Coast Lines Book Club

Coast Lines Book Club encourages Memorial University alumni, faculty, staff, students and friends to connect through a common love of reading and of literature from Newfoundland and Labrador.

Coast Lines’ highlights both the importance of lifelong learning for the Memorial University community, and the role of our hugely successful creative writing program based in the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. The program has played and continues to play a key role in the development and in the careers of Newfoundland and Labrador writers, most of whom have either graduated from the program or taken individual classes.

Join now!

Coast Lines and Coffee - Fall 2024

Join us for a very special Coast Lines and Coffee, presented as part of Memorial’s 100th anniversary celebration and in partnership with the SPARKS Literary Festival. 

From the very beginning, the focus of the Coast Lines Book Club has been Newfoundland and Labrador’s literary landscape, a terrain largely populated by writers who got their start at Memorial University’s Department of English and its creative writing program. We are pleased to present a panel of esteemed current and former faculty members and writers – Mary Dalton (MA’75), Lisa Moore, Larry Mathews, Aaron Tucker – who will discuss the intersections of Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador’s writing and publishing community and the 40th anniversary of the creative writing program,  in conversation with writer, broadcaster, and Coast Lines alumnus William Ping (BA '18, MA '20).

The Memorial University Bookstore will be onsite with various Coast Lines titles for sale and our guests of honour will be happy to sign copies of their books following the panel discussion.

Registration Link

MARY DALTON (MA’75) is the author of six books of poetry, among them Merrybegot, Red Ledger,  Hooking, and Interrobang (2024), as well as a prose miscellany,  Edge: Essays, Reviews, Interviews from Palimpsest Press, and several chapbooks. Her poetry has been widely anthologized in Canada, as well as appearing in anthologies in the U.S., Ireland, England, and Belgium. The book version of her 2020 Pratt Lecture, The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry, was released by Breakwater in 2022. Dalton served as Poet Laureate of the City of St. John’s 2019-2022. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Currently Professor Emerita of English at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, she is the editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2026, forthcoming from Biblioasis.

LISA MOORE is the author of the bestselling novels Alligator, February, and Caught; the story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and a young adult novel, Flannery. Her most recent publication is the non-fiction Invisible Prisons: Jack Whalen’s Tireless Fight for Justice. Her books have been finalists for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, CBC Canada Reads, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Man Booker Prize, among many other honours and accolades. Lisa lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland and is a professor of creative writing at Memorial University.

AARON TUCKER is the author of seven books, including the novels Soldiers, Hunter's Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (both with Coach House Books). His poetry and collaborative new media work engaging with machine translation and 3D printing has been shown across Canada, and in the United States, Norway, and Brazil. His scholarly work on facial recognition technologies won the Governor General's Gold Medal and his writing on artificial intelligence has been widely published in North America. He is currently an assistant professor at Memorial University, teaching creative writing and communication and media studies.

WILLIAM PING (BA '18, MA '20) is a novelist and journalist, born and raised in St. John’s. His debut novel Hollow Bamboo was published by HarperCollins in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the BMO Winterset Award, and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award as well as being longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award. He has previously been published in ‘Us, Now,’ Hard Ticket and Riddle Fence. William is also known for his contributions to CBC News, where he can most often be heard reading the news.

Previous Selections:

November/December Selection

Eyes in Front when Running
By Willow Kean

Willow Kean (BFA'99) is an actor and writer originally from Labrador West. She’s co-written several children’s plays that have toured provincially, and her five-woman comedy Supper Club premiered at the LSPU Hall in 2021. She’s beenshortlisted for the Cuffer Prize and longlisted for the NLCU Fresh Fish Award, and she won the Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2018. Willow lives in St. John’s with her partner, the filmmaker Justin Simms, and their son, Jude. Eyes in Front When Running is her first published novel and is a book about the collision of fear and longing, how the thing you fear the most is often the one thing you need to set you straight.

September/October Selection

Mary Foley, Mary Doyle: Unraveling a mother's secrets
By Marjorie Doyle

Marjorie Doyle (MA'87) has published four books of non-fiction. Her columns and essays have appeared across Canada in the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, Fiddlehead, Geist, Calgary Herald, Queen’s Quarterly, Antigonish Review.

Her broadcast career included hosting the national CBC radio show That Time of the Night. Marjorie has been awarded a National Magazine Award and (with her brother John W. Doyle) two CBC Radio Awards for Programming Excellence and a Golden Sheaf nomination for the documentary Regarding Our Father.

A former Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, she has read across Canada and was writer in residence at Haig Brown House on Vancouver Island.

Recordings of Past Live Events: