This episode covers a new anthology from Wayne State University Press. Titled Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors, this vibrant collection invites readers to breathe deeply and return to that "carefree" season from an urban perspective. These emerging and award-winning creators of all ages recount the struggles and triumph of staking their claim to public spaces. Ranging from poetry to essay, creative nonfiction to comics, this collection blends nostalgia with struggle and resilience.

DESIREE COOPER

Desiree Cooper, the book’s editor, was born in Japan as a military dependent and spent her adulthood in Detroit. She now lives in coastal Virginia where she is raising her grandchildren. She is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, and among her accolades are a 2017 Midland Authors Award Winner in Adult Fiction, a 2017 Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Midwest Book Award Finalist, and inclusion in the Poets and Writers 5 Over 50.

NANDI COMER

Our next author is Nandi Comer, an award-winning poet and essayist. She served as the 2nd Poet Laureate of the state of Michigan 2023-2025, during which time she spearheaded Michigan Words and the video series Michigan in Verse. She is the author of the chapbook American Family: A Syndrome. Her debut poetry collection, Tapping Out, won the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poets, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, and others. She currently serves as the 2025-2026 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Creative Writing and co-director of Detroit Lit.

ROCHELLE WILSON-ELLIS

Next we have, Rochelle Wilson-Ellis. She is a U.S. Navy veteran whose journey has been shaped by service, resilience, and care for others. Having served aboard the USS Ross and USS George Washington, Rochelle has carried that same spirit of dedication into every chapter of her life. A loving mother of two and a certified baker and pastry chef, she has also spent years working in healthcare. In 2021, Rochelle was trained as a citizen journalist through the Sarah E. Ray Project, helping preserve the oral histories of those who attended Detroit’s legendary Action House in the 1970s and ’80s.

LILLIEN WALLER

Our final reader is Detroit native Lillien Waller, a poet and essayist. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and, in 2015, she received a Kresge Artist Fellowship in Poetry. In 2023, Lillien was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her essay “Listen Children, All Is Not Lost” appears in the anthology Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors.

For more information on the book and the authors, please see the Wayne State University Press website.

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.

Don Gillmor is the author of To the River, which won the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction. He is the author of five novels, Cherry Beach, Breaking and Entering, Long Change, Mount Pleasant, and Kanata; a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History; and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He was a senior editor at The Walrus, and his journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. He has won twelve National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto. His latest book is Cherry Beach, published by Biblioasis in 2026.

https://www.biblioasis.com/author/gillmor-don/

In this episode dedicated to the art of Canadian detective fiction, we have a bonus reading from Amherstburg mystery writer John Schlarbaum.

John Schlarbaum began his professional writing career working in the television industry before embarking on a career as a licensed Private Investigator. Along the way, he’s also co-owned an award-winning independent bookstore, reviewed books for CBC Radio, and has written mystery and thriller novels, children's books, as well as interactive plays. He’s best known for his two separate mystery series featuring flawed P.I. Steve Cassidy and feisty newspaper reporter Jennifer Malone.

John reads for us from The Groom Wore Red.

https://www.amazon.ca/stores/author/B086WMCHCG/about

Fartumo Kusow is a high school English teacher, novelist, podcaster, activist, and mother of five who lives in Windsor, Ontario. Born in Somalia, Fartumo immigrated to Canada in 1991, at the start of the civil war, with fluency in Somali and Arabic but not English, and went on to earn two degrees. Fartumo Kusow first appeared on this podcast in 2020, chatting about her second novel which was her debut novel in English, Tale of a Boon’s Wife. She’s here with us today to discuss her new novel, Winter of My Spring, published by Spark Press in March 2026.

https://fartumokusow.com/

https://gosparkpress.com/portfolio/fartumo-kusow/

Curtis Chin is the author of the award-winning memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. The restaurant of the title was a popular downtown Detroit eatery owned by his family for generations.

Chin was recently in Windsor, kicking off his five-stop Canadian book tour. A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Curtis Chin served as the nonprofit's first Executive Director. He went on to write comedy for network and cable television before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in twenty countries. He has written for CNN, Bon Appétit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Emancipator/Boston Globe.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Chin has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. We caught up with him at Biblioasis bookshop. This podcast features the recorded highlights of his book talk and his conversation with Scarlet Kennedy. You can find out more about the book and Curtis on his website, curtisfromdetroit.com.

Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Chemical Life, which was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award. Johnstone has also won several awards, including the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Robin Blaser Award, and Poetry's Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, he curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Windsor’s Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. His most recent books are Bait & Switch, a collection of reviews, essays and conversations on poetry, and a collection of poems, The King of Terrors.
Bait and Switch was published by Porcupine’s Quill. The King of Terrors was published by Coach House Books.

Poetry Magazine Summer 2025