PEN Canada presents the TAXI Stand Jam!

TORONTO, Sept. 28 /CNW/ - What happens when you pair up 7 of Ottawa's top writers with 7 outstanding writers in exile, give them 7 hours to develop a 7 minute presentation based on a theme revealed that day? You get the TAXI Stand Jam- an exciting evening of performance, music, theatre, art and surprises presented by PEN Canada.

The featured artists are world-renowned Indian classical musician Mushfiq Hashimi, award-winning spoken word artist Oni the Haitian Sensation, innovative digital artist eepmon, celebrated theatre creator Emily Pearlman, visionary Oud player Mel M'rabet, multi-disciplinary artist Sheila James and song-writer and musician Phil Jenkins.

The featured writers in exile are Amatoritsero Ede, Goran Simic, Sheng Xue, Alvaro Gómez, Nooshin Salari, Petronila Cleto, and Gordana Icevska.

Hosted by Adrian Harewood of CBC News: Ottawa.

Date: Thursday, October 14^th, 7:30pm
Location: Arts Court Theatre, 2 Daly Avenue
$10
For tickets please call 613-564-7240

The TAXI Stand Jam is a feature event of the TAXI Project. PEN Canada assists writers around the world who are persecuted for the peaceful expression of their ideas.

Biographies

Emily Pearlman
Emily works across disciplines as a writer, performer, director and dramaturge. In the past, she has toured the country with her three solo shows, made radio documentaries for CBC, been bitten on the eye by a wood tick while directing anarchist theatre in the woods of Ohio, and hooked up a golden bicycle to an amplifier so that when you pedal you hear stories about cycling. As artistic co-director of Mi Casa Theatre, she has toured Canada and New Mexico with the award winning Countries Shaped Like Stars, and published a storybook version of the show. Mi Casa is the company in residence at the GCTC where Emily is currently writing text for a new piece that involves whales, a daring escape, janky cabaret music and a plot to swallow the moon. Upcoming projects include acting in Third Wall Theatre's production of Antigone, and working with Brian Quirt as assistant dramaturge on The Shadow Cutter. Emily has an MFA from Simon Fraser University in Interdisciplinary Performance creation, and teaches scriptwriting at Algonquin College.

Said Mushfiq Hashimi
Born in Kabul, Mushfiq Hashimi holds a Bachelor degree in Theatre from the University of Kabul. His training in Eastern classical music began here under Rubin Chatterjee and Krishna Chatterjee. Later, Mushfiq entered the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music, and studied North Indian classical music under several renowned professors, including Pandit Ajoy Chakraborthy of the Patiala Gharana (school). Hashimi is the founder and lead vocalist of the Mushfiq Ensemble, whose work has traced a captivating journey through classical eastern music. The Ensemble typically uses South Asian instruments such as the harmonium, tabla, surmandal and tanpura, and performs songs in different twelve languages, among them Dari, French, Hindi, Punjabi, Russian and Urdu.

Oni the Haitian Sensation
Chosen as "Ottawa's favourite full time writer/poet" by the Ottawa Xpress Arts Weekly, Oni the Haitian Sensation (aka Ingrid Joseph) is an internationally recognized slam poet and Ottawa's poetry diva. She has been commissioned to write poetry for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, the CBC, the Bytowne Museum and Ottawa's Winterlude Festival. The first Canadian woman to tour the European slam poetry circuit, Oni has also performed in Australia and the United States. She directed Canada's first National Poetry Slam, the Canadian Spoken Wordlympics, and has curated the Ottawa International Writers Festival. Oni's poetry addresses subjects that are not always covered in the mainstream media and seeks to empower, educate and entertain her audience. Oni is also a widely admired  HIV/AIDS activist. "Sex education has never been as fun," wrote Maclean's Magazine of her award-winning poetry workshops on HIV/AIDS, "nor, possibly, as effective." A single parent with three children, Oni is a social activist who was nominated for Ottawa's YWCA Women of Distinction Award. Born in Montreal, she lives in Ottawa.

Mel M'rabet
Oud virtuoso Mel M'rabet has been nominated for several Genie awards. The compositions on his four CDs, which include collaborations with Omar Sosa, Salif Keita and Steve Potts, reflect his eclectic cultural background and a wealth of experience acquired from tours in Canada, the United States and Europe. M'rabet has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, The City of Ottawa and many other institutions. Recognized among his peers as versatile and innovative performer, his music has been prominently featured in several documentaries on music and he has been invited to jazz and folk festivals across Canada, as well as in Chicago, Washington DC, France, Germany and Spain.

