We are excited to announce the 2023 selected title
Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures
by Ivan Coyote
Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures
Writer and performer Ivan Coyote has spent decades on the road, telling stories around the world. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members—letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Then came Spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events canceled. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered.
Care Of combines the most powerful of these letters with Ivan’s responses, creating a body of correspondence of startling intimacy, breathtaking beauty, and heartbreaking honesty and openness. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes central to Coyote’s celebrated work—compassion and empathy, family fragility, non-binary and trans identity, and the unending beauty of simply being alive, a giant love letter to the idea of human connection, and the power of truly listening to each other.
Ivan Coyote
Ivan Coyote is a writer and storyteller. Born and raised in Whitehorse, Yukon, they are the author of thirteen books, the creator of four films, six stage shows, and three albums that combine storytelling with music. Coyote’s books have won the ReLit Award, been named a Stonewall Honour Book, been long-listed for Canada Reads, and been shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize for non-fiction, and the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction twice. In 2017 Ivan was given an honorary Doctor of Laws from Simon Fraser University. Coyote’s stories grapple with the complex and intensely personal topics of gender identity, family, class, and queer liberation, but always with a generous heart, and a quick wit. Ivan’s stories manage to handle both the hilarious and the historical with reverence and compassion, and remind us all of our own fallible and imperfect humanity, while at the same time inspiring us to change the world. Ivan’s 13th book, Care Of, was released in June 2021 by McClelland and Stewart.
How was Care Of by Ivan Coyote selected?
This year’s selected title was made by the One Book, One Niagara Steering Committee that is comprised of representatives from each of the eleven public libraries in Niagara, as well as a representative from the Niagara College Library and Brock University Library. The Steering Committee decided upon a selection criteria that each potential book would be filtered through to ensure that it would be the best fit for this initiative.
This criteria included:
- Whether the author was Canadian
- Whether the title would appeal to the broadest possible audience (ex. readers of varying ages, literacy levels, and life experiences
- Whether the title was published recently
- Whether the title was available in multiple formats (ex. Audiobook, e-Book, Large Print)
- Whether the topic will generate discussion and the exchange of ideas
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