Progress isn't always a straight line.

When a non-denominational megachurch opens on the edges of a rural Mennonite community, a quiet--but longstanding battle--begins to reveal itself. For years, the traditionalists in the community have held fast to the values and beliefs they grew up with, while other community members have begun raising important questions about LGBTQ+ inclusion, Indigenous land rights, and the Mennonite legacy of pacifism.

Through a series of vignettes, Shelterbelts explores the perspectives, experiences and limitations of a wide range of characters who find themselves increasingly at odds with their surroundings. A pastor and his queer daughter learn that a family has left their church because of the "LGBT issue." Young activists butt heads with a farmer over the construction of a pipeline happening onhis fields. A librarian leaves suggestive notes for readers inside popular library books. By pulling these threads together, artist Jonathan Dyck has woven a rich tapestry--one that depicts a close-knit community in the midst of defining its future as it reckons with its past.

Jonathan Dyck is an illustrator and cartoonist from Winnipeg, Manitoba -- Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation.

A Cross-Continental Roar!
In 2021, sixteen Indigenous spoken word artists from North and South America performed their works at the Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) in Toronto, Canada. This anthology, featuring poems from each of the performers, is the result of this remarkable cross-border collaboration. Digitally enhanced with QR codes, Slam Coalkan links readers to the poets' performances at the festivals.
From these pages the poets sing their hopes and their dreams. These are the voices of resistance, voices that speak out against the evils of colonialism, racism, transphobia, and genocide. Voices that cry, shout, whisper and roar passionate messages to the world.

Jennifer Alicia Murrin (they/she) is a queer, mixed (Mi'kmaw/Settler) storyteller originally from Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk (Bay Of Islands, Newfoundland), now residing in Toronto. She is a two-time national poetry slam champion and member of Seeds & Stardust Poetry Collective. Jennifer Alicia's debut chapbook was released by Moon Jelly House, Fall 2020.

Renata Tupinambá's Indigenous name is Aratykyra; she is a journalist, producer, poet, consultant, curator, screen-writer and visual artist. She founded the Indigenous production company Originárias Produções. Collaborator of the Visibilidade Indígena network. For 15 years she has been working with the dissemination of Indigenous culture and ethnocommunication. She has been on the Curating Council of TV Cultura - Fundação Padre Anchieta since 2020. She is a member of the Amotara Zabelê in Bahia, a school of ancestral knowledge in Tupinambá territory in the Una municipality. Creator of the Originárias podcast, the first podcast of interviews with Indigenous artists and musicians in Brazil, which is a part of PodSim, a group of female-led podcasts. Co-founded Rádio Yandê, the first Brazilian Indigenous web radio. Curator of the Festival Corpos da Terra - images of Indigenous peoples in Brazilian cinema (2021). Curator of the second screening of Etnomídia indígena (2021). Curator of the Festival de Música indígena, at CCVM's Indígenas BR 2021 festival. Curator of the first Brazilian festival of contemporary Indigenous music, by Rádio Yandê, at Unibes Cultural in São Paulo (2019).

From acclaimed filmmaker, artist and activist Marjorie Beaucage comes a poetic memoir that reflects on seven decades of living and seeking justice as a Two Spirit Michif woman. Poems, poetic observations and thoughtful meanderings comprise this inspirational journal-memoir-poetry collection from a woman who has dedicated her life and her talent to creating social change. Unfolding the wisdom gained from experience, leave some for the birds: movements for justice offers guidance for younger activists following the author's trailblazing footsteps.

Marjorie Beaucage is a proud Métis Two Spirit Filmmaker, cultural worker, and community based video activist. Her work as a community based independent artist, seeks to question, empower, and change the ways we look at ourselves...seeing from the inside out. Marjorie was a cofounder of the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance. As a 'Runner' she worked as a cultural Ambassador to negotiate self governing partnerships and alliances with the Banff Centre for the Arts, V-tape, the Canada Council for the Arts which resulted in the development of Aboriginal Arts programs. She also programmed the first Aboriginal Film Festival in Toronto in 1992 .

Noelle Schmidt plows through the distorted shrapnel of trauma dormant and still tingling.

Claimings and Other Wild Things is a brave debut poetry collection which delves into a catalog of personal struggle and identity, all the while inviting readers to imagine the "prophet in the dirty motel" or "the illusion of soft flesh giving way" or the pent up rage of a "boxed-up grenade sent round trip".

This is poetry of exactitude -- honest, at times tender, a collection which reminds us how life's obstacles inform the accruing intensity of being human in the twenty-first century.

Noelle Schmidt is a queer, non-binary poet. A graduate of Western University and a recipient of Alfred R. Poynt Award in Poetry, the Margeurite R. Dow Canadian Heritage Award and the Western Gold Medal. Their poetry can be found in Symposium, Frankenzine, Common Mag and Déraciné Magazine. Claimings and Other Wild Things is their debut collection. They live in Sudbury, Ontario with their partner and two cats.

What was beyond doubt by the time I got back was that a new Transfixion had arrived in the form of Hermia Druitt, the woman in this photograph. This was confirmed by the sensations: flashes from Arcadia. Moonlight, of a kind, sighed up and down the tube of my spine, but above all, that indescribable note which accompanied all my Transfixions was present: humming beneath the high fine rush--probably not dissimilar to holy rapture--was an almost violent familiarity. The feeling of not only recognising, but of having been recognised.

A new Transfixion.

Shola von Reinhold's lavish debut novel lays bare, through ornate, layered prose, the gaps and fault lines in the archive. Through obsessive research on an overlooked Black modernist poet, the narrator buckles under the vacuousness of the art world and also curates a queer historical scene, breaking it open and reveling in it. Originally published in the UK by Jacaranda as part of the Twenty in 2020 Black British writers series, LOTE won both the James Tait Black Prize and The Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2021.

Shola von Reinhold is a writer based in Glasgow, Scotland.

An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex -- in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare.

Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, and their links become clear over the course of the fragmented narrative. The author playfully traces the portrait of the intertwined lives of a group of Black queer and trans friends as they navigate the social violence, traumas, and contradictions of their circumstances.

Originally published in French in 2021 by les Éditions du remue-ménage, as part of the Martiales collection, the stories in Bah's The Rage Letters -- set in Montreal and beyond -- are sometimes brief, often conversational, and always generative of possibilities through the characters' desire, rage, and acts of rebellion.

Valérie Bah is a Tiohtià:ke-based filmmaker and writer whose work explores intergenerational trauma & healing, as well as mundane/radical acts of survival. Couched in magical realism, Val's narratives are driven by Black feminist thought and lived experience.

Kama La Mackerel is an educator, visual artist, performer, writer and translator who works between and across English, French and Mauritian Kreol. They are the author of the award-winning poetry collection ZOM-FAM (Metonymy Press) and have translated works by Canadian writers Vivek Shraya and Kai Cheng Thom. They have lectured, performed and exhibited their work internationally. Find them on social media @kamalamackerel