Sheila James
Sheila James is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of social justice, with a particular focus on race, gender and sexuality.  After training with renowned "popular theatre" director Augusto Boal, she has facilitated numerous "theatre of the oppressed" workshops and founded two community arts theatre groups. James has written several stage plays, including All Whispers / No Words and A Canadian Monsoon, which were produced by Company of Sirens, the latter in association with Theatre Passe Muraille. She has also released a compilation of original children's songs and created and collaborated on four videos including the award-winning Unmapping Desire, which has been translated into French and German and broadcast by ZDF in Europe. James also wrote the screenplay for Erased, which has been screened internationally to wide acclaim. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and journals and her first collection of short stories, In the Wake of Loss, which received Honorable Mention in the 2010 Foreword Book Awards, was published by the Ronsdale Press in 2009. She lives in Ottawa.

eepmon
Artist-programmer Eric Chan (a.k.a. eepmon) works at the intersection of art, design and technology. He is currently exploring the creative potential of a free and open Internet by combining art with open data to create spontaneous and unexpected paintings. Intersections, a series of images generated by information streamed from the Google Weather Service, was exhibited at the Ottawa Art Gallery (OAG) in summer 2010. Eric has also applied his multidisciplinary skills towards commercial works that include visually integrated campaigns/projects for Microsoft XBox 360, MINI Cooper, and the Gemini Awards 25th anniversary. Eric was awarded "Best Canadian Student" at FITC 2006, and the "Excellence Award for Illustration" in Computer Arts magazine's Graduate Showcase 2008. He was a recipient of a 2009 Banff Centre artist residency, and was a PechaKucha:Tokyo 2009 speaker and TEDxToronto 2010 performer. His art has been acquired by the Canada Council's Art Bank. Eric is a part-time faculty member of Algonquin College.

Phil Jenkins
Phil Jenkins is an author and performing songwriter. As a writer he has published four books, all relating to the evolving Canadian attitude to landscape. His first, Fields of Vision, about Canadian farm families was a national bestseller, and his second, An Acre of Time, won a national history award. Since 1991 (apart from a break during the Black years) he has been a columnist with the Ottawa Citizen, writing on books, local history and architecture. He has written for magazines as diverse as National Geographic Traveller and Ottawa Life. He is currently writing his first play. As a teenager in Liverpool during the Beatle years, Phil began playing guitar and performed in University folk clubs. On returning to Canada in 1978 he sang for his supper for ten years as a full-time minstrel, and still performs regularly as a solo throughout the National Capital region as well as at his many readings, singing songs that have come out of his books. In 1998 he formed the band Riverbend and they have released one CD, Car Tunes, and will release a second this Fall. From 2008 - 2010 he was the chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN Canada. 

Writers

Alvaro Gómez
Prior to his departure in the fall of 2005, Alvaro Gómez survived several attempts on his life and suffered internal displacement within his native Colombia after reporting on links between drug traffickers and government officials, police and the army. In 1997, he founded Servicios Especializados de Información, Seinforma (Specialized Journalistic Services), as an alternative news agency dedicated, in part, to helping victims of Colombia's civil war obtain reparations from the government. In October 2006 Gómez re-activated Seinforma in Canada, as a Web-based entity which promotes and circulates human rights news. The agency has correspondents in twelve Latin American countries. In 2009 Gómez received his Diploma in Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Writers from Sheridan College. He is currently working on two books.

Amatoritsero Ede
Amatoritsero Ede was born in Nigeria. His poetry has been anthologized internationally in ten books - most recently in Rogue Stimulus (Toronto: Mansfield Press, 2010). His latest poetry collection is Globetrotter & Hitler's Children (New York: Akashic, 2009). Ede was the 2005-2006 PEN Canada Writer-in-Residence at Carleton University's English Department, where he is now a doctoral candidate. He is the publisher and Managing Editor of the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, MTLS at www.mtls.ca and has received two major international literary awards, the1998 All Africa Christopher Okigbo Prize for Literature for his first collection, A Writer's Pains Caribbean Blues (Bremen, Germany: Yeti Press, 1998) and second prize in the first May Ayim Award: International Black German Literary Prize, in 2004.

