The essays in If You're Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free?: Literature and Social Change focus on the interconnection of community/workplace/individual and how literature (and thinking about literature) has a role in social struggles aimed at making that nexus more liberatory. The essays' topics include various social issues in contemporary writing--daily work, narrative, love poems, the teaching (and hence status) of poetry, and postmodernism.

Tom Wayman's profile page

• Short-listed, Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism (Short-listed)
• Short-listed, George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature (Short-listed)

On The Shadows We Mistake for Love: Wayman’s richly textured and tightly structured stories are steeped in history … Shifting in response to internal and external forces, the Slocan Valley and its inhabitants—wholly realized under Wayman’s deft touch—feel simultaneously alive and vulnerable.

Quill & Quire

On Winter's Skin: Passionate and lyrical by turns, didactic at others, insisting that ideals matter, that people must strive for more empathy and honesty, Wayman demands much of his readers. He leaves us, as always, with a fire in the belly and a smile on our lips.

Alberta Views

On Dirty Snow: Vintage Wayman: engaged, observant, prickly, lusty, and open to what the world … [has] to teach us about ourselves.

Canadian Literature