Special guests
Anne
Simpson
Anne Simpson’s work scoops up prizes both in poetry and fiction. Her second collection of poetry, Loop, won the prestigious 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize and was also a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award. Her first collection of poetry, Light Falls Through You won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. Her first novel, Canterbury Beach (2001), was shortlisted for the 2002 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. In 1997, her short story “Dreaming Snow” shared the Journey Prize.
Simpson received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Queen’s University, and a diploma in Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Subsequently, she was a CUSO volunteer English teacher for two years in Nigeria. She has been the recipient of two Nova Scotia Arts Council grants and several Canada Council grants.
Currently she lives with her family in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where she teaches part-time at St. Francis Xavier University. She has been artist-in-residence at the Dalhousie Medical Humanities Program in Halifax. Simpson’s new volume of poetry, Quick, was published in the spring of 2007.
www.griffinpoetryprize.com/shortlist_2004.php?t=3
Christian
Bök
Christian Bök is a dynamic performer and creator of some of Canada’s most innovative poetry. What that man does with vowels in Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001) is amazing – the book is unusual in being both experimental and a bestseller, and it received the prestigious Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence.
Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. He has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique.
He is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_B%C3%B6k
Roald
Hoffmann
A poet who also happens to be a Nobel laureate in chemistry, Roald Hoffman was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).
As a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays and three books, Chemistry Imagined with artist Vivian Torrence, The Same and Not the Same and Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition, with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt (translated into six languages).
He began writing poetry in the mid-1970s, eventually publishing the first of a number of collections, The Metamict State, in 1987, followed three years later by Gaps and Verges, then Memory Effects (1999), Soliton (2002), and most recently, in Spanish, Catalista. He has also co-written a play with fellow chemist Carl Djerassi, entitled Oxygen, which has been performed worldwide, translated into ten languages. A second play, Should’ve, is receiving it North American premiere as part of Word! Symposium.
Unadvertised, a monthly cabaret Roald runs at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, “Entertaining Science,” has become the hot cheap ticket in NYC.
Morningstar
Mercredi
Morningstar Mercredi is a storyteller, actress, social activist, poet, playwright, researcher and multi-media communicator. Her non-fiction children’s book, Fort Chipewayan Homecoming, was a finalist in the Silver Birch young reader’s choice award in Ontario. She has also had poetry published in the Gatherings Anthology series. She has done extensive acting work in film, television, radio and on the stage.
George
McWhirter
George McWhirter was recently appointed as Vancouver’s poet laureate. An Irish accent still warms his voice – he was born in Belfast, and came to Canada in 1966. He has published five books of poetry, three of short stories, two novels, and one book of translation. He has published prize-winning novels and translations, as well as five collections of poetry. His work appears in many anthologies, including thePenguin Book of Canadian Verse and Poets of Canada.
George was warmly regarded as an inspiring teacher of Creative Writing during his years as head of the Department of Creative Writing at U.B.C. He has been associated with the long-standing literary magazine Prism International since 1968.
Bert
Almon
Bert Almon was born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1943 during a hurricane. He has lived a fairly quiet life since. He began writing poetry in 1967 and came to Canada to teach at the University of Alberta in 1968.
Bert has published nine books of poetry, most recently A Ghost in Waterloo Station. He teaches creative writing, modern literature and autobiography. More than thirty of his poetry students have gone on to publish books. He won the Writers' Guild of Alberta Award for poetry in 1998 for Earth Prime. He has been a Hawthornden Fellow in Poetry and a finalist in the Blackwell's / Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition.
E.D.
Blodgett
Edmonton’s current poet laureate, E.D. (Ted) Blodgett, FRSC, is University Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. He is currently teaching at MacEwan College and the Campus Saint-Jean where he is professeur auxiliaire in Études canadiennes. His research has varied from mediaeval European romance to Canadian Comparative Literature. His publications include Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (Toronto University Press, 2003) and Elegy (University of Alberta Press, 2005). He has published 17 books of poetry, of which 2 were awarded the Governor General¹s Award. He is preparing two others. A bilingual edition of his French poems, Le poème invisible, will be published in 2008.
Marilyn
Dumont
Marilyn Dumont’s first collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, which is presented by the League of Canadian Poets for best first book of poetry. This collection is now in its eleventh printing, and selections from it are widely anthologized in secondary and post-secondary literature texts.
Her second collection, green girl dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writer’s Guild of Alberta. Her third collection, that tongued belonging has just been published by Kegedonce Press.
Marilyn has been the Writer-in-Residence at the universities of Alberta and Windsor, and at Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton and Massey College, University of Toronto. She continues to work on a fourth manuscript where she explores Métis history, politics and identity through the ancestral figure of Gabriel Dumont. Marilyn teaches Creative Writing through Prose for Athabasca University.
