Launch of Maria Giesbrecht's A LITTLE FERAL (with special guests!)

Maria and Deepa will both read from their most recent books, and Ellen will facilitate a wonderful conversation. Hope you can join us!

In A Little Feral, Maria Giesbrecht delivers a debut collection that navigates faith, family, and personal resurrection through a voice at once wild, intimate, and quietly rebellious. Written in the aftermath of leaving a conservative Mennonite upbringing, these poems chart a parallel journey of breaking away— from father, from God, from the confines of obedience. Giesbrecht’ s language is lyrical and unflinching, a cadence that moves between tenderness and defiance, weaving ancestral memory with moments of stark revelation. A Little Feral asks readers to reimagine where holiness might be found— in the fractures of family, in the undoing of inherited faith, and even in the loneliness of a world shaped by patriarchy and exile.

Maria Giesbrecht is a Canadian poet whose work explores her Mexican and Mennonite roots. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Grain, Contemporary Verse 2, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, a Best of Net nominee, and the founder of Gather, an international writing community that connects poets worldwide. Born in Durango, Mexico, she now lives in Toronto, Canada with her fiancée.

Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, shortlisted for the 2024 Giller prize, and an Apple Books Best Books of the Year 2024. She won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award for the title story of the collection. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Room, the Malahat Review, Event, and Arc.

Eleni Zaptses is an emerging fiction writer from Waterloo, Ontario. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and carte blanche. She is also the Managing Editor of The New Quarterly.

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