Weaving between the perspectives of public relations, zoos as unique spaces of human animal interaction, and the question of whether or not zoos should exist at all, Conni Massing’s latest play takes inspiration from real life debates that surround Lucy, the lone elephant at the Edmonton Valley Zoo, asking poignant questions about our relationships with…

Medicine and Duty is the World War I memoir of Harold McGill, a medical officer in the 31st (Alberta) Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, edited and presented by writer and historian Marjorie Barron Norris McGill attempted to have his memoir published by Macmillan of Canada in 1935, but, unfortunately, due to financial constraints, the company was not…

The criticisms leveled at online education during the Covid-19 pandemic revealed not only a lack of understanding about how educational technology can be deployed effectively, but a lack of imagination. Martin Weller provides new ways of thinking about educational technology through a wide range of metaphors. By using metaphors as a mental model, Weller enables…

These twelve essays constitute a groundbreaking volume of new work prepared by leading scholars in the fields of history, anthropology, constitutional law, political science, and sociology, who identify the many facets of what it means to be Métis in Canada today. After the Powley decision in 2003, Métis peoples were no longer conceptually limited to…

In Metis Pioneers, Doris Jeanne MacKinnon compares the survival strategies of two Metis women born during the fur trade—one from the French-speaking free trade tradition and one from the English-speaking Hudson’s Bay Company tradition—who settled in southern Alberta as the Canadian West transitioned to a sedentary agricultural and industrial economy. MacKinnon provides rare insight into…

In May of 1868, Elizabeth Bingham Young and her new husband, Egerton Ryerson Young, began a long journey from Hamilton, Ontario, to the Methodist mission of Rossville. For the next eight years, Elizabeth supported her husband’s work at two mission houses, Norway House and then Berens River. Unprepared for the difficult conditions and the “eight…

In 2018, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees documented a record high 71.4 million displaced people around the world. As states struggle with the costs of providing protection to so many people and popular conceptions of refugees have become increasingly politicized and sensationalized, researchers have come together to form regional and global networks dedicated…

Modern Fables is a darkly funny, feminist collection of essays about love and place.…

Aspiring novelist Molly MacGregor’s life is strikingly different from a literary heroine’s. Named for one of literature’s least romantic protagonists, Moll Flanders, Molly lives in Edmonton, a city she finds irredeemably unromantic, where she writes university term papers instead of novels, and sells shoes in the Largest Mall on Earth. There she seeks the other…

Sonja Ruth Greckol’s Monitoring Station enters a slipstream of space and planetary language, circling time, embodying loss and longing, generating and regenerating in a faltering climate. Orbiting through a mother’s death, a grandbaby’s birth, and a pandemic summer, these poems loop and fragment in expansive and empathetic ways. Nimble, energetic, and challenging, the book engages…

Nominated for the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book and the Georges Bugnet award for Best Novel! In this modern, magical tale, Carmen and Griffin, young and white, are goofy, head-over-heels in love. When Carmen turns into a black woman, Griffin thrills at a love turned exotic. But Carmen’s transformation means trouble for Griffin’s…

“In all creative writing, the question of what is true and what is real are two very different considerations. Figuring out how to dance between them is a murky business.” In Most of What Follows Is True, Michael Crummey examines the complex relationship between fact and fiction, between the “real world” and the stories we…

From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman’s journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home. In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a…

Muster Points is a frank discussion of desire, nostalgia, mental illness, and health from a professor with one foot kicking the ivory tower. These poems bring us on a trans boy’s trips through the shard-sharp ruins of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into regret and recovery, durability and desire. This…

My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell is a simple and outspoken account of the sexual and psychological abuse that Arthur Bear Chief suffered during his time at Old Sun Residential school in Gleichen on the Siksika Nation. In a series of chronological vignettes, Bear Chief depicts the punishment, cruelty, abuse, and injustice…

In a series of inspirational profiles, Cora Voyageur celebrates 100 remarkable Indigenous Albertans whose achievements have enriched their communities, the province, and the world. As a child, Cora rarely saw Indigenous individuals represented in her history textbooks or in pop culture. Willie Nelson sang “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” but Cora wondered, where were…

My Life in Propaganda is Magda Stroińska’s personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She looks at the influence of her family history that contradicted what she was taught at school; the cognitive and emotional effects of compulsory school readings; socialist realist art and film; and Radio Free Europe and Voice…

In Phyllis Rudin‘s coming-of-age story, Benjie Gabai is convinced he’s been the victim of a terrible cosmic hoax. Instead of being born in the 18th century as a French-Canadian voyageur, God has plunked him down in present-day Montreal, into a family that views his fur trade obsession as proof that their Benjie, once so bursting with…

Examining various cultural products—music, cartoons, travel guides, ideographic treaties, film, and especially the literary arts—the contributors of these thirteen essays invite readers to conceptualize citizenship as a narrative construct, both in Canada and beyond.…

If literature has often informed the creation of a national imaginary—a sense of common history and destiny—it has also complicated, even challenged, the unifying vision assumed in the formation of a national literature and sense of nation. National Literature in Multinational States questions the persistent association of literature and nation-states, contrasting this with the reality…