Phizog • • •
by Gary Barwin & Dona Mayoora

Gary Barwin is a writer, performer, and multimedia artist and the author of 27 books, including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, Bird Arsonist (with Tom Prime), The Fabulous Op (with Gregory Betts), and the forthcoming Portal (visual poems). His national bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates, won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was longlisted for Canada Reads. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Dona Mayoora, aka Donmay Donamayoora, is a bilingual/visual/experimental poet, the creator of Calligraphy Stories, and an occasional columnist, essayist, and short story writer. Her books include Ice Cubukal (2012), Neela Moonga (2019), Listening To Red (2018), Echoes (2019), and Language Lines & Poetry (2020). Her Malayalam poems are taught in universities India, and her visual poems have been exhibited in the US, Canada, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal and featured in the international anthologies A History of Visual Text Art (2019) and JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021). She was a co-editor of WAAVe Global Anthology of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (Hysterical Books, 2021), is a Sullivan Scholar of Poetry in the Expanded Field at the MFA of the Americas, and currently lives in Connecticut.

Gary and Dona’s first collaborative chapbook was Punctum (Gap Riot Press, 2021).