About the Book

A multi-cultural, poly-vocal exploration of sound in all forms, throughout our lives by established and emerging award-winning authors from across Canada.

POINTS OF INTEREST:

Award-winning Canadian authors, award-winning press.
Multi-cultural lens: Canadian hyphened authors.
Sensory exploration: Sense of sound throughout our lives across different cultures.
Multi-genre: Essays, poems, plays, stories.

Sound can heal and harm, comfort and confront, catalyzing the other senses and carrying us to distant places. Sound moves us.

The sonic modalities addressed by the authors in this collection cross borders and time, ranging from a Paco de Lucía Flamenco guitar performance, to the calming reassurance of a harp in an Alberta hospital ward; from Vienna in the 19th century, to the Chile of the 1970's. With acute sensibility, the editors have harnessed 19 stories and poems bringing the ultimate “soundtrack” to life. In the pages of Beyond the Concert Hall, multi-genre narratives vibrate together in high and low notes, a poly-sonic rollercoaster reminiscent of sound installations, music concerts, and the most intimate moments where silence holds.

Editorial team

Luciana Erregue-Sacchi is an award-winning publisher (Laberinto Press), art historian, translator, author (Of Mothers and Madonna, Polyglot 2023) and cultural worker. Luciana has presented at LitFest, Edmonton Poetry Fest, and Banff Centre. She coordinated the WGA Horizons Writers Circle. She has presented at the University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan University. Her work and translations have appeared in academic publications, Polyglot Magazine, AGNI, and others, and she has been featured on CBC Edmonton, Radio Canada, Quill and Quire, Literary Review of Canada, Westword, and Edmonton Journal. She is in the board of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta and champions freedom to read and hyphenated Canadian literature.

Catalina Morales Velez is a Colombian-Canadian holistic storyteller and writer whose work unites professional communications with deep personal inquiry. Drawing on a two-decade career in media, coupled with years studying inner wisdom, Catalina explores how we align our external narrative with our soul's message across genres. Nourished by a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications, diplomas in Marketing and Advertising, and a Graduate Diploma in Urban Communication, her creative portfolio spans literary fiction, creative non-fiction, and the forthcoming self-fiction novella, DeepReSeed. Her work has been published in Beyond Touch Sites: An Anthology of the Tangible (2025) and various media outlets, including Entrepreneur Magazine, Revista Cronopio, and Life as a Human. A member of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and a Board Member of Litfest, she is a multi-platform creator who hosts the multilingual podcast The Rational Gal Grimoire.

Cait Yaga is an author, editor, and avid reader. She is currently completing her Bachelor of Communication Studies at MacEwan University with a focus on editing and publishing, bringing academic knowledge to her decade of experience in copywriting and editing in the construction and architecture industries. At MacEwan, she is the Lead Editor of the creative writing group The Bolo Tie Collective for the second year in a row. Cait has been published in three anthologies, including Beyond the Concert Hall. In addition to this anthology, her poetry piece “Time” and flash fiction piece “Perhaps Tomorrow” are published in The Bolo Tie Collective’s Volume IX (2025), and her short story “The Plainest Door” was published in the War of the Words Volume II (2025). Cait is honoured to be both co-editor and author for Laberinto Press’s Beyond the Concert Hall: An Anthology of Sound. You can follow her work on her website, www.caityaga.com and her book reviews on Instagram @caityaga.

“Our Beyond series is as much an exploration of cultures, languages, and audience engagement as our own inquiry into the spaces where those sensory events may happen. Following Bourdieu, our anthologies respond to very concrete spaces, the food court, the gallery, the park, the concert hall, and places where touch happens. This approach centres narratives that, until recently, have been at the margins of those social spaces and literary production in Canada.”

— Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Publisher, Laberinto Press

“The collaborative effort of editing this anthology provided me with a deeper understanding of sound, as well as insight into how it influences who we are, who we become, and how we perceive the world.

Now, it’s your turn to expand, to read with your ears and listen with your eyes. Enjoy.”

— Catalina Morales Vélez, Editor, Beyond the Concert Hall

“Entire cultures exist within a sound, a note, a lyric. This series of anthologies was created to celebrate the senses, with Beyond the Concert Hall being the magnum opus, the grand finale, in this multi-lingual composition of what it means to be human.”

— Cait Yaga, Editor, Beyond the Concert Hall