Licia Canton is an editor, instructor, mentor, and writer. Most recently, she edited Here & Now Volume 2: An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian Writing.

For many years, I never read or saw stories about Italian-Canadians. I would say they are still a rarity. So many of the stories that we see as “Italian-something” are actually Italian-American stories or based on Mafia stereotypes. I like a good gangster story as much as the next person, but it’s getting to be a lazy, tired stereotype. Yes, Cold City is a crime story, but it’s also a story about people: immigration, desperation and redemption, not another version of The Godfather. It’s time to tell other stories and I’m very happy to tell them.

Carmelo Militano's latest novel, The Patina of Melancholy, is very compelling and sensual, with all the elements of a detective literary thriller and the passion of a love story, intertwined into one.

To date I have published seven poetry books, three novels, one children’s fantasy novel, two drama books and two works of non-fiction, one of which, Italy Revisited, was translated into French and Italian. Which form do I find the most challenging? They are equally challenging and fun. Writing itself does not require much effort. Finding publishers does.

The writing of the book was a long process. When I started, I didn't see what I saw when I came to the final version of this manuscript. When I started writing this, I saw myself only as a failure of a scholar. When I finished, I saw that everything I strove for was meaningless in the new decolonized academy. I still think the academy is a colonizers project, a relic of King Arthur's round table of knights, a world of landed gentry, so the decolonizing project is not complete… and also the academy is being taken over by a market economy, degrees are monetized, students purchase credentials as clients. So on the one hand we have decolonization of academic elitism and on the other, a kind of capitalist revision of education.

After close to eighty years of poems, short stories, novels, and essays, readers have the right to ask what is an Italian Canadian writer if there is no legal justification for such an ID. There are three possibilities: you own the Italian passport, you own the Canadian passport, or you own both. Only if you have both passports, have you the right to consider yourself an Italian and a Canadian. Otherwise you are either an Italian or a Canadian. Nonetheless, at some point, a few writers of my generation brought together both identities, and in so doing cracked open our conception of personal testimony. I needed to delve into what had been posited by this agglutination.

Extra/Beautiful/U centers on the story of five women as they shape each other’s lives, and affirm their own identities. A former Reality TV beauty queen needs reconstructive surgery after a violet car crash leaves her disfigured. Her surgeon turns out to be an old high school colleague; her nurse is a super fan; her mom is stressed out; her sister wants to live her own life. Cue transformative moments and five defiant spirits.

Domenico Capilongo’s latest book of poems is a blast-to-the-past, more specifically the 1970s. It’s a series of prose poems based on words added in the dictionary the year the poet was born.

Catering to kids of all ages, Marcangelo Benevenga’s new children’s book, Rain or Shine, is a heart-warming tale of Marc and his loyal dog Arya, who embark on an inspiring journey of finding motivation in unexpected places.