Writers' Workshop, Tom Gannon Hamilton

Participants are encouraged to bring questions and insights from their own writing journey to share and discuss. There will be an open discussion after the workshop, beginning around 3 p.m.

Tom has recited, read and given workshops all over Canada. In 2018 he won first prize in the Big Pond Rumours Chapbook Competition, for his poem sequence entitled El Marillo, chronicling the poet's experiences in war-torn El Salvador during the 1980s. This sequence is contained in his Aeolus House trilogy of poems including the critically acclaimed Panoptic (2018), The Mezzo Soprano Dines Alone (2021) and To Grace Bridges (2023). Tom’s poem Non-Consultant was awarded First Prize in the 2021 Love Lies Bleeding poem contest, blind judged by former Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Eliot Clarke, who chose the winning poem out of nearly a thousand entries from across Canada.

A recent review described Tom as “an irreverent poet, full of surprises, who will take risks and embrace the new,” and yet one who “draws on traditional poetic form” to ground his work.

Tom’s work has increasingly gone global, published in periodicals in Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, and across the USA. In his youth Tom served as an aid worker in El Salvador, and was later welcomed into the Salvadoran arts cooperative Tizon and Nicaragua’s Instituto de Cultura. He is founder, curator and host of the Urban Folk Art Salon in partnership with Toronto Public Library.

When not writing poetry, Tom sings and plays violin, mandolin, piano, set drums/percussion. In festivals, concerts, night clubs and recording studios, he has worked with guitarists Oscar Lopez and Jeff Healy, opened with Big Rude Jake for Blues legend BB King, and shared the stage with the Down Child Blues Band, Ian Tyson, and Jane Siberry. He was cast as a violinist in Murdoch Mysteries, Netflix’s American Gods, and The Shape of Water, which swept the Oscars in 2018.

Host or Publisher Toronto Writers' Cooperative