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 Women in a Globalizing World:
Equality, Development, Peace and Diversity
edited by Angela Miles
978-1-926708-19-5 / February 2013 / $39.95
An exciting Canadian collection of feminist articles that provide cutting-edge gender analysis for understanding diverse personal and political challenges and opportunities in our fast-changing global world. Canadian and international authors offer varied social justice, anti-racist, Indigenous, and subsistence perspectives on environmental, social, cultural, and political issues in women's local and global struggles and visions for another world.
The book combines articles by formative researchers in key areas with historically-specific reflections and analyses of Canadian and other feminist activists as they first face, come to understand, and learn to address (with their sisters around the world) emerging neo-liberalism's impacts on women. This anthology, thus, uniquely situates current theory and activism in a rare historically-contextualized account of Canadian and global feminisms' deepening engagement with these issues.
Anyone concerned to understand Canadian and international neo-liberal policies' impact on women and women's growing understanding and resistance to these policies will be interested in this book. As well as women's studies courses, this collection will be an indispensable resource for teachers seeking globally-informed, gender-, race-, class-, and Indigenous- aware Canadian resources for the study of sociology, international development, environmental studies, political economy, women's human rights, labour studies, social policy, social work, international relations, migration/immigration, violence, poverty, militarism, colonialism and post-colonialism, social movements, global feminisms, peace, community organizing, sustainability and alternative possibilities.
Sections include:
Part 1: 'Sustainable Development' and Growth: Social and Environmental Costs
i. Neo-liberal 'Restructuring': 'Liberalization'; ii. Neo-liberal 'Restructuring': Enclosure and Commodification; iii. Displacement, Migration and Violence.
Part 2: Another World is Possible
i. un Decade for Women and Beyond: Equality, Development, Peace and Diversity; ii. Gender-focused Policy Critique and Advocacy; iii. Women's Local and Global Activism.
Angela Miles is a feminist activist, theorist, and Professor in the Adult Education and Community Development Program and co-founder of the International Women's Human Rights Education Institute at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her publications include: Integrative Feminisms: Building Global Visions (1996) and co-edited collections Feminist Politics, Activism and Vision: Local and Global Challenges (2004) and Feminism: From Pressure to Politics (1989).
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 "And Neither Have I Wings to Fly":
Labelled and Locked Up in Canada's Oldest Institution
by Thelma Wheatley
978-1-926708-58-4 / April 2013 / $24.95
The shocking true story of the institutionalization and abuse of children and adults with intellectual and physical handicaps in Canada's oldest provincial institution in Orillia, Ontario. Daisy Lumsden and her family were such victims, along with over ten thousand children, including infants, and adults with intellectual disabilities committed over the last century to the institution now known as Huronia Regional Centre, formerly the Asylum for Idiots and Feeble-Minded.
The time frame of the book, 1900-1966, covers the most controversial decades in its history, a time of over-crowding and abuses that reached a crux in the 1950s and 1960s when the inmate population was nearly 3000. Victims of the rising eugenic ideology of the early 1900s that infiltrated Canada from United States and Britain, advocating segregation and involuntary sterilization of the "feeble-minded," Daisy's family — uneducated, ignorant, unemployed, incestuous, poor — were easily identifiable as "feeble-minded" and "unfit," unwittingly caught up in a genetic "survival of the fittest." But who are the "unfit" in our society? And who decides?
Powerful exposé of a part of Canadian history kept secret — the book exposes the role of psychiatrists and leading eugenicists in Canada in the abuse of intellectual and physically handicapped children's civil rights in Canada. A true story, it is highly readable and includes full historical data, endnotes, historical sources, photographs, and a bibliography. Readers will experience what it is like being locked up in an institution through the first-hand experiences of heroine Daisy Lumsden and members of her family. Original patient records and psychiatrists reports are incorporated throughout the story providing integrity. The book brings to light a shameful part of Canada's history too long swept under the table.
