All Lit Up turns five today! With growing pains behind us, we’re blowing out our candles with a look back on five of our favourite features on the blog AND five + five books we loved this year.Â
By:
ALU Editor
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Follow along all week with the hashtag #ALUturns5 and help us celebrate!
To celebrate the addition of All Lit Up’s  Indigenous Litspace — a hub that showcases books, words, and art by some of the Indigenous artists we admire — we went further and brought you READ INDIGENOUS in October 2018. Highlighting work by Indigenous authors across all genres, we shared excerpts from 20 featured books to help you discover some new favourite authors. PLUS: we created that sweet special limited-run tote bag up top with awesome art by the Indigenous artists whose work is featured on our Litspace. Â
We’ve said it before: poetry has been a favourite at ALU HQ and National Poetry Month is basically our Superbowl. This past April, we shouted out to all the rad women of poetry who write in all kinds of spaces and styles with Poetry Grrrowl, a high-five to those women who make us better readers and thinkers. All month we interviewed poets and shared excerpts from their latest collections. We also hit you with some CanLit trivia with our Poetry Grrrowl quiz that you can take to test your knowledge!
Writer performer, and self-proclaimed wicked witch Kai Cheng Thom gave us such a gift with her rad, and insightful essay on the literary practice of sensitivity reading, a type of manuscript consulting that’s been roundly criticized by some as thought-policing. But Kai breaks it down like this: “the concept itself of sensitivity reading is, it seems to me, rather innocuous—and while the term is new, the practice has existed for many decades. Sensitivity reading is, in short, the idea that when a writer has decided to represent an experience that they do not personally share—for example, a white writer portraying a Black character, or cis writer writing about a trans community—they ought to consult with someone who has first-hand knowledge of that experience.”
Our parent the Literary Press Group is a national organization made up of indie Canadian publishers across the country, which means we at All Lit Up get to experience some of the very best in Canadian books. To share the diversity of literary authors in Canada, we rounded up a list of books that celebrate writers in every province from Joseph Dandurand in British Columbia to Heather Nolan in Newfoundland and more in between!
This summer there was more than the breeze making us feel fine: our second favourite time of the year rolled around with ALU Book Club! Four years running, our little Book Club is truly a fun time for us as ALU staffers don’t often read the same books at the same time. What’s more is that we get to chat with the publishers and authors about their books and steal away to a patio (of course) to share our own thoughts with each other. Cheers to that!Â
5 + 5 Books (We’re celebrating with books, natch.)
Follow us on Twitter and/or Instagram for five days worth of books that have made an impact on us this year so much so that we’re taking 15% OFF the sale price so you can enjoy them too! There’s more! If you’re the first to buy these featured titles, you get not only the book but an All Lit Up birthday box featuring our favourite swag (including the Poets Resist iron-on patch and our much-loved tote bags). Get a sneak peek at our first few books and stay tuned to Twitter and Instagram all next week for the rest of our birthday books!
* * *Thank you to all our super readers and supporters; we wouldn’t be here without you!Â
