative medicine workshop for health care learners and workers.

Originally from Montreal, Paul Cormier has been a carrier of severe arthritis since childhood that has led to many periods of hospitalization and rehabilitation. He has completed classical and university studies and made a career in the public service.

A kidney transplant recipient, he participates as a patient partner in various projects, including the Chaire McConnell-Université de Montréal en recherche-création sur les récits du don et de la vie en contexte de soins. Some of his creations have been published in French on the website L'Organon (lorganon.ca).

Born in Montreal, André Charbonneau is a retired community college ESL teacher. At different moments in his life, he was involved in prior learning assessment and recognition, carceral education, pedagogical advisory work, community-based education programs, and trade union and international solidarity organizations. He studied in Education (M.A. McGill, 1975, Thesis on Paolo Freire). He has been married to Micheline for 52 years. She is a retired social worker with significant community-based education and social involvement experience. He donated a kidney to her in 2018. They have 3 children and 3 grandchildren.

September 27, 2023 Cross-Pollinations event will feature poet Adrienne Gruber and Catherine Mellinger, a perinatal mental health therapist and mixed media artist. This session will explore pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences. Adrienne Gruber will read from Q&A, a poetic memoir about her first pregnancy, birth, and early postpartum period. Meanwhile Catherine Mellinger will present on her personal, artistic, and clinical experiences with pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.

Catherine Mellinger (she/they) is a certified Expressive Arts Therapist (EXAT - CREATE Institute, Toronto), Perinatal Mental Health Therapist (PMH - CPMHT, PSI) and mixed media collage artist who’s works have been exhibited across North America and published Internationally. Originally from land belonging to Treaty 6 (Colonially named Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) they currently live and work in what is colonially named Waterloo, land included in the Haldimand Tract and belonging to the Neutral, Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe peoples. Catherine is also Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Together: For Perinatal Mental Health and lead artist of Post-Part.

Adrienne Gruber (she/her) is an award-winning author of three books of poetry, most recently Q & A (Book*hug Press, 2019). Her book of essays on motherhood, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is forthcoming with Book*hug in 2024. She lives with her partner and their three daughters on Nex̱wlélex̱m (Bowen Island), the traditional territory of the Squamish peoples.