Love Letters to Your Library Winners Announced!

Library Poetry Winners

To celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the Edmonton Public Library in 2013, the Edmonton Poetry Festival sought out library-themed submissions for the next flight of The Poetry Route, a project that puts poetry onto public transit vehicles.

Congratulations to the winners of our January / February Bus Route poetry contest! Our winners and their poems are:

  • Ben Murray — EPL, The Seventies
  • D’James Rushlow — This Paper Place
  • Garry Garrison — Library Card
  • Wendy Joy — The Library as Meditation

Please attend the official launch of Love Letters to Your Library at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 18, in conjunction with Family Day festivities at Stanley Milner Library (main branch, downtown). The poets whose work was chosen – Wendy Joy, Gary Garrison, Ben Murray and D’James Rushlow – will read their library-themed poems celebrating EPL’s centennial in the audio-visual room, main floor.

Posted February 13, 2013

About The Poetry Route

“The Poetry Route” is an Edmonton Poetry Festival project that puts poems into ETS buses and LRT trains. A new three-year Poetry Route cycle hits the road in mid-April, with the first batch of 2011 showcasing four outstanding writers from this year’s poetry festival: Tim Bowling and Jannie Edwards of Edmonton; Griffin Award-winner Karen Solie of Toronto; and world slam poetry champion Ian Keteku of Ottawa. Thanks to funding from the Edmonton Arts Council, future instalments will continue to feature excellent work from local, national and international wordsmiths, including students. The poems will also be printed on ETS transfers and viewable on the ETS web site.

Take the poetry route

The Poetry Route is a three-year project, with three 12-week flights of poems circulating the transit vehicles per year. The first flight will begin circulating in the buses in mid-April, 2011, and the others will launch in September and January with a similar schedule for 2012 and 2013.

The primary funders of the project are the Edmonton Arts Council, the Edmonton Poetry Festival, and Edmonton Transit.

Special thanks to representatives from Edmonton Public Schools, Edmonton Public Library and the Edmonton Heritage Council for their efforts on our steering committee. Thanks to Marc Nipp from El Designo for some design elements that went into the bus placards.