IMAGINING TORONTO
Intersections of Literature and Place in the Toronto Region

Contacting the Imagining Toronto project

Updated 25 November 2007

The curator of the Imagining Toronto project is Amy Lavender Harris, a geographer and part-time faculty member who teaches in the Department of Geography at York University. She is a contributing writer at Reading Toronto and a contributing editor with Spacing Magazine, where she writes a regular column on Toronto literature. Her work also appears in The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto (Coach House, 2006) and (with Peter Fruchter) GreenTOpia, an anthology of environmental writing (Coach House, 2007), Open Book magazine and Canada: A Literary Tour (LAC, forthcoming 2008). Amy speaks regularly to popular and scholarly audiences about Toronto literature and the imaginative qualities of cities, including at Salon Voltaire (2006), the Goethe Institute (2006), Juice Dialogues / Think Tank at OCAD (2006), the Toronto Festival of Architecture & Design (May 2007) Walk21 (October 2007) and Beyond Bureaucracy (November 2007).

Mansfield Press will publish Imagining Toronto, a book exploring how culture and space are negotiated through the city's literature, in the fall of 2008.

Amy has an undergraduate degree in Geography and Literature (Queen's) and holds master's degrees in Urban and Regional Planning (Queen's) and Industrial Relations (University of Toronto). Until 2004 she was a PhD student in environmental philosophy. Amy has also been a union leader and negotiator, an urban planner, a civilian instructor, and a journalist. She lives in the Toronto Junction area.