Plans for MayWorks 2025: Celebrating Labour and the Arts are underway. This yearly festival honours and promotes cultural expressions produced by artists depicting working class life and aspirations as well as by workers interpreting their own lives, work and struggles to build a better world.
The Festival takes place in and around May. Artists, performers, writers, dancers, filmmakers, actors, comedians or others who have an exhibit, a performance, a project or an event that will take place in that time frame, please submit a description of your event to info@mayworks.org by March 15, 2025. MayWorks will promote your organization and event in our online and print calendar.
MayWorks is a non-profit organization established in 1997, inspired by events surrounding the 75th anniversary of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.
Each year in Canada, we remember workers we lost to workplace injuries and illnesses with a National Day of Mourning. Canada was the first country to commemorate this day, but it is now observed in over 80 countries around the world.
Date: Friday, April 26
Time: 11:00 am
Location: Union Centre (Broadway at Smith Street) travelling down Broadway to Workers Memorial at Memorial Park
Rally followed by march south on Main Street, returning to City Hall.
Bring your flag, sign, keffiyeh, union flags and banners.
Stop the genocide; Stop the apartheid
@labour4palestinewpg
@cpam1948
Labour For Palestine Winnipeg and the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba invite you to join us in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Let’s unite to stop genocide and end the occupation.
Location: Henderson Branch Library – 1050 Henderson Highway at McLeod Avenue (easy bus access and free parking)
Admission is Free
Poet Ron Romanowski commemorates the 105th anniversary of the 1919 WinnipegGeneral Strike with a reading of his new and selected poetry.
Ron’s poetry collections, Insurrection (2009) and If 30,000 Strikers Marched Today (2019) were local best-sellers. They commemorated the 90th and 100th anniversaries of the Winnipeg General Strike respectively.
Last year Ron’s book-length collection Heart Blooms from the Gardener Poet highlighted an environmentalist theme and is available at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.
Ron was the Labour representative at the Manitoba Museum’s 2019 innovative commemoration of the centennial of the 1919 Strike which featured live music, dance, and poetry in the museum’s Urban Gallery.
Ron was a Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ union activist in his Labour life.
He has studied History at the University of Winnipeg; Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba; Creative Writing at Toronto’s Humber College and attended many writing workshops and symposia with some of Canada’s best poets, playwrights, spoken word artists, and fiction writers.
Recently Ron won the first-place poetry prize in two Manitoban writing contests: the Lake Winnipeg Writers’ Group and the Gimli Icelandic Festival.
His poetry has been featured in the annual Winnipeg Free Press April is Poetry Month feature and has been published in dozens of literary journals, magazines, newspapers (and even in a calendar for a charity).
The Winnipeg Public Library currently holds four of Ron’s nine books in its collection.
Ron’s new book 27 Dancers Working Off Broadway Canada will be published in 2025 by Augustine Hand Press. Labour, politics, and the arts are its themes.