Nooshin Salari
Nooshin Salari was born in Tabriz, Iran and immigrated to Canada in 1992. She attended the University of Saskatchewan and obtained her degree in Pharmacy. Salari began writing short stories as a teenager in Tehran. Her first story, "School Library", appeared in 1980 in Negeen magazine. Since then, her stories have appeared in several literary magazines in Iran including the World of Words, in various volumes of the Anthology of Short Stories by Iranian and World Writers (selected by Safdar Taghizadeh) and in At the Threshold of a Cold Season (selected by Toraj Rahnama and Susan Gaveri), a of short stories by contemporary Iranian female writers. Salari's first collection of short stories, The End of the Apple Tree, was published by Movarid Press in Tehran in 2004. She has completed a second collection of short stories and has recently finished her first novel in English.

Sheng Xue
Sheng Xue grew up in Beijing and moved to Canada soon after witnessing the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In 2000, she won the Canadian Association of Journalists Award for Investigative Journalism and the National Magazine Award, for an investigative report on the lives of Chinese boat refugees published in Maclean's magazine. In 2001, Sheng investigated China's most prominent smuggling case and published a book (in Chinese), Unveiling the Yuan Hua Case, which soon became a bestseller in Chinese communities outside China and created shockwaves both inside and outside China. China's Propaganda Ministry immediately banned the book. Since March 2002, Sheng has been a regular commentator for NTDTV, a global Chinese TV network. In 2005, she joined Deutsche Welle (Voice of Germany) has been its North American correspondent. As a freelance writer, she has published numerous news reports and commentaries in Chinese-language media and her poetry and prose has been widely published. Sheng article, "The Unbearable Heaviness of Being", was collected in The Exiles Who Did Not Die, published by INK Publishing Limited in Taiwan in February 2005. Her prose fiction "The Bloody Morning" and "Light up a Candle Please" were collected in Poetry and Tank, published in January 2007 by the Chen Zhong Publishing House in Hong Kong. Sheng is also a member of the Editorial Board of June 4 Poetry, named in memory of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square.

Goran Simic
Goran Simic was born in Bosnia and has published many volumes of poetry, drama and short fiction. His work has been translated into nine languages and been published and performed in several European countries. One of the most prominent writers of the former Yugoslavia, Simic and his family were trapped in the siege of Sarajevo. In 1995 they were able to settle in Canada as a result of a PEN Freedom to Write Award and he became a resident at the University of Toronto's Massey College as part of their writer-in-exile program. PEN's Writers in Exile Committee supported Simic's integration into the Canadian writing world, and he and poet Fraser Sutherland collaborated on a short-run collection of poetry called Peace and War, as well as a theatrical piece. In 2003, Brick Books published Simic's first full collection of poems in Canada, Immigrant Blues, translated by Amela Simic. He continues to write and give readings.

Petronila Cleto
As part of the late 1960s radical and political student movement at the University of the Philippines, Petronila Cleto went into theatre organizing among out-of-school youth and working students, and also into child education among the urban poor of Manila. Surviving Ferdinand Marcos's martial law in the 70s, which forced the student movement underground, she became a journalist, well-known for her investigative reporting on human rights stories, socio-economic issues as well as feminist issues. Her poetry and plays also revolved around the same themes of injustice and the people's democratic rights. In the late 80s, her reportage on a Marcos ally, who was terrorizing the journalists in the Visayan part of the archipelago, led to a million-peso libel suit. Cleto, who came to Canada in the early 1990s, is currently working on a project to improve advocacy for Filipino journalists who, more than ever, risk violent repercussions for their work. She is the 2010 PEN Lecturer-in-Residence at George Brown College.

Gordana Icevska
An experienced journalist in her native Macedonia, Icevska has also studied journalism in Denmark, Hungary and, since her arrival in Canada in 2004, in Toronto. Along with Macedonian, she also speaks English, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. Icevska was editor-in-chief of the Skopje-based Kapital magazine and has filed stories for the BBC World Service, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Time magazine and CNN Online. She has co-authored and edited several books on the Macedonian media and politics, and on Eastern Europe. While in Canada, Icevska has written for several Toronto newspapers. She has also written several short stories and plans to write a novel.

Host

Adrian Harewood
Adrian Harewood is co-host of CBC News Ottawa at 5, 5:30 & 6 and host of CBC News Ottawa Late Night at 10:55 p.m. Adrian made the leap from radio to television in the fall of 2009 after three years of hosting Ottawa's number one drive-home show, All in a Day on CBC Radio One (91.5 FM). Adrian has a keen interest in community involvement and getting to better know the city where he grew up.

For further information:

or media interviews please contact Anjula Gogia, freelance events producer at [e-mail], or 416.535.9632, or visit www.pencanada.ca.