The ACQL/ALCQ Executive committee is currently working on firming up a date and place for an in-person 2026 Conference. At the moment, we are looking at Montreal in early June. 

As soon as we have the dates and place confirmed, we will post this on the website and announce this to our members. We will also post this on other relative websites related to conferences. 

Thank you for your patience and understanding. We are still looking for people to occupy positions on the Executive committee. 

Sincerely

ACQL Exec. 

Susie O’Brien, What the World Might Look Like: Decolonial Stories of Resilience and Refusal

Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.

View the book on the publisher’s site »

Please note that no prize was awarded this year for the French-language section. As always, the Gabrielle Roy Prize is awarded for books published in the previous calendar year.

Founded in 1975 in the wake of Canada’s official ratification of multiculturalism, the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures has, over more than 45 years, emerged as Canada’s premier association for showcasing multilingual and transnational research in Canadian and Québec literatures. 

As last year’s scheduled conference on “Sustaining shared futures” at Congress at McGill University was cancelled, the ACQL is proposing this year to host an ONLINE CONFERENCE between Friday, May 23^rd and Sunday, May 25^th. 

While we understand the value of in-person gatherings, the ACQL hopes that this virtual meeting will allow greater participation, reduce our environmental impact, and allow participants whose talks were previously accepted to present their research. 

Conference Fees and ACQL Membership 

• There are no conference fees. Participation does, however, require up-to-date ACQL membership. 

• Members from ACQL (April 1^st 2023-March 30^th 2024) are not required to renew memberships in order to present in 2025. 

• Those who are not registered as members and who wish to present must become members before the Online conference. 

The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2024 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English section), which each year honours the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English.

This year’s shortlisted finalists (in alphabetical order) are:

Jennifer Andrews. Canada Through American Eyes: Literature and Canadian Exceptionalism. Palgrave Macmillan. 2023. 

Paul Huebener. Restless in Sleep Country: Imagination and the Cultural Politics of Sleep. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024.

Susie O’Brien. What the World Might Look Like: Decolonial Stories of Resilience and Refusal. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024. 

The shortlist was chosen by a jury composed of Nicholas Bradley (University of Victoria), Laurel Ryan (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), and Steven Urquhart (University of Lethbridge). 

The winner will be announced publicly on Saturday, May 24, 2025 at the Gabrielle Roy Prize Reception as part of ACQL’s annual conference. To register to attend the ceremony or the conference, please visit our conference’s registration page.

For more information, contact Nicholas Bradley, Chair of the Jury, English Section, at nbradley@uvic.ca.

The ACQL is currently having difficulty filling Executive positions. If you are at all interested in participating in the ACQL, please contact any of the existing members of the association. Participation is key for the organisation to function properly and carry out activities such as the GR Prize and annual conferences.

Positions needing filled: President / VP (Anglophone and Francophone) / Chairs – GR Prize (Anglo and Francophone) 

The GR Prize (Francophone Section) has been temporarily suspended due to a shortage of ACQL executive members.

We apologize for this unfortunate situation and ask for your patience as we work to fill these positions and reorganize the submission and evaluation process for this important prize.

Applications are invited for a probationary (tenure-track) position at the rank of Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies, to begin July 1, 2025. We are seeking an emerging researcher and teacher with leadership potential to be appointed as the James and Eva Good Chair in English Literature. Preference will be given to candidates with a demonstrated research and teaching interest in one or more of the following fields: Black, Canadian, Diasporic, Indigenous, or Postcolonial Literatures. An ability to contribute to one or more of our constituent programs (see below) would also be an asset. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

View the full job posting

The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2022 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English section), which each year honours the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English.

The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2022 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English section), which each year honours the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English. This year’s shortlisted finalists (in alphabetical order) are:

Joel Deshaye, for The American Western in Canadian Literature (University of Calgary Press) 

Deanna Reder, for Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition: Cree and Métis âcimisowina (Wilfrid Laurier University Press) 

Robert Zacharias, for Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism (Pennsylvania State University Press)

The shortlist was chosen by a jury composed of Nicholas Bradley (University of Victoria), Kait Pinder (Acadia University), and Candida Rifkind (University of Winnipeg). The winner will be announced publicly on Monday, May 29, 2023at the Annual Meeting of the ACLQ, which will be held in person at the ACQL conference (York U).

For more information 

Kait Pinder, Chair of the Jury, English Section

kait.pinder@acadiau.ca

The General Call for Papers for the 2023 annual ACQL conference at York University (Toronto) is now available here.

 The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2021 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English section), which each year honours the best work of scholarship on literature produced in Canada written in English, is Finding Nothing: The Vangardes, 1959-1975, by Gregory Betts. The winner was chosen by a jury composed of Jody Mason (Carleton University), Jenny Kerber (Wilfrid Laurier University), and Kait Pinder (Acadia University). The prize was awarded at a virtual reception held by the Association for Canadian and Quebec literatures on the evening of May 27.

Critically and theoretically innovative, Gregory Betts’s Finding Nothing makes a significant contribution to the field of late-twentieth-century poetry in Canada. Betts’s study of the avant-garde in Vancouver in the 1960s and early 1970s “[f]ind[s] something where nothing had been presumed.” Finding Nothing defamiliarizes and broadens a history that has often focused on Tish and the Vancouver Poetry Conference. In so doing, Betts accounts for “productive tensions” between, for instance, Indigenous-authored petroglyphs and concrete poetry, unsettling the “habitual narrativization of concrete and visual poetry” as originating with Mallarmé and Apollinaire. Drawing on the methods of “microhistory” and the concept of geomodernism, Betts situates the Vancouver avant-garde in a network of global, local, and national movements and histories, reaching across time, borders, and media to illustrate the complexity, energy, and materiality of aesthetic experiment occurring in one place and time. This book is to be commended not only for its meticulous research, but also for its embrace of the creative and interdisciplinary character of the art it studies. On every page Betts balances a rich archive of primary sources and critical histories with his own energetic and engaging prose, creating a work of scholarly collage that, like the art he examines, provokes and illuminates through “a network of evocations, associations, [and] polyvocalisms.” Filled with visual evidence of a vibrant cultural movement, this is a crucial source for those with an interest in late twentieth-century poetry and visual art, the history of small press activity, and the cultural histories of Vancouver.