Featured Guest: Michael Mirolla

About our guest: MICHAEL MIROLLA’s awards for novella, short fiction, novels, and poetry include the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award for fiction, as well as three Bressani Prizes. He has been awarded writers’ residencies at Vancouver’s Historic Joy Kogawa House, in Olot, Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, and most recently, the Regina Public Library from 2025-2026 and a virtual Writer in Residence session with the Saskatoon Writers’ Guild. When not busy writing, Michael helps run Guernica Editions, a Canadian independent literary publishing house. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home outside the town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands area of Ontario. His latest work, How About This …? was published by At Bay Press in late 2025.

https://atbaypress.com/books/detail/how-about-this

https://guernicaeditions.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoqG-_ldL_ZnY1P7JSwUjcjPkD_cfMOqi5mZHeN055AKE6anEJwP

https://www.michaelmirolla.com/

Happy Canada Day! To celebrate Canada’s 159th birthday, we’re offering up a few selections from early Canadian poets. Enjoy these short readings from our country’s literary history. Poems read in this episode include:

• The Old Red Shirt by Rebecca Gibbs
• Marshlands by E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)
• Women's Rights by Anna Louisa Walker
• At Niagara (1911 version) by R. Nathaniel Dett
• The Blue Flower by Helen M. Merrill
• Life by Mary Morgan

We hope you'll enjoy this selection of early Canadian poetry. You can find more examples of contemporary Canadian poetry to fill your long weekend here on the podcast.

Recently, the Amherstburg Freedom Museum hosted a virtual book launch for Cheryl Thompson’s latest work, Staging Blackface in Canada, which was published in April 2026 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. We’re sharing a portion of that very interesting discussion.

Cheryl Thompson lives in Toronto and is the author of Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812–1897, Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty, and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Windsor here in the Detroit River Borderlands.

Dr. Thompson is an Associate Professor in Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University and currently director of Black Creative Lab where she heads up projects including a digital mapping of Black archival collections in Ontario and a database that catalogues blackface as performance and Black community's resistance to it. Her latest work, released this spring by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, is Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919.

To watch the full conversation, go to the Amherstburg Freedom Museum's YouTube channel. For more information about the book, check it out on the WLU Press website.