Rendezvous Spoken Word and Open Mic

Please join us at our first Rendezvous spoken word and open mic event as part of our Shine ; Together year!

We are excited to feature esteemed writers Ghadeer Elghafri and Kelly Rose Pflug-Back – see their biography and contact details below! The event will also feature open mic from Workman Arts writers each sharing 5 minutes of writing with our audience – sign up for the open mic begins at 1:30 PM and continues until the 12 slots are filled. Tickets are available at the door or in advance – pay what you can and no one turned away!

This event follows the Workman Arts short film program

Any questions please contact info@workmanarts.com.

Ghadeer Elghafri is a Palestinian-Canadian poet from Gaza, born and raised in Dubai, UAE, living in Toronto. She immigrated to Canada 10 years ago from Dubai without her family. She is a Palestinian activist, a feminist, and an advocate of women, children, human rights and social justice.

Since she was 10 years old child, she was writing poetry in her mother language Arabic. What inspired Ghadeer to write is nature, her father, love, longing, nostalgia, diaspora, her homeland Palestine, difficult emotions, hard feelings, trauma, feminism, freedom, liberation, human rights and justice.

Ghadeer is the founder of Toronto Poetry Club. She has organized inclusive and diverse multicultural multilingual open mic poetry nights in Toronto for 8 years. She has published her Arabic and English poetry in newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, including the anthology “Poetry ReRooted: Decolonizing Our Tongues” and in the anthology “To Hear The Birds” 

Ghadeer’s poem “Alhuwiyya (The Identity)” had been published in English in an anthology of “Muslim American Writers at Home” in San Francisco by Freedom Voices Publisher. It was about her 3 different identities contained within her while being in diaspora, relocating in different countries and her nostalgia to her homeland Palestine. She received a grant from The Toronto Arts Council to start a Multilingual Poetry Collective. 

Ghadeer is an Ontario Ambassador, Outreach to Arab speaking community of National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse (NAASCA). She completed her BSc. in Computer Science and MBA at the American University of Sharjah in UAE. Her dream is to have her own house and host her poetry nights, under the name Qahwa Art Café, in its back or front yard in the Summer and in the basement in the Winter. “Qahwa” means coffee in Arabic.

Instagram: gghafri

Kelly Rose Pflug-Back is a writer and creative writing workshop facilitator. Her fiction, poetry, and journalism has appeared recently in publications like The Briarpatch, The Deadlands, and This Magazine, as well as anthologies such as Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp, 2022) and Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing (ChiZine, 2012) . Their debut collection of poems, The Hammer of Witches (Caitlin Press/Dagger Editions, 2020), recently placed as a finalist in the upcoming Bisexual Book Awards.

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Tranzac Club | 292 Brunswick Avenue, Toronto
Box office: 1 PM | Open Mic signup opens at 1:30 PM
Spoken Word event starts at 4 PM sharp and runs until 5:30

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