Captions For CanLit is a free workshop designed specifically for literary event organizers, including publishers, bookstore staff, and magazine editors. We will explore the range of options available to you to ensure that your virtual book launches and online readings are meaningfully and accurately captioned. We will introduce you to the free and paid tools available to you, as well as how to find a professional to support your accessibility efforts during and beyond COVID-19. Leah and Kay are both working professional artists who are prepared to address your concerns about copyright, budgetary restrictions, the annual granting cycle, and other industry-specific challenges to equitable access.

This workshop will take place on Google Hangouts with automatic captions. It will not run the full two hours; we have budgeted extra time for questions. We look forward to hosting this specific workshop again in future; if you cannot attend this one, a complete transcript as well as the slide deck will be made available after for your reference. Future events will be recorded. It is our intention to make this information as widely available as possible to literary organizers across the country thanks to the generosity of Kay and grunt gallery.

This workshop is part of a series presented by grunt gallery designed to help arts organizations, artists and community creators take a tangible first step towards building accessibility into their practices. By outlining best practices (and identifying the pros and cons of available auto-generated captioning services), and inviting participants to learn the basics of captioning and transcription for live and pre-recorded material, we invest in a baseline standard for access as well as a shared and shareable knowledge base. Leah is undergoing a mentorship program with Kay and grunt gallery to make this knowledge base available to the literary community in Canada and is very grateful to grunt gallery and Kay for generously providing the time, venue, skills, and resources to host this initiative for writers and literary organizers.

This workshop series and mentorship program is produced by grunt gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Disability Alliance BC.

Co-Hosts:

Leah Horlick:
​Leah Horlick is a writer and poet who grew up as a settler on Treaty Six Cree Territory & the homelands of the Métis in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her long-awaited third collection of poems, "Moldovan Hotel," is available now from Brick Books. Her first book, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012), was shortlisted for a 2013 ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her second collection, For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2015), was named a 2016 Stonewall Honour Book by the American Library Association. She is also the author of wreckoning, a chapbook produced with Alison Roth Cooley and JackPine Press. She lived on Unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver for nearly ten years, during which time she and her dear friend Estlin McPhee ran REVERB, a queer and anti-oppressive reading series. In 2016, Leah was awarded the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers. In 2018, her piece "You Are My Hiding Place" was named Arc Poetry Magazine's Poem of the Year.  She lives on Treaty Seven Territory & Region 3 of the Métis Nation in Calgary.

Kay Slater:
Kay Slater is a multidisciplinary artist, accessibility consultant and arts worker.  As a consultant, they work directly with artists and organizations to build accessibility in at the planning stage, and to incorporate sustainable, grass roots strategies that support evolution in artistic presentation. Their work is rooted in anti-oppression practices, and they employ open source and community-engaged approaches to support ongoing knowledge transfer  with makers and creators at all stages of their careers. They are a member of the Open Access Mapping project’s Advisory Committee, are a proud volunteer and social coordinator at Queer ASL, have completed the Rick Hansen Foundation’s Accessibility Certification program and are working towards CSA Accessibility certification later this year. Kay is passionate about sharing knowledge with the wider arts community.  Kay is queer and hard of hearing. They use They/Their/Theirs pronouns exclusively online.