Of note: A current $1-billion class-action lawsuit is underway against the government of Ontario and the institution for failure to provide proper care and protection for those living within its walls. This book is at the heart of it.
Thelma Wheatley is the author of My Sad Is All Gone: A Family's Triumph Over Violent Autism (2004), a book about raising her autistic child. Her award-winning short fiction has been published in a number of literary journals across Canada. Past president of Autism Society Ontario, Peel Region, Wheatley continues to be in demand as a speaker on violence and autism. She is on the Board of the Friends of the Archives, Museum of Mental Health, CAMH, and is currently editor of the Friends of the Archives Newsletter.
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 A Glittering Chaos
a novel by Lisa de Nikolits
97819267089928 / May 2013 / $22.95
The adage about "what happens in Vegas" is funny precisely because we know it's wishful thinking. A Glittering Chaos is about what happens when "what happens in Vegas" comes home to haunt you. Melusine is a German librarian whose ho-hum world wobbles after she tags along when her husband Hans attends a Las Vegas optometry conference. A newly empty nester who speaks no English, Melusine's voyage of self-discovery is punctuated by the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann, nude photos in the desert, a black dildo named Kurt, autoerotic asphyxia, and the unravelling of her husband's sanity because of a secret from his youth. A smart, funny and incredibly wise novel about marriage, secrets and lies, and unusual sexual proclivities.
Author Information:
Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has been a Canadian citizen for nine years and has lived in Toronto for thirteen. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. As an art director, her magazine credits include marie claire, Vogue, Vogue Living and Cosmopolitan, SHE and Longevity. Her first novel, the critically acclaimed The Hungry Mirror, won the 2011 IPPY Gold Medal for Women's Issues Fiction, and her second novel, West of Wawa, won the 2012 IPPY Silver Medal for Popular Fiction.
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 Autumn's Grace
a novel by Bonnie Lendrum
9781926708881 / May 2013 / $22.95
Families who would want to honour a parent's request to not die in hospital, encounter obstacles that can defeat even accomplished health professionals. Autumn's Grace is a story that spans a ten-month period as the Campbell family comes to terms with the father's diagnosis of cancer. The diagnosis seems a particularly unfair blow to a veterinarian who has lived a very healthy lifestyle. In addition he has treated his animal patients and their owners with more respect and compassion than many of the human health professionals are willing or able to provide. The adult children (two nurses, veterinarian, and teacher) confront a health care system they thought they knew, and familial relationships that they had avoided for decades. Generational pulls and career conflicts challenge the siblings as they support their parents, conduct their own family and professional lives, and are forced to face critical situations and the decisions that they must make. They muddle through with varying doses of tenacity, courage, humour and hope.
Author Information: Bonnie Lendrum is a wife, mother, nurse, gardener, volunteer, and ballet student living in Carlisle, Ontario. The latter activity is an attempt to defy the age-associated effects of gravity. A former community nurse, she has cared for patients and families in the ICU and in their homes, directed large departments, and participated in research and teaching. Her writing is informed by the experiences that worry her, like palliative care and its delivery in rural communities. Her first published work was a chapter in Nursing Management in Canada. Autumn's Grace is her first work of fiction.
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 The Long White Sickness
a novel by Cecelia Frey
9781926708904 / May 2013 / $22.95
On a remote lonely mountain, Constance skis toward her death and Harry Weinstein loses himself in an avalanche. Meanwhile, back in the city, Gully Jillson is the suspect in the investigation of a murder that has taken place in Constance's high-rise condo. The collision of this strange ménage a trois is at the heart of Cecelia Frey's latest novel of love and death, sex and life. Complicating matters for Constance in her pursuit of a recalcitrant and perfidious muse are the ongoing intrusions of Sgt. Rock, homicide detective with ulterior motives; daughter Lara and her rock musician partner, Rowlf, fugitives from a California religious cult; and 84-year-old Aunt Olive, one floor down, who shoots from the lip, and the hip, if anyone messes with her boyfriend, Fred. In the ensuing hijinks, Constance becomes a character trapped in her narrative, which is hijacked by her former husband. Ultimately, a novel about how to find a way to live in the world.
