Andrea Thompson

Event: The Cabaret of Wild Culture

Andrea Thompson is one of the most well known poets in the Canadian spoken word scene and has performed her poetry at venues across North America and overseas for the past twenty years. Thompson's debut poetry collection, Eating the Seed (2000), has been featured on the reading list at the University of Toronto, and at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and her spoken word cd One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award in 2005. One of the pioneers of the slam poetry scene in Canada, Thompson was awarded the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word's Poet of Honour: For Outstanding Achievement in the Art of Spoken Word in 2009. Thompson is the co-editor of the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out (Inanna, 2010), and is a recent graduate of the University of Guelph's MFA Creative Writing program. She currently teaches Spoken Word: Poetry and Performance through the Ontario College of Art and Design's Continuing Studies Department. Over Our Heads is her first novel. Andrea lives in Toronto.

Book: Over Our Heads

Book Synopsis: Over Our Heads is a story about kindness, compassion—and the lack of it, on both a societal and individual level. It's about growing up wounded, and the generational legacy of suffering such wounds can create. It unearths the painful family dynamics that can arise from our perception of memory, and how these dynamics colour both who we are, and who we believe others to be. It's a story of acceptance, forgiveness, redemption, and the beauty that can be found in the imperfection inherent in being human.

Act: First, Andrea will participate in StorySlide—an improvised onstage narrative, told by three StorySliders, built around a random sequence of visuals and sounds.
This presentation is funded by the League of Canadian Poets and The Toronto Arts Council.

After that, Andrea will perform a special spoken word and music piece on her perception of the recent cultural shift from apathy to ingenuity.