Under the Cover Fundraiser with Michelle Good

Spend an evening with a Canadian novelist and raise funds to support free adult literacy tutoring in the West Island.

Literacy Unlimited is proud to present virtual Under the Cover, a conversation with a Canadian author about books, the writing process, and topics of interest to the audience. 

Under the Cover is Literacy Unlimited’s annual fundraiser, helping raise money to support adults in the West Island to improve their English language literacy. The funds raised support Literacy Unlimited’s free one-on-one tutoring services and community programs.

At each online Under the Cover event, a moderator will interview an author for the first part of the evening, discussing books and the writing process. At the end of the evening, you can ask questions about topics of interest to you.

Two online Under the Cover Events were scheduled for 2023.

The webinars run from 7pm to 8:30pm.

April 13 – Michelle Good

Michelle Good

MICHELLE GOOD is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years. Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practising law and managing her own law firm. Her poems, short stories, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. Five Little Indians, her first novel, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize, the Amazon First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award. It was also longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Award.

Order Five Little Indians from Librairie Clio.

Kristy Snell will interview Michelle. Kristy is an award-winning multi-platform journalist who has spent the last 14 years delivering morning radio newscasts for CBC in Montreal and Quebec.  She has filled-in as a news anchor for The World This Hour and has anchored CBC television newscasts in several provinces and nationally on CBC News Network.  Kristy is currently taking a year-long leave of absence from CBC to act as Journalist-in-Residence at Concordia University’s Department of Journalism, serving as interim academic leader of the Institute for Inclusive, Investigative, and Innovative Journalism (I3J).  She is also working on a Master of Education in Indigenous Education at the University of British Columbia.  Kristy is a member of Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation in Saskatchewan.  For fun she loves spending time with her family, hiking, and reading, of course!

February 8 – Joanna Goodman (completed)

Joanna Goodman

JOANNA GOODMAN is the author of six novels, including #1 national bestseller, The Home for Unwanted Girls, which was on The Globe & Mail’s Fiction bestseller list for more than six months, as well as The Forgotten Daughter and The Finishing School, both national bestsellers. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, B & A Fiction, Event, The New Quarterly, and White Wall Review, as well as excerpted in Elisabeth Harvor’s fiction anthology A Room at the Heart of Things. Originally from Montreal, Joanna now lives in Toronto with her husband and two kids.

Her next novel, The Golddiggers, will be out in September 2023 with Harper Collins.

Order The Forgotten Daughter from Librairie Clio.

Trudie Mason will interview Joanna. Trudie is a born-and-bred Montrealer. She attended Lachine High School (now Lakeside Academy) and Concordia University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with a Major in Journalism in 1984. After a short stint in the newsrooms at CHOM-FM and CFCF, Trudie was hired by the legendary Gord Sinclair to be an overnight newscaster at CJAD 800. She spent 18 months in that job before becoming the newsroom’s assignment editor/reporter, a position she held for 12 years, until the birth of her first child. CJAD then offered Trudie and husband Kevin Holden a talk show focusing on current events, parenting matters, lifestyle subjects and entertainment. “The Kevin and Trudie Show” aired for 12 years. Trudie then returned to the newsroom, handling the 6:30, 7:30, 8:30 and 9 o’clock newscasts on CJAD. She was also a member of The Gang of Four opinion panel, and handled morning news on sister station CHOM for ten years. Over the years, Trudie occasionally taught the Radio News and Advanced Radio Newsroom courses at Concordia’s Journalism Department. She has a hobby job producing instructional craft tutorials for the Fabricville chain of stores. Trudie and Kevin live in Pierrefonds, and have two children, now both in their twenties.

With low or no literacy, we would not be able to enjoy these authors’ timely books depicting Canadian history. With your support of our Under the Cover fundraiser, you are helping English-speaking adults in the West Island improve their reading skills enough to enjoy these authors’ works in the future. 

Under the Cover is Literacy Unlimited's flagship fundraiser. Donation receipts will be provided, with all proceeds benefiting Literacy Unlimited. 

Purchase your tickets for our online event today!

The Pointe-Claire independent bookstore Librairie Clio will donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of select books by the featured Under the Cover authors to Literacy Unlimited for a limited time. Shop online at store.librairieclio.ca/ or in person at Plaza Pointe-Claire.

Registered charity number 139269153 RR0001