The Language Between
Her mother spoke about the war the way someone else might describe the weather—casually, without ceremony, folding the dead into ordinary conversation. Morsal Yakuby grew up in Toronto absorbing these stories: born in Afghanistan, raised between Farsi and English, between her family’s world and her own. At the Gallery of Human Migration, her writer portrait explores what it means to carry another person’s survival inside your own body, and what it takes—on the page and on the canvas—to finally set it down.
The Door He Chose to Open
He was eight years old when he started narrating his own life from a Toronto curb, watching puddles run toward the storm drain. Decades on, Mohamed Hammoud’s award-winning story “Reclaiming My Name” became the seed of a memoir arriving this October. In this Threshold conversation, he talks about the name he set down as a child, the one he’s still learning to carry without shaking, and what it costs to decide which chapters of a life deserve to exist on the page.
We Are the Architects, We Are the Architecture
Three bottles by the bedside — milk, juice, water — placed every night by a father who had no other language for care. It is one of the images at the heart of Her Story, a dialogue between a first-generation immigrant and their second-generation Canadian partner, honoured in the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. In this conversation, the Prairie Collective reflects on what it means to build a story together, how memory unlocks itself in layers, and why belonging is always under construction.
The Car That Carried the Story
Ana-Maria Posada-Borda has been thinking about car rides for as long as she can remember—not the destinations, but what her parents said in those moments, facing forward, the cost of each word only clear to her later. Born in Montréal to Colombian parents who arrived before she did, she is eighteen years old and already published. Her story, submitted to the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award, received the Honourable Mention. In this conversation, she reflects on writing in secret, the surprise of being read, and what she would say to anyone sitting with a story they’re not sure belongs.
The Music She Carried
A fiddle melody rises through the floorboards of a house in Oxford, and Winnie—stubborn, curious, already bending the rules—follows the sound upstairs toward a coughing Canadian soldier and a life she couldn’t have invented. In War Brides, Elisa Bryce weaves four generations of migration and music into a single voice. The Gallery of Human Migration spoke with the 2025 Migration Literary Award Honourable Mention about inherited courage, the women who held the story, and why she kept writing.
The Nest That Holds The Story
Keiko Honda arrived in Vancouver in her early forties—navigating a new city from a wheelchair, hosting cultural salons in her living room, telling herself she was an observer. Then four words in an email changed everything. In conversation with Gallery Executive Director Nancy Perin, Honda reflects on what it truly costs to move a story from the private desk to the collective container, whose voices live inside the stories we think are ours alone, and why the doubt you feel about telling it is not a warning. It is the clearest sign that it matters.