In this collection of deeply personal essays, twenty-six writers explore their connection with language, accents, and vocabularies, and contend with the ways these can be used as both bridge and weapon. Some explore the way power and privilege affect language learning, especially the shame and exclusion often felt by non-native English speakers in a white, settler, colonial nation. Some confront the pain of losing a mother tongue or an ancestral language along with the loss of community and highlight the empowerment that comes with reclamation. Others celebrate the joys of learning a new language and the power of connection. All underscore how language can offer both transformation and collective healing.

Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language is a vital anthology that opens a compelling dialogue about language diversity and probes the importance of language in our identity and the ways in which it shapes us.

With contributions by: Kamal Al-Solaylee, Jenny Heijun Wills, Karen McBride, Melissa Bull, Leonarda Carranza, Adam Pottle, Kai Cheng Thom, Sigal Samuel, Rebecca Fisseha, Hege Anita Jakobsen Lepri, Logan Broeckaert, Taslim Jaffer, Ashley Hynd, Jagtar Kaur Atwal, Téa Mutonji, Rowan McCandless, Sahar Golshan, Camila Justino, Amanda Leduc, Ayelet Tsabari, Carrianne Leung, Janet Hong, Danny Ramadan, Sadiqa de Meijer, Jónína Kirton, and Eufemia Fantetti.

Ayelet Tsabari is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. She co-edited with Leonarda Carranza and Eufemia Fantetti the anthology Tongues, On Longing and Belonging through Language.

Her first book, The Best Place On Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Kirkus Review’s Best Debut Fiction of 2016, was nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and has been published internationally to great acclaim.

A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, Ayelet teaches at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, at University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and The Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Track in Creative Writing in Bar Ilan University.

Ayelet Tsabari's profile page

Eufemia Fantetti is a graduate of The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her short fiction collection, A Recipe for Disaster and Other Unlikely Tales of Love, was runner up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and winner of the F.G. Bressani Prize. She is a winner of the Event Magazine Non-Fiction Contest, and a three-time winner of the annual Accenti Writing Contest. Her writing has been nominated for the Creative Nonfiction Collective Readers' Choice Award and was listed as a notable essay in the Best American Essay Series. My Father, Fortune-tellers and Me: A Memoir was released in 2019. She teaches at Humber College and the University of Guelph-Humber and co-edits The Humber Literary Review. She lives in Toronto.

Eufemia Fantetti's profile page

Leonarda Carranza was born in El Salvador to a family of Indigenous and African ancestry. She holds a PhD in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto. Her children's book, Abuelita and Me, will be published by Annick Press in winter 2022. Her essays have been published in Room, The New Quarterly, Briarpatch, Humber Literary Review, and Best Canadian Essays. She is the winner of Briarpatch Magazine's seventh annual Writing in the Margins contest, was shortlisted for PRISM International's short forms contest, and was the winner of Room's 2018 short forms contest for her piece, "White Spaces Brown Bodies." She lives in Brampton

Leonarda Carranza's profile page

• Short-listed, Next Generation Indie Book Awards
• Winner, IPPY Awards
• Winner, Foreword INDIES

“The collection is an extraordinary achievement, one that succeeds in creating a colourful tapestry out of the hundreds if not thousands of languages that live within the soul of the inhabitants of this land we call Canada.” —New Canadian Media