Join us as we celebrate dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s book, Bread & Water. Featuring special guest Amy Jo Ehman and tunes by Carly Perkin and Darl Hobsbawn. Enjoy the reading with savoury snacks and cookies.
Award-winning essayist, poet, fictionist, Red Seal chef, educator and food writer dee Hobsbawn-Smith lives rurally on the remnants of her family’s farm west of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in Treaty Six Territory, with her husband, the writer Dave Margoshes. An ex-restaurateur and longtime freelance journalist, she has written 10 books in several genres, and recently completed a new essay collection and a new poetry collection. She’s served as Saskatchewan’s 10th Poet Laureate, as Saskatoon Public Library’s 35th Writer in Residence, as a mentor and editor, and as leader of Slow Food Calgary and then Slow Food Saskatoon. Called an educator “blessed with whimsy and precision,” she has taught thousands of adults and kids to cook.
Her most recent book is Among the Untamed, which received the 2024 Sask Book Awards’ Best Poetry Award. Her novel Danceland Diary was shortlisted for the 2023 Sask Book Awards Fiction Award and was a shortlisted finalist for the Glengarry Book Prize. Bread & Water: Essays, won the Sask Book Awards’ 2022 Nonfiction Award, and Taste Canada’s Gold Medal for Culinary Narrative. Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet, won three international awards for its portrayal of the politics and challenges of small-scale sustainable growers.
In her spare time, dee gardens, grows orchids, cooks, quilts, writes, runs, reads, does crosswords, plays with her dog, and watches period movies and whodunnits. A lifelong learner, dee hopes to learn to play her guitar before she turns 80.
Special thanks to Chef Evelyn Resner of Fresh Dish Catering.
About One Book One Province
The Saskatchewan Library Association (SLA) introduced One Book One Province Saskatchewan in 2017 to allow the province’s residents to engage with a shared experience around a book. We aim to create an experience that supports literacy, creates a reading culture, raises the profile of libraries and literacy organizations, and builds community engagement through a shared experience. Each year, the SLA selects a title by a Saskatchewan Author that builds awareness and understanding in topics such as diversity, reconciliation or an aspect of our provincial history.
The Alice Turner Library replaced the smaller Sutherland Branch in December 1998. It was named after Alice Turner McFarland who was a library employee for 37 years and Saskatoon Public Library's chief librarian from 1981 to 1989. The first library in Canada to be built to the standards of C-2000 construction, Canada's environmental building code, the Alice Turner Library was expanded to double its original size in 2013.
