Award-winning author Barbara Black will be the featured reader at the next Electric Mermaid live reading event in Port Alberni on Wednesday, July 31.
Black writes short and flash fiction, poetry and libretti (a text intended for an extended musical work). Her writing appears in The Cincinnati Review, Geist, The Hong Kong Review, Prairie Fire and CV2, as well as in anthologies.
She has been named a finalist for the 2020 National Magazine Awards and was nominated for the 2019 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Black was also named the winner of the 2017 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition and a winner of multiple Federation of BC Writers Contests. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award.
Most recently, she won first prize in the Plaza Prizes Microfiction Contest 2023 and also placed second in the Flash Fiction Category.
Black is the author of Music from a Strange Planet (Caitlin Press 2021), which was the winner of the 2023 Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2023 International Book Awards, the 2023 Canadian Book Club Award and the 2021 Miramichi Reader's Very Best Book Awards.
Black lives in Victoria, B.C. where she gardens and rides her trusty Triumph motorcycle.
Her books are available for purchase from Caitlin Press, Amazon or from your favourite independent bookstore.
With host and emcee Derek Hanebury’s literary guidance, featured reader Barbara Black and a host of other authors through an open mic, Electric Mermaid promises to keep poetry and prose fans engaged.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the open mic runs from 6-8 p.m. Admission is $10. See www.charslanding.com/events to pre-register for the readers’ list and to select the optional Zoom link.