Author Information: Cecelia Frey was born in northern Alberta, grew up in Edmonton and now lives in Calgary. Her short stories and poetry have been published in dozens of literary journals and anthologies as well as being broadcast on CBC radio and performed on the Women's Television Network. Her last novel, A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing, was shortlisted for the 2009 Writers Guild of Alberta Fiction Award and she is a three-time recipient of the WGA Short Fiction Award. She has also won awards for play writing. Cecelia is the author of poetry collections: the least you can do is sing; Songs Like White Apples Tasted; And Still I Hear Her Singing; Reckless Women; and Under Nose Hill; short story collections: The Nefertiti Look; The Love Song of Romeo Paquette; and Salamander Moon; and novels: Breakaway; The Prisoner of Cage Farm; A Fine Mischief and A Raw Mix of Carelessness and Longing. Her play, The Dinosaur Connection, was produced on CBC's Vanishing Point series.
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 I write these words / J'écris ces mots
poems by Lélia Young, translated by Christine Tipper
9781771330527 / April 2013 / $18.95
I write these words / J'écris ces mots is a fascinating volume of poetry that examines the world of a woman born in Tunisia but living in Toronto, and women's universal struggle to find their place in the world. Poems explore the roles woman play in diverse societies and cultures and draw the reader in with gentle, probing verses that beguile with their beauty, but challenge with their meaning. Sometimes the reader travels in the present, sometimes in the past, into the world of a woman and poet who is pulled in many directions.
Author Information: Born in Tunisia, Lélia Young immigrated to Canada in 1968. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of French Studies, York University, in Toronto. She is the author of several poetry books in French, including: Entre l'outil et la matière (1993); Si loin des cypress (1999); Aquarelles, La paix comme un poème (2006); and Réverbères (2007). In 2009, she organized a conference on the topic of Francophone poetry in North America, in 2009, and a book of the proceedings Langages Poétiques et poésie francophone en Amérique du Nord (Poetic Languages and Francophone Poetry in Nord America) is forthcoming. She is also the founder and director of an international research network focused on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary Francophone studies in literature (C-RICEFM). I write these words/ j'écris ces mots is her first bilingual volume of selected poetry.
Christine Tipper is an internationally published French and Spanish literary translator currently living in Swindon, England. She is also a poet, writer, storyteller and lecturer. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Exeter and has translated and interpreted for over 30 years, working across France, Belgium, Canada, Spain, and the UK. Her translation of Nadine Ltaif's poetry Entre les fleuves, was published in Canada as Changing Shores (Guernica Editions) in 2009. She divides her life between her numerous writing passions and visiting her sons and grandchildren in Spain, Belgium and France when she is not trekking in the Himalayas in Nepal where she supports a local school.
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 Dark Water Songs
poems by Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes
9781926708942 / April 2013 / $18.95
The poems in Dark Water Songs begin on the margins of islands and ancestors, and fan out, probing love, loss and life's dilemmas. They expand and deepen the poetic exploration which began with my earlier collections, mining the reciprocal spaces enabled by the hyphen between Jamaican and Canadian, exploring silences, the weight of memory, and a sense of the sacred. The collection contributes to the body of work by contemporary Canadian writers of Caribbean origin. The perspective is that of a poet/educator and former nun ― a writer who negotiates the world through the lens of islands and continents, landscapes and seas.
Author Information: Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes, is a Jamaican-Canadian, poet/educator and former nun. A Fellow at Scotland's Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Fall 2009, her literary publications include the collections: Travelling Light (2006), long-listed for the 2007 ReLit Poetry Award, and The Fires of Naming (2001). Her poetry appears in the anthologies: Calling Cards: New Poetry from Caribbean/Canadian Women (2005); Garden Variety, An Anthology of Flower Poems (2007); and Resonance: Poetry and Art (2008), and in journals such as Quills, The Toronto Quarterly, Arc, and Lichen. She has lived in Toronto since her arrival in 1969.
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 Rebel Women
poems by Vancy Kasper
9781926708966 / April 2013 / $18.95
Rebel Women begins by moving in and out of women's kitchens, parlours, meetings and wagon-rides on the eve and throughout Toronto's 1837 Rebellion. The poems let the reader eavesdrop on the loves, fears, hatreds and courage of these feisty pioneers as they are engulfed by an uprising some did or did not support. The poems are based on the stories, gossip, and rumours that Kasper's grandmother, Statira Catherine Shepard – the granddaughter of Joseph Shepard, a prominent leader of the Reform Party (after whom Sheppard Avenue is named) and the youngest daughter of Rebel Joseph (jailed for insurrection with his three brothers) – shared with the poet when she was growing up. Almost nothing has been written about the women who supported, opposed or endured the failed December Rebellion of 1837—certainly not in poetry. This collection honours these daring women, what happened to them, and how they took charge of their lives. This volume also features poems about Kasper's impoverished, eccentric family and provide a glimpse of Toronto when it was still considered a "hick town."
Author Information: Vancy Kasper is a Toronto poet, author and journalist. Her work includes her first poetry collection, Mother, I'm So Glad You Taught Me How to Dance; the best-selling Young Adult novel, Always Ask For a Transfer and Y.A. novels Escape to Freedom (First Honourable Mention, Canadian Library Association) and Street of Three Directions, also published in Italy. Her poems have been published in Fireweed, Canadian Women's Studies, Quarry, Waves, and Landscape and have been broadcast on Bravo TV, CKLN and the University of Toronto radio station. She has Poet in Residence in various Ontario schools. One of the first members of the Women's Writing Collective, she was a features writer for the Toronto Star for nine years. She is included in Greg Gatenby's Literary Toronto.
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 A Gut Reaction
A True Story About a Mother's Fight to Save her Son's Life and his Amazing Recovery from Crohn's Disease
by Sky Curtis
9781771330800 / May 2013 / $22.95
Gut Reaction is an entertaining as well as informative true story about the author's battle to save her son's life – or at least his large intestine - from a very severe case of Crohn's disease. With persistence, humour, much searching of the Internet and the help of two unusual doctors, one in Canada and the other in Australia, she and her son, who was in his early twenties, finally find a regime of fecal infusions that replaces the bacteria that had ulcerated his gut with a healthy flora donated by his mother. The manuscript details their adventures and then concludes with a helpful summary of how they did it. It includes a foreword by Dr. Thomas Borody, a globally recognized gastroenterologist and the Director of the Centre for Digestive Diseases in Australia, whose emails and phone conversations helped the author understand what, how, and why to do what was necessary. When the regime is only a partial success, she figures out on her own that she must eliminate many of the problems that are preventing the helpful bacteria from being able to colonize her son's intestine. By talking to a helpful pharmacist and then with the support of a helpful doctor she begins the healing of the intestine walls and develops a more extensive regime of fecal infusions that cures her son. The proof is supported by a final colonoscopy and a forthcoming article in Lancet as well as by the by Dr. Borody's foreword.
Research involving gut flora and the identification of which of the thousands of different kinds of bacteria effect our physical and mental health is relatively new but is showing promise. Sky Curtis's sometimes desperate, often hilarious, and always determined international quest for a treatment for her son's life-threatening Crohn's disease resulted in a new protocol for the treatment of this disease. Sky's son is probably the first person in North America to be free of Crohn's/Colitis because of fecal transplants. Her perseverance with this type of therapy for intestinal diseases means that sufferers of Crohn's/Colitis now have hope that they can be completely well.
Author Information: Sky Curtis is a former magazine writer, educational software designer, editor, playwright, columnist and children's writer. She now writes fiction and non-fiction books for adults. Her most recent book, Doctored, was published by Inanna Publications in 2010. Sky lives in Toronto with her family.
