National Network for Equitable Library Service

Success and promotion within Toronto's public transportation system come at a price. The shifts bring both physical and mental stress. The effects of these seep from work life into the social and personal lives of the operators. Parallel to this is the author's own personal story, a moving portrayal of a broken family home, abandoned teen dreams and a desperate need to be loved and appreciated. The author struggles with daily abuse from the public and his own demons, to the point of almost calling it quits.

Sarah & Abraham: The Search for Miracles and the Stuttering Poet is a stranger than fiction account of a woman's reach for miracles and her conflicted love for Montreal poet, Avi Boxer. It is a gripping tale of experiences that includes magic, sometimes black, by way of the captivating and devilish poet who played magician. The sacred and profane blurred in boundary, as did the very definition of morality, blessing and curse.

Geza Tatrallyay was born in Budapest, Hungary, and escaped with his family in 1956, immigrating to Canada. Geza worked as a host in the Ontario Pavilion at Expo '70, was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, attending Oxford University, and represented Canada as an epée fencer in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. He is the author of Twisted Reasons (Deux Voiliers), For the Children (Editions Dedicaces), and Cello's Tears (P.R.A. Publishing). Since 2004, he has been semi-retired, devoting his time to his family and his writing.

For 11 months Calvin White worked for Doctors Without Borders as a mental health specialist in the off-the-radar region of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan. Unlike the higher profile emergency situations which draw that international humanitarian organization's attention, the milieu for White's mission was the quiet, slow death in an epidemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. White takes the reader inside the daily heartbeat of humans we've never heard of but come to see as sharing the same pulse.

Textbooks describe cancer as a malignant tumour or growth, caused when cells multiply uncontrollably. Researchers give no mention to the consumption of healthy thoughts, and the birth of destructive, negative feelings. Cancer bursts into your consciousness, and like its concrete form, malignant thoughts multiply uncontrollably. In Hard Lumps, Nancy-Gail Burns corrals those thoughts and feelings and illustrates that in the end, good things can be found in just about anything.

A child survivor, a child of survivors and a grandchild of a survivor, Sidney Zoltak is all these things. His story about a family that struggled and endured, the generosity of those who saved them against all odds, and a vow never to forget is a remarkable journey through the Holocaust into a rich and full life. At eight, Sidney loses a middle class home and goes from the slow death of the ghetto into the terror of hiding in forests, barns and finally, a hole in the ground provided by a Polish family farm. But when war ends, there is no going back.

Compulsive Acts explores the films, plays and personality of prolific playwright, novelist, filmmaker and poet Sky Gilbert through the eyes of a handful of the people who have observed his work closely over the past two decades -- as audience members and arts workers.

Born near Park Valley, Saskatchewan, on Crown land, often referred to by locals as a road allowance community, Maria Campbell is the oldest of 8 children. Much of her early years are revealed in Halfbreed, the book which would ultimately ensure that Campbell's life would take a path as a writer, an artist, a community worker and social rights advocate.

This collection features essays on Nova Scotia-born poet, playwright and literary critic George Elliott Clarke. Instrumental in promoting the writing of Canadian writers of African descent, Clarke's work has won awards including the Governor General’s Award for poetry, a National Magazine Gold Medal Award for Poetry, the prestigious Trudeau Fellowship Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Achievement Award, and The Premiul Poesis (Romania).

Frank Lentricchia was born to working-class parents in Utica, New York, on May 23rd in 1940. He earned his M.A. from Duke University in 1963, and his Ph.D. in 1966. His first two books were about modern poetry, and he then began to write more about literary theory, publishing his ground-breaking books in the early 1980's.