Spring into summer with yet another Wednesday of wild & wonderful words on June 18 at Sookram’s Brewing (479-B Warsaw Ave.), featuring a line-up of Manitoba writers. The reading starts at 7 p.m. and is free. All ages are welcome to attend.

Host Sheldon Birnie is a writer, dad, and beer league hockey player, and the author of Missing Like Teeth and Where the Pavement Turns to Sand.

Antonio Barraza Luna is a Mexican-Canadian writer and musician who loves to paint pictures with words. The supernatural always makes its way into his work, as he believes the world is a little more magical with a touch of the unknown in it.

Zoë Mills is a writer whose work has appeared in print for Room Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2, and online for Manitoba Music and her Substack project For Frances. She is currently working on publishing her first lyric essay.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 Territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which is the essay collection Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024). She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with Plume Winnipeg that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press.

Following a business career in manufacturing and marketing, Mitchell Toews of Jessica Lake, Manitoba, began writing fiction in 2016. Since then, 138 magazine appearances, a debut collection of short stories published by At Bay Press in 2023, and a novel, forthcoming from At Bay in 2026, have established Mitch as an author with things to say and places to imagine.

The reading on June 18 is the fourth in the ongoing series, which has also featured local writers Anna Leventhal, Gonzalo Riedel, Lisa Michelle Moore, A.W. Glen, Seyward Goodhand, Kevin Doole, Noah Cain, Jenny Heijun Wills, Bob Armstrong, and more. The next regular reading in the series will take place on a Wednesday in September, but keep your eyes pealed for a number of summer pop-up readings to be announced soon.

For more information, contact wildwonderfulwords@gmail.com

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