Name: Tamil Terrains: Poems, Translations, Reflections with Trace Press
Start: 2025-11-16T09:30:00-05:00
End: 2025-11-16T11:00:00-05:00
Location: Online via Zoom

Description

What happens when a two-thousand-year-old language, rooted in a classical poetics of land, is moved, along with its peoples, through colonial and postcolonial upheavals, war and forced or voluntary migrations?

Join us online on Sunday Nov 16 at 9:30am PST to celebrate Trance Press’ newest release in their translating [x] series, Tamil Terrains. We’ll be joined by editors Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran, as well as contributors Subhanya Sivajothy and Thamilini Jothilingam.

Questioning traditional concepts of time, place, labour, love, purity and gender, this prismatic collection of poems, translations and transcreations draws connections between ancient Sangam landscapes and North America’s Indigenous lands, and between classical Tamil love poems and Southeast Asian migrant labour songs—tending, with care, the wounded memories of fisher-people, plantation workers and undocumented refugees.

This event is free but please RSVP here.

More about Trace Press:

t r a c e is both verb and noun; act and residue. t r a c e collaborates with writers to publish books that illuminate, in complex, beautiful and thought-provoking ways, contemporary and historical experiences of conflict, war, displacement, exile, migration, the environment, labour and resistance. We look for words that draw connections between here and there; now and then. Voices that ask us to question, reflect, take pleasure, love, remember and build solidarity across our many differences. We are unafraid to mix genres, voices, and languages. t r a c e is a not-for-profit press.

About Upstart & Crow: Upstart & Crow is a not-for-profit creative studio and literary incubator that champions writers, readers and stories, and the role they play in shaping our lives. We develop original programs, support artists and revel in creative projects focused on Literature In Translation / Climate Solutions / Poetry / Civic Dialogue / Community & Skills Building … all with the aim of elevating the role of literature and storytelling in our lives. Find us on Granville Island, Gibsons and online at upstartandcrow.com.

Questions: hello[at]upstartandcrow.com.

Tamil Terrains

Our own vazhinool runs through this book: our sense of indebtedness to the lands that hold us, and the lands we hold within us: நெெஞ்் சநிிலம்் , the landscape of our hearts. It is not without some sense of trepidation that we set it afloat now, across unknown lands and waters, into unknown hands.

— Nedra Rodrigo & Geetha Sukumaran

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Nedra Rodrigo

Nedra Rodrigo is an award-winning translator, scholar, and curator of multi-art events. She is the founder of the Tamil Studies Symposium in Toronto, and the bilingual event series, The Tam Fam Lit Jam. Her translations include In the Shadow of the Sword (2020) and the Devakanthan quintet, Prison of Dreams (2021–2024) for which she received the 2025 Tamil Literary Garden’s Translation award. She has published critical essays in Briarpatch, C Magazine, Studies in Canadian Literature, Human Rights and the Arts: Essays on Global Asia, and in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (trace, 2023). Her translations of Tamil poetry have appeared in Words and Worlds, Jaggery Lit, Still We Sing: Voices on Violence Against Women (2021), and Out of Sri Lanka (2023). Her translation of Rashmy’s Songs in a Time of Confinement received the inaugural PEN Translates x SALT award and will be published by trace in 2026.

Geetha Sukumaran

Geetha Sukumaran is a Tamil poet and a bilingual translator and scholar. Her award-winning poetry collection Otrai pakadaiyil enchum nampikkai was published in 2014. She translated a selection of P. Ahilan’s poetry in Then There Were No Witnesses (2018), and collaborated with Ahilan and the artist Vaidekhi on the bilingual collection, Tea: A Concoction of Dissonance (2021). Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Still We Sing: Voices on Violence Against Women, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, the art installation Rucksack, and in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (trace, 2023). She is the co-founder of the Conflict and Food Studies Group and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.

Subhanya Sivajothy

Subhanya Sivajothy is a librarian and writer living in Tkaronto. She uses poetry to think about ecologies, archives, and struggle. Her work has appeared in Filling Station and Adi Magazine and has received funding from the Canada Council of the Arts. Her debut poetry collection, The Certainty of Dust, will be published by trace in 2027.

Thamilini Jothilingam

Thamilini Jothilingam is an archivist, documentary artist, and translator living and working on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Halq’eméylem-speaking peoples. Her interdisciplinary practice centred at the confluence of art, historiographies, and ethnographic research with a focus on digital memory, social, visual and oral histories, and community-driven heritage work. Thamilini has collaborated with academic and community organizations globally, spearheading documentary and preservation projects.