Montreal Serai

08/09/2025

“Vierge got me thinking about the deeper meanings of Black liberatory practices in community spaces in Canada. I thought about my family’s lived experience and my own, as a daughter of the diaspora.”

Discover Ceta Gabriel’s insightful commentary on Vierge, a play by award-winning playwright Rachel Mutombo co-produced by Black Theatre Workshop—Canada’s longest running Black theatre company—and The Great Canadian Theatre Company.

📸 Black Theatre Workshop, The Great Canadian Theatre Company

Find more of her work on her website: [email protected]

Friendship, religion, family, and betrayal—this play is an excellent representation of Black girls from the African diaspora growing up and acclimating to Canadian culture.

08/05/2025

In Sumair Sattar’s poignant remembrance, he reflects on his strained relationship with his grandmother, and growing up as a favourite grandchild but never accepted as a trans man by his family.

📸© Pasha M. Khan

Our conversation went downhill quickly, as it often did when Amma remembered it was her grandmotherly duty to set me on the “right path.”

08/04/2025

Tomorrow evening at 7 pm

08/02/2025

“Today I see an ant carrying a moth wing
ten times her size. As I watch, the wing
becomes a stiff sail catching the wind,
tumbling the ant backward again and again
over the yard, vast sea with no horizon.
She never lets go of the bright gold wing.”

Read Kathryn Jordan’s three reverberating poems, “Vivarium,” “Gold Wing” and “City Called Heaven” via the link in our bio.

📸© Kathryn Jordan

Find more of her work on her website: http://kathrynjordan.org/

An iguana moves to catch my eye. Time seems to stop. These lost creatures stare, tell how they were pulled from their burrows . . .

07/29/2025

“I wanted to create something […] small and touchable and not overwhelming like the news around the world was beginning to be.”

Dive into the whimsical world of Susan Dubrofsky and let yourself be charmed by her vibrant and zany little creatures.

📸© Susan Dubrofsky

These creatures are made of remnants that I have around me – wire, paper, pieces of wood, cloth, feathers, paint and whatever else I find.

07/26/2025

Palestinian-Egyptian artist Nada El-Omari carries us deep into the sea currents, from Haiti to Palestine.

📸© Nada El-Omari

I tell you a little deaf girl said she can’t hear the bombs but what she imagines in her mind is usually reality. You tell us about a song you don’t sing anymore

07/22/2025

With “Degrees of Change,” Tahieròn:iohte Dan David concludes his four-part series for Montréal Serai as the first voice to carry the Rana Bose Memorial Grant and Writing Residency.

📸© Dan David

"You want to change the world? Then get them to sing your own song. But—first—you must find out what your song is. To do that, you must find out who you are, and be proud of that.” Harry Belafonte

07/18/2025

“Some lives are more important than others—
carved into the silence of lands unspoken,
a truth in the shadows, hiding in plain sight—
as if we could forget that dust settles differently
on each life, marking some with weight, others with wind.”

Dipti Gupta’s incisive poem is a stark reminder of the unequal value placed on lives in times of war.
Read it via the link in our bio.

📸© Severe Dust Storm in the Middle East - MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, Public domain

... see which lives we lift and those we lay down in the silence ...

07/16/2025

Discover Vishesh Abeyratne’s three far-reaching poems—“Metaphor Shear,” “A Girl from Gaza” and “To Visitors”—that unsettle with their unflinching tone.

📸 © After the big destroy – Stathop, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Soon the veins and arteries of cities are clogged with caravans of the outraged.

07/12/2025

“Arnopoulos effortlessly transports the reader to far-flung locations and back to Canada in this engaging collection of tales,” writes Anna Fuerstenberg about Sheila Arnopoulos’ collection of short stories, “Out of Bounds.”

Discover her full review linked in our bio.

📸Out of Bounds by Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos (Austin Macauley, 2023)

Some were lied to about the truth of their ancestry, while others are drawn to cultures and lives very different from their own.

07/09/2025

“you ask the whooping crane
with its white plumage, crimson cap
to be forgiven”

Ilona Martonfi’s two latest poems seize our attention with hauntingly vivid imagery.

📸U.S. Department of Agriculture, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

... you ask the boreal forests named after Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind ...