As we announced at our last public reading in March, Rowers Reading Series is closing down after 13 incredible seasons.
From our start at the actual Rowers Pub on Harbord Street in 2007 to our last reading on March 3, 2020, at the fantastic Glad Day Bookshop on Church Street, the monthly series was proud and honoured to have been a central part of Toronto’s literary landscape these past 13 years and pleased to have hosted readers from across Canada.
The Rowers team would like to thank our attendees, our readers and our funders since 2007.
Born in Hastings County, Hannah Brown currently lives in the Beach neighbourhood of Toronto. She is a prize-winning screenwriter with two degrees in film from York University. After a happy sojourn teaching English and film at the college and collegiate levels, she recently returned to writing full-time, and has had her work published in several North American literary magazines. Her short story in Superstition Review #15, “On Any Windy Day,” is recommended by Emily Wilson, along with the Broadway hit, Hamilton, as fine companion works to Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Hannah Brown has been invited to present her debut novel, Look After Her, at the Leeds International Festival 2020.
Kate Marshall Flaherty’s sixth book of poetry, Radiant, launched in 2019 (Inanna). She was shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year 2019, and for Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize 2018, and won the 2018 King Foundation Georgian Bay Project Award. She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, such as Vallum, Malahat Review, CV2, Grain, Saranac Review, and was shortlisted for Descant’s Best Canadian Poem, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Prize, the Robert Frost Poetry Award and others. She was Toronto Rep. for the League of Canadian Poets 2012 -2018, and inaugurated Toronto’s Poetry in Union in 2018, and “Poetry and Healing” for Sick Kids in 2019. She guides StillPoint Writing Workshops in schools, youth shelters, universities and hospitals; poetry is her lifeline. See her performance poetry to music at 
Maria Meindl is the author of The Work, Stonehouse Publishing (2019). Her first book, Outside the Box from McGill-Queen’s University Press, won the Alison Prentice Award for Women’s History. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many publications including The Literary Review of Canada, Descant, and Musicworks, as well as in the anthologies, At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die and The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood. In 2005, Maria founded the Draft Reading Series, which specializes in unpublished work by emerging and established writers. Maria teaches movement in Toronto. 
Christine Ottoni lives and writes in Toronto. Her short fiction has appeared in untethered, Riddle Fence, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and PRISM International. Her work of linked short stories, Cracker Jacks for Misfits, was published with Exile Editions in the fall of 2019.
Rowers Reading Series 