Tartan Turban Secret Readings #49, curated by Deepa Rajagopalan.
About this Event
Book your free tickets via Luma at https://luma.com/pzemkck3
You are invited to our 49th Tartan Turban Secret Reading. Curated by Deepa Rajagopalan. Featuring Deepa, Su Chang, Chido Muchemwa, Farah Ghafoor, Atom Cheung and Taneet Grewal.
Event tickets (in-person and livestream) and the livestream link will only be shared with those who register on Luma:
Our featured writers will be performing on-site and in person between 7–10 pm, Thursday, July 23rd, 2026, at Barrett and Welsh, 577 Kingston Road, Suite #301, Toronto, ON M4E 1R3.
The in-person event will be live-streamed and recorded for accessibility. A link will be provided to attendees who register for the live stream.
We do ask that you register if you plan to attend. Tickets are free. Reserving a spot via the Lu.Ma platform can help us track numbers and access funding.
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Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Named a CBC Best Book of the Year, Shadow Price was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award, and the Toronto Book Awards. Selections of Ghafoor’s debut won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize, were shortlisted for the Far Horizons Award, and longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her work appears in various podcasts and radio shows, anthologies, post-secondary course curricula, art exhibitions like Who's Afraid of Labour Justice? (2025) and Structural Integrity (2025), as well as in magazines such as The Walrus, The Offing, Brick Magazine, and The Fiddlehead. She lives in Tkaranto (Toronto).
Based in Kitchener Ontario, Taneet Grewal is a neurodivergent South Asian writer passionate about amplifying marginalized voices and supporting fellow BIPOC creatives. Her love for storytelling began in childhood and grew into journalism focused on human rights, backed by a Liberal Arts degree from York University. Today, her work explores motherhood, gender equality, female empowerment, and breaking toxic generational cycles. She has published a poetry collection dedicated to her daughters and is currently working on a project centred on mental health and addiction in the Punjabi community. Her writing has appeared in Brown Girl Magazine, OMNI Television, and the Punjabi Art Collective.
Chido Muchemwa is a writer and academic from Harare. She is the author of the short story collection Who Will Bury You and Other Stories. Her short stories have previously appeared in The Baltimore Review, Canthius, Catapult, Humber Literary Review, and Prism International amongst others. She is a 2022 Miles Morland Scholar, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming. Muchemwa is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Su Chang is a Shanghai-born Chinese-Canadian writer. Her debut novel, The Immortal Woman, was published with House of Anansi in 2025. The book is a CBC Best Fiction of 2025, a Toronto Book Award nominee, a Foreword INDIES finalist, shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and won the 2025 Independent Publisher Book Award, among other accolades. CBC named her a "Writer to Watch" in 2025. Her short stories have won awards or been shortlisted by the Montreal Fiction Prize, SASFest Fiction Contest, Prairie Fire Fiction Contest, Canadian Authors' Association National Contest, Disquiet Literary Prize, among others. She is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a proud member of the Writers Union of Canada.
Atom Cheung is a Hong Kong Canadian poet whose work captures the quiet, intricate details of everyday life. His first full-length collection Forty-One Frames will be published by Musical Stone in September. Through sharp, minimalist vignettes of domestic spaces and window-framed observations, the book examines the internal struggle to document reality before it slips away. Atom is also the voice of Atomic Heart, a confessional audio blog delivered through the reading of poems. It’s available as a podcast on various platforms including Apple and Spotify.
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Want to receive updates? For updates on the next reading, or this one, and for author headshots, follow our Facebook group and our Facebook event page.
You can also sign up for our email list here.
Open mic
Anyone attending is welcome to read or perform (if you are a musician) in our limited-room open mic sessions. If you are a writer or musician who would like to perform in the open mic session, we ask that you listen in to at least one session to get the flavour of the evening and join in on your next visit.
To participate in the TTSR #49 open mic, please contact Deepa or series curator Gavin Barrett ideally before the reading. This allows us to line up readers and manage the evening in a way that respects each writer's work. These are first-come, first-served spots.
The ambience at our readings is intimate, extremely informal and very supportive. Open mic readers are given 4 minutes in total, including a brief introduction to themselves and their work. Detailed open mic guidelines are posted in our FB group.
Open mic readers who have published works they would like to offer for sale are free to mention these upon finishing their readings.
About The Tartan Turban Secret Readings
In good weather, Barrett and Welsh hosts a (not so) “secret" reading series on its rather lovely open-air office rooftop deck or in its large open-concept studio space in Toronto. In winter, our readings migrate online in a virtual reading format that accepts writers from across the country and can be attended from anywhere in the world.
The Tartan Turban Secret Readings feature poetry, drama and prose readings and celebrate Canadian multicultural writing created by multicultural, minority and IBPOC writers. The idea is to provide a platform for IBPOC writers with few such platforms. At the same time, all writers who want to celebrate Canada’s multiculturalism, literary diversity and Indigenous heritage and have talent to share are welcomed.
Curators change from reading to reading. If you would like to curate an evening, contact Gavin Barrett, who is the series curator.
The sessions are photographed, filmed and streamed on FB/YouTube live and recordings will eventually be posted on YouTube and the series website. Please be aware that by attending this event, you agree to be photographed and/or filmed and give permission to use your likeness in promotional and/or marketing materials.
https://tartanturbansecretreadings.org/
Tartan Turban Secret Readings are variously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the League of Canadian Poets, The Writers’ Union of Canada and Barrett and Welsh.
About Barrett and Welsh
Barrett and Welsh is a minority-owned, creativity-powered, change-making advertising and branding agency that puts ideas first to make ideas last. A certified B Corporation, it uses design and advertising to create access and inclusion for racialized minorities and persons with disabilities.
About the series founders
Gavin Barrett is the series curator of the Tartan Turban Secret Readings, which he co-founded with the late Mayank Bhatt in 2017.
novel was published in 2016 by Mawenzi House. The novel explores youth radicalization and alienation and the impact of terrorism on a family in the context of the failure of the immigration and settlement framework in Canada. Trachea, his collection of short stories was published posthumously in 2025 by Mawenzi House. Mayank Bhatt immigrated to Toronto in 2008 from Mumbai (Bombay), where he worked as a journalist. His short stories have been published in TOK 5: Writing the New Toronto and Canadian Voices II. In Canada, he worked as a security guard, as the Chief Administrative Officer of the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce and as an organizer for the Festival of South Asian Literature and Art. He lived in Toronto with his family and passed away after a courageous battle with pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2022.
is a poet, creative entrepreneur, and the author of a collection of poems titled (Mawenzi House, 2020), a CBC Books recommendation. He was born in Bombay and lived in Hong Kong for several years before immigrating to Canada. Gavin’s poetry has been published in Reasons for Belonging (Viking Penguin India), an anthology of 14 Indian poets; The Joao Roque Literary Journal; the Pen India journal; The Folio; The Independent (Bombay); The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad; and Poiesis, the Bombay Poetry Circle journal. He was a contributing writer to This|ability, a book on Canada’s art brut and outsider artists. He is the founder and Chief Creative Officer of idea consultancy and brand advertising agency Barrett and Welsh. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Authors Association (Toronto), PEN Canada and is EDI co-chair of The League of Canadian Poets.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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