Canada’s national parks invite walking across trails and shorelines, but also across histories, relationships, and ideas. On Shared Ground: A Walk Through Canada’s National Parks brings together books that approach these landscapes not simply as beautiful places to visit, but as spaces shaped by human decisions, ecological change, and long-standing relationships to land. Taken together, these works encourage readers to take a closer look at what national parks are, how they came to be, and what they continue to mean.

Making Parks, Making Wilderness
Discover how Canada’s national parks were created and how particular ideas of ‘wilderness’ took hold. Books such as Climber’s Paradise, Manufacturing National Park Nature, and Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park show how tourism, recreation, and government policy shaped iconic parks like Banff and Jasper. They frame parks as planned and managed landscapes, places carefully produced to appear natural and timeless. Natural Selections, traces the development of national parks in Atlantic Canada, while A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011 situates today’s parks within a longer institutional history. Together, they invite readers to consider how protection, access, and use have been defined—and redefined—over time.

Indigenous Lands, Living Histories
Books such as Spirits of the Rockies, Ukkusiksalik: The People’s Story, and Remembering Our Relations foreground Indigenous voices and enduring relationships to land.  Other titles, including Ndè sìì wet’aɂà and All That We Say Is Ours, emphasize that land is inseparable from culture, community, and governance. These works challenge the notion that parks represent a beginning, instead revealing deeper histories of care, presence, and belonging.

Wildlife, Ecology, and Change
The exhibit also highlights parks as living ecosystems with long-term studies like The Wolves of Algonquin Park and The Buffalo Wolf. Books like Rewilding and The Magnificent Nahanni frame conservation as an ongoing practice rather than a finished project.

Story, Memory, and Creative Response
Alongside history and science, the exhibit features creative and personal engagements with park landscapes. Poetry collections like North of Summer and Open Wide a Wilderness, memoirs such as The Mountain Story, and visual histories including Mountain Voices offer ways of knowing place through experience, emotion, and imagination.

Walking on Shared Ground
On Shared Ground presents Canada’s national parks as spaces of coexistence where species, cultures, beauty, conflict, contestation, change, and care intersect. It invites readers to move thoughtfully through these landscapes, considering whose stories are visible, how places have been shaped over time, and what it means to engage with them attentively and responsibly.  Find all the books in this exhibit here.

We are delighted to showcase a selection of entries and award-winning works from Poems Without Borders: A Contest to Celebrate World Poetry Day, organized by the EDI Committee of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, with support from the Arts Opportunity Fund.

This exhibition brings together a vibrant collection of poems by McGill Faculty of Arts students, highlighting the richness of linguistic diversity and creative expression across cultures. The works on display move fluidly between languages including English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, and Turkish, often accompanied by thoughtful translations that open new pathways of understanding.

From meditations on memory, identity, and loss to reflections on love, faith, migration, and belonging, these poems demonstrate the many ways poetry can transform both personal and collective experience. Some contributors engage as original creators, while others reinterpret existing works—revealing how poetry continues to evolve across voices, media, and traditions.

Visitors will encounter pieces such as Gefei Zhang’s Redpath Museum, a quiet reflection on time and material culture; Mariana Monsalve Orozco’s visceral A hundred deaths and lyrical Mi gran amor; and Serena Chouery’s award-winning L’ombre et la passion, which explores light, longing, and emotional intensity through richly layered imagery. Also featured are Jiayuan Cao’s prize-winning creative interpretation of Jorge Luis Borges’ El enamorado and Mariane Cousineau Rousseau’s Packing List, a free-verse work that adds another dimension to the exhibit’s engagement with voice and form, alongside intimate portraits, elegies, and collaborative pieces.

Together, these poems affirm the enduring and transformative power of poetry to connect us across languages, disciplines, and lived experiences.

We invite you to explore the exhibit and experience the many voices that make up this year’s Poems Without Borders along the ground floor Redpath hallway.

In honour of Latin American and Hispanic Heritage month, our October book display invites you to explore the vibrant, complex, and deeply personal stories of Latinx diasporas in Canada and beyond. Entre mundos / Between Worlds brings together fiction, memoir, poetry, and scholarship that reflect the lived experiences of Latin American communities navigating migration, memory, and identity.

These books trace journeys across geographic, cultural, and emotional borders. They speak of homes left behind and new ones imagined, of identities shaped in motion, and of creativity born from displacement. Whether through the lens of revolutionary memoirs, diasporic art, digital storytelling, or speculative fiction, each work offers a unique perspective on what it means to live “entre mundos.”

Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter follows six-year-old Carmen Aguirre as she flees Chile for Canada with her family after Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Five years later, Carmen returns to South America with her mother and stepfather—members of the Chilean resistance—and begins living a double life alongside her sister. By 18, she becomes a militant herself, navigating a world of secrecy, danger, and defiant hope.

Latinocanadá highlights the literary contributions of Hispanic writers who have settled in Canada over the past thirty years, offering newly translated selections of their work. Latin America Made in Canada delves into questions of cultural production and identity within the Canadian landscape. Meanwhile, books like Rock the Nation and LatiNext explore Latinx artistic expression—through music and poetry respectively—revealing how creativity flourishes across diasporic communities.

Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable, along with the French-language titles Marche ou crève : voix migrantes de l’Amérique latine and Rencontres : écrivains et artistes de l’Argentine et du Québec, document the diverse experiences of Latin American immigrants in Quebec. Historias de Montreal offers a similar perspective through fictional narratives, capturing the imagined and lived realities of diasporic life.

The display also features popular writers such as Silvia Moreno-García, a Mexican-Canadian author whose novels—Silver Nitrate, Mexican Gothic, and Velvet Was the Night—blend history, horror, and noir with Latinx sensibilities. Also included is Montreal-based Chilean author Nicholas Dawson, represented by works like Partir de loin, Désormais, ma demeure, Se faire éclaté.e : expériences marginales et écritures de soi, and House within a house, which explore themes of marginality, identity, and self-expression.