Editor, Designer, Art Director
5 works is a front-of-book feature from Inuit Art Quarterly, which invites staff to consider a piece of Inuit or Circumpolar indigenous art within the context of the issue’s theme.
From issue 33.2
Issue Theme: Water
5 works theme:
The Life Aquatic
IAF staff choose works showing the materials and inspiration artists find in their waterways
From issue 33.4
Issue theme: Painting
5 Works theme:
True Colours.
IAF Staff choose works that conjure whole worlds with few hues
In 2021, my work with Inuit Art Quarterly won a National Magazine Award for Best Editorial Package.
Issue: Inuit Art Quarterly 33.1
Theme: Threads
An in-depth look at the history of textile arts in Inuit and circumpolar cultures, from Wallhangings in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), NU, to the embroidery traditions in Nunatsiavut, to the cutting edge of circumpolar fashion design.
Role: As Managing Editor of the Inuit Art Quarterly, I handled the substantive editing of all pieces in the issue, helped devise the theme, composed the packaging copy and worked closely with Art Director Matthew Hoffman to design and layout the overall package.
Collaborators:
Britt Gallpen, Editor
Michael Stevens, Managing Editor and Handling Editor
Matthew Hoffman, Art Direction and Design
Other Notes:
The lead feature of this package, “Threading Memories” by Krista Ulujuk Zawadski, was also nominated for Best Short Feature.
The Winning Package:
Click here to see a PDF of the full package
Some Sample Spreads:
The School of Cities is a solutions incubator for urban-focused researchers, educators, students, practitioners, and the general public to explore and address the complex global challenges facing urban centres. A living laboratory, the School leverages urban data and lived experience to improve policy and decision-making, and collaborates with communities around the world to make cities and urban regions more sustainable, prosperous, inclusive, and just.
About City Research Insights
City Research Insights is a policy brief periodical designed to link the urban research being conducted at the University of Toronto with the public, other institutions, and decision-makers. With this series, the School of Cities seeks to leverage their extraordinary community of urbanists and urban-oriented researchers to create a rich, multidisciplinary community of urban faculty, researchers, and students across disciplines and perspectives. In addition to facilitating interdisciplinary research projects, partnerships and funding opportunities, The School of Cities provide a hub for urban-focused interdisciplinary and collaborative learning.
My involvement
In 2022, The School of Cities contacted me to help enliven the packaging of their City Research Insights series, provide editorial support, and establish a blue print for future editions of the series.
Example issues:
Volume 1: Issue 6 | The Affordable Housing Challenge Project: Community land trusts as a tool for affordable housing provision in Toronto
A review of Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio by Brian Fauteux
(Wilfrid Laurier University Press)
From: May 2016 issue of the Literary Review of Canada
The movie Contact, adapted from the Carl Sagan novel of the same name, opens with a shot of Earth from space, evoking the serene photograph snapped by the Apollo 17 crew. Except this Earth is accompanied by a jarring cacophony of insouciant 1990s pop music, bits of air traffic chatter and yammering talk radio hosts. Suddenly the camera retreats past the Moon, then past Mars, while the music becomes decidedly disco and the dissonance slowly subsides. Past Jupiter you can hear iconic DJ Cousin Brucie spinning Beatles 45s, while approaching Saturn it is early Elvis. The reports of an attack on Pearl Harbor ricochet off the rubble of the Kuiper belt, which marks the outer limits of our solar system. Since the invention of radio, it turns out, we have been unwittingly transmitting our existence and position to ALF and E.T., and our noise pollution facilitates first contact with Mork and his fellow Orkans.
But among all that clamour we are emitting, you will not hear the University of Calgary’s CJSW or Dalhousie’s CKDU from space—you would barely notice them if you were riding the shallowest satellite in orbit, Dr. Strangelove–style. Canadian campus radio was not meant to be among Earth’s ambassadors to other worlds and, according to Brian Fauteux, that is where its value lies. Leave space travel to Richard Branson; Canadian campus radio is all about the local, even in a time when “the local” dwindles from the dial.
Diaspora Dialogues is a unique and treasured charity in Toronto that supports writers of diverse backgrounds through direct mentorship, professional development and securing opportunities to publish and present their work.
DD’s main initiatives are its mentoring programs, where they pair emerging Toronto writers from diverse backgrounds with an established mentor. In one, over six months the mentor and mentee work to hone the mentee’s manuscript and help submit it to Canadian publishers. Past mentors have included Rawi Hage, Lawrence Hill and MG Vassanji, and the CBC show Kim’s Convenience was originally produced as a play with the support of DD.
My most recent work for Diaspora Dialogues, who I have had the pleasure to work with for the last five years, is the program for their new event series, Hello, Neighbour. This series is extremely local, taking written pieces about a given neighbourhood , which were taken as inspiration by artists—poets, writers and playwrights alike—to create new work to be performed at the event.
The material for the event was, then, part event program, part literary journal. Since Diaspora Dialogues has been located itself in the Annex in Toronto for years, we took inspiration from a specific Annex landmark:
JAZZ.FM91 is a not-for-profit, community radio station in Toronto, and Canada’s only 24-hour jazz station. In 2018, I served as their designer and web editor while my colleague Matthew McKinnon and I redesigned the station’s website and their online editorial/content strategy, respectively.
Continue reading “JAZZ.FM91 Program Cards”
The Literary Review of Canada is a not-for-profit book reviews magazine based out of Toronto that publishes 10 issues a year. I worked at the LRC in various editorial roles from 2013-2018, and served as its Managing Editor and Art Director (and occasional designer) from 2015-2018, and had aimed to revamp the magazine’s story packaging while maintaining its established identity.
Continue reading “Literary Review of Canada covers”
In the summer of 2017, JAZZ.FM91 contracted me to assemble their annual report to the board.
Continue reading “JAZZ.FM91 F2018 Annual Report”
In November 2016 the LRC published it’s 250th issue. To commemorate the milestone, contributing editor Mohamed Huque and I were tasked with producing an editorial supplement that profiled what the LRC editorial group believed to be the 25 most influential Canadian books from 1991-2016. In the supplement, the titles that made the list are re-evaluated by some of Canada’s most renown writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Charles Foran, Adam Sternbergh, Niigaan Sinclair, Alissa York and more.
Continue reading “Literary Review of Canada 25th Anniversary Supplement”
In 2015, some colleagues of mine at Toronto art institutions and I decided to try our luck at recreational softball, and we established the West-End W.A.S.T.E.
We wanted a team identity that reflected both our investments in literature, and the fact that we were likely going to be very, very bad at baseball. So we decided to base ourselves around the group who withdrew from the state in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, who await for the fabled return of a 16th century Italian dynasty to overthrow the American hegemony.
Continue reading “West-End W.A.S.T.E.”