PARIS
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LONDON
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GUELPH
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WINDSOR
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HAMILTON
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ELORA
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PARIS ✻ LONDON ✻ GUELPH ✻ WINDSOR ✻ HAMILTON ✻ ELORA ✻
WEIRD GIRLS BOOK TOUR
In May 2026, we (Emma McKenna + Jaclyn Desforges) are hitting the road to share our new books and build literary community.
We’re embarking on a slow tour of beautiful Southwestern Ontario, heading to small cities and towns with thriving literary arts scenes. Our goal is to connect with local writers and book enthusiasts and engage in community readings, workshops, and panels. Our tour aims to embody a weird girl ethos: interactive, accessible, and fun.
More details about each event (including accessibility information) coming soon!
Sign up here to get notified about the tour!
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About Gold Star
A poetry collection by Emma McKenna
In this candid and moving collection, Emma McKenna explores the multifaceted themes of bodily autonomy, capturing the empowerment of queer femme identity.
Drawn from the experience of growing up in poverty in a single-parent home and escaping to the city at the age of sixteen, these poems look at the physical and emotional implications of trauma but also reveal how being bisexual and disabled can be sources of resilience, joy, and creativity.
Examining the way sexism and sexual violence exist as a spectre throughout the lives of women and girls, Gold Star also contemplates issues of child abuse and neglect, reproductive health, and the complex decision to be child-free. Never shying away from the weight of its vital subject matter, this is an urgent and unflinching feminist exploration of embodiment.
Book*Hug Press | Poetry | Publication Date: April 14, 2026 | 5.5 x 8 inches | 104 pages | Trade Paperback | ISBN 9781771669740About Weird Babies
A short story collection by Jaclyn Desforges
Weird Babies is a short story collection about weird babies: a miraculous set of reincarnated quadruplets, babies born from the bellies of trout, babies who are destined to molt like tarantulas, babies who hatch from piles of warm clothes. It's also about the weird baby living in each of us — the tenderest part of ourselves that longs, at whatever the cost, to be loved.
Stories from Weird Babies have appeared in The Ex-Puritan, The Temz Review, Minola Review, and CRAFT Literary. They were also nominated for the Best Of The Net Award (2025), Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy (2024), and Best American Short Stories (2024); were finalists for the Room Magazine Fiction Contest (2024), the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize (2023), and the 2024 CRAFT Novelette Print Prize; and were winners of the Short Works Prize (2019), and the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award (2018).
The Porcupine’s Quill | Short Fiction | Publication Date: April 1, 2026 | 5.55 x 8.75 inches | Trade Paperback | ISBN 9781774221976