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 Canadian Woman Studies
An Introductory Reader, 3rd Edition
Brenda Cranney and Sheila Molloy, editors
ISBN 978-1-771330-60-2 / $39.95 / Due: June 2013
Canadian Woman Studies: An Introductory Reader, 3rd Revised and Updated Edition, brings together articles on themes and topics at the forefront of feminist inquiry and research. Compiled of articles previously published in one of Canada's oldest feminist journals, Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme (CWS/cf), it offers a unique and historical perspective of feminism as well as provides an excellent introduction to feminist thought in Canada. This volume has been revised and updated to consider some of the changes that we have witnessed in Canada and elsewhere in the world since the publication of the best-selling first edition in 1999, and second edition in 2006. Recognizing the growing significance of Canadian feminist scholarship, this revised and updated third edition aims to situate Canada within a broader, transnational context. Articles consider the regional, urban, rural, linguistic, demographic and ethnic differences within the nation, as well as the ways women in Canada are impacted by various global factors. Sections include: Feminist Perspectives; Herstories; Work/Economy; Policy; Violence; Representation; Health; Activism and Resistance.
Author Information: Brenda Cranney has a Ph.D. in in Sociology from York University and has worked extensively on a variety of women's issues with numerous NGOs in Canada and India. A scholar, activist, and photographer, she continues to be active in a number of women's organization and has taught at York University, George Brown and Humber College. She is the author of Local Environment and Lived Experience: The Mountain Women of Himachal Pradesh.
Sheila Molloy has been interested in international feminist issues for many years. She has been involved in women's centres in her neighbourhood, and has a background in public and intergovernmental organizations in the area of education. She speaks and reads English and French, having worked in bilingual environments. She is a long-time supporter of women and a feminist and is an active member of Women for a Just and Healthy Planet.
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 A Force Such as the World Has Never Known
Women Creating Change
Sharon G. Mijares, Aliaa Rafea and Nahid Angha, editors
ISBN 978-1-771330-56-5 / $34.95 / Due: May 2013
A Force Such as the World Has Never Known: Women Creating Change is a unique collection of narratives from academics and grassroots activists from around the globe. These are stories of compassion and bravery, empowered by the vision of a better world for all life. The anthology emphasizes the need to empower the feminine and assure gender balance and human rights for all. This accumulation of women's stories reveals the role of women in creating needed changes in areas of health and nutrition, supporting efforts toward sustainable environments, promoting political and social rights, protecting women from the travesties of war and rape, and promoting the acceptance of religious diversity and better conditions for all beings.
A very interesting and instructive manuscript that both gives one much needed hope and reveals some of how much needs to be done before both women and men can hope to live together in equality and harmony in a world at peace. An attempt to really pull together the voices of women activists from around the world revealing the particular context in which women live in their countries and the actions women have and are taking to improve the lives of women in particular, women and men more generally, in their countries.
The manuscript offers an introduction to women's movements in parts of the world where we normally have little access to this kind of information, i.e., women's activism in communist societies such as the U.S.S.R. and now Russia, as well as China, as well as women's activism within spiritual traditions such as Islam and Buddhism, and forms of activism that women may not have previously considered (e.g. dance). Makes an important contribution in filling a gap in knowledge about the status and activism of women in other cultures.
Sharon G. Mijares, psychologist, workshop leader and author, has focused on women's development for over 25 years. She has authored five books, numerous articles and is an influential leader in promoting women's empowerment, gender balance and psychospiritual healing.
Aliaa Rafea is a Professor of Anthropology at Ain Shams University, Women's College in Cairo. She has authored and co-authored several books, had chapters in books published in India, Japan, Morocco and the USA, as well as numerous academic articles in international and regional journals.
Nahid Angha, Ph. D., is a Sufi Scholar, a Humanitarian, Human Rights activist, Women's Rights activist; Author, Lecturer, and Translator of over fifteen published books. She is the first Muslim woman inducted to the Marin Women's Hall of Fame.
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