What’s New

We are so excited to announce our upcoming special “Growing Room” issue of Room magazine, which will be an issue dedicated entirely to the writers and artists intended to feature at the 2020 Growing Room Literary & Arts Festival. This issue will be an homage to the...

We need books now, more than ever. Reading, by nature, is a solitary activity, but sharing stories is a shared tradition. Since book delivery was declared an essential service, local bookstores have continued to make sure that the public has access to books. I got a...

Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Seoul, South Korea and was adopted and raised in a white family in Southern-Ontario, Canada. In 2008, she reunited with her family in Asia. Jenny has lived, studied, and worked in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and Seoul. Her debut...

Dr. Cheryl Thompson is a writer, author, and academic. She is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University in the School of Creative Industries. Her book, Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture, was published with Wilfrid Laurier Press...

Molly Cross-Blanchard sits down with Room editor of 43.4 Geffen Semach to chat about the issue, the world of publishing, and what Geffen has been reading lately. Geffen Semach recently moved to Toronto where she works at Doubleday at Penguin Random House Canada. For...

We are thrilled to announce Whitney French as Room’s Mentor-in-Residence! Room’s mentor-in-residence program is a brand new program designed to pair established mentors with emerging writers. This year’s mentor, Whitney French, will mentor about eight students (free...

Naava Smolash is a white settler from a working class immigrant family. Her writing appears in Studies in Canadian Literature, West Coast Line, LitHub, Everyday Feminism, Briarpatch, and the University of Toronto Quarterly. Her essay "The Opposite of Rape Culture is...

To celebrate the upcoming Growing Room Festival 2020, we are chatting with a few festival authors to learn more about them and their work until the festival rolls around. Isabella Wang chats with some of the talented young writers who will be performing at this year's...

In the following interview, Manahil Bandukwala chats with poet and fellow festival author, Liz Howard, whose debut poetry collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent won the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. The author spoke about contamination and poisoning in...