Ben Murray
Ben Murray’s poetry has appeared in a wide variety of journals including Descant, Event, Grain, CV2, and the Windsor Review. The title poem for this collection won the CV2 Poetry Award in 2001. His work has been broadcast on cbc radio, he is a winner of the Canadian Poetry Association Award, and he has placed third in the Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition. Ben is a car-free vegan whose world view is largely dystopian but given to sporadic moments of glee. He makes his home in Edmonton.
Heather
Haley
Poet, singer, performer, publisher and media artist, Heather Haley is architect of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre and the Vancouver Videopoem Festival. She is also curator and host of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse – an annual Vancouver event known throughout North America for the presentation of new and artistically significant poetry video and film.
Her own work has been published in numerous journals and e-zines. Anvil Press published a book of verse, Sideways, in 2003. Surfing Season, an audio CD of song and spoken word, was released in 2004. Her video poem Purple Lipstick, has garnered international kudos and was selected for screening at international VideoPoetry festivals in Argentina and Berlin.
People’s
Poets
The people’s poets are three Edmonton MCs who rap about social justice issues, local and global. rosouljah, 4 Life and solidario joined up in the fall of 2006 with the intention of making critically conscious hip hop. They then hooked up with Edmonton's renowned cut artist DJ Dice, who has over two decades of experience in contributing to the local Hip Hop scene. This hip hop colectivo mixes rhymes about life experiences with political commentary.
Douglas
Barbour
Poet, essayist, scholar Douglas Barbour is one-half of the sound poetry duo, Re: Sounding and has performed in Canada , the USA , Australia and New Zealand, and Europe . He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Alberta, where he has taught creative writing, poetry, and (among other things) science fiction and fantasy. His book Visible Visions: The Selected Poems of Douglas Barbour won Alberta's Stephan Stephannson Award for poetry. Recent books include Fragmenting Body Etc. and Breath Takes. His collaborative long poem, Continuations, created with Sheila E. Murphy appeared in 2006.
Tanya
Lukin-Linklater
Tanya originates from a small fishing village on Kodiak Island in southwestern Alaska. Based in Edmonton since 2000 with her husband and children, she is a performance artist, choreographer, and writer.
In 2006 she performed "woman and water" as a resident artist at Visualeyez: Latitude 53’s festival of performance art, directed and acted in Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters for the Edmonton Fringe Festival, and was a guest performing arts mentor at the Enow’kin Centre in Penticton, British Columbia. She recently performed her solo choreography, "ika lluk," a fusion of breath, modern dance, throat song, and Alaska Native dance at NextFest 2007.
Her forthcoming publications include "Re-membering, re-imagining, re-telling Alutiiq Dance" in an anthology on contemporary American Indian dance methodologies, and "Avva’s Telling," a critical essay on the film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen in an anthology of essays published by Isuma along with the film script in English and Inuktitut.
Tanya previously lectured at the University of Alberta in aboriginal literature, and shares her unique Alutiiq cultural perspective infused with contemporary performance work with children in schools and informal education settings
Robert
Heidbreder
Robert Heidbreder has been engaging kids with poetry for 30 years as an inspired teacher and author. Soon after he started teaching primary children in Vancouver, he began writing because he wanted the children in his class introduced to a liveliness of language that matched their natural bounce, energy, imagination and playfulness.
His first book was Don’t Eat Spiders, published in 1985, and his newest book is Lickety-Split, published in the fall of 2007.
In 2002 he won the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence. His presentations to children in the schools and at festivals help keep the child within him alive, awake, laughing and rhyming away.
Jack
McCarthy
Jack McCarthy calls himself a “standup poetry guy.” Others have called him "legend.” Poet Stephen Dobyns says he’s "one of the wonders of contempo-rary poetry." He’s an engaging minor character in the film “Slamnation.” He’s been in jail, but he can explain. His work appears in The Spoken Word Revolution, The Spoken Word Revolution Redux, Poetry Slam, and Complete Idiot's Guide to Slam Poetry and numerous small magazines. High school and college students nationally perform his work in competition. His most recent book, from EM Press, is called Say Goodnight, Grace Notes. His website is www.standupoet.net. He now lives in the state of Washington.
Sheila
E. Murphy
An American text and visual poet who has an abiding interest in creating collaborative works with poets she admires. Now living in Phoenix, Arizona, she was co-founder and coordinator of the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series. Her most recent book publications include Continuations (University of Alberta Press, 2006) with Doug Barbour – in which alternating six line passages by the two poets create a third voice that emerges out of daily activity, distance of years and thousands of kilometres (or miles, depending) in the form of a sustained long poem. Sheila was awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for her Green Integer book titled Letters to Unfinished J. (2003).
Elizabeth
Phillips
Elizabeth Philips is the award-winning author of four collections of poetry, most recently Torch River, published by Brick Books. That new title is described as "A book of deceptively quiet lyrics, … half love song, half funeral dirge, with a measure of travelling tune thrown in.”
Elizabeth lives in Saskatoon and is