by Barbara Black

Professor Peter Rist has just published a major reference work, Guide to the Cinema(s) of Canada. It is part of a series, Reference Guides to the World’s Cinema, published by Greenwood Press, of Westport, Conn.

The publication was celebrated at a party in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema studio on Guy St. on Nov. 30. It was attended by most of his 20 collaborators on the project, who are to be congratulated for this significant contribution to Canadian film scholarship. Collaborators who attended were Donato Totaro, Dave Douglas, Louis Goyette, Paul and Helen Salmon, Ian Elliot, Judes Dickey, Alain Dubeau and Isabelle Morissette. Some of these guests traveled from Ontario to congratulate Rist and his longtime companion Shelley Coleman, who were married earlier in the day.

Congratulations to Daniel Dagenais, a new tenure-track professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department, who won one of four book prizes given by the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada. Dagenais’s book is La fin de la famille moderne: Signification des transformations contemporaines de la famille (Les Presses de l’Université Laval). He won the Prix Jean-Charles-Falardeau, given for the best work in French in the social sciences. The prizes were announced at a reception at the National Library of Canada in Ottawa on Nov. 24.

David Homel, who has taught in the translation program of Études françaises in 1983 and intermittently in creative writing, is as well known to French-speaking as to English-speaking Quebec readers. With Fred R. Reed, Homel won the Governor-General’s Award for Translation this year, for The Fairy Ring, a rendering into English of Le cercle de Clara, by Martine Desjardins.

Norman Ravvin holds the chair in Canadian Jewish studies at Concordia. He’s prolific — his books include Café des Westens (a novel), Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish (short stories), A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory (essays), Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue (essays) and a forthcoming novel, Lola By Night. He also edited a short story anthology called Great Stories of the Sea. His latest book is Not Quite Mainstream: Jewish Canadian Short Stories, which was just published by Red Deer Press.

Jeffrey Moore can stop teaching in the translation program for a while. After winning the $10,000 Best First Novel Commonwealth Prize last year, he signed a two-book deal with the leading London literary publishing house Weidenfeld and Nicolson that could be worth even more. He made his breakthrough to the big time with his novel Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain.

Matthew Santateresa works in Human Resources and Employee Relations, but he’s also a published poet. His latest collection, published by the Mansfield Press (Toronto) is called A Beggar’s Loom. Matt took the graduate creative writing program at Concordia. His past two years have been especially productive; he will bring another collection out with Mansfield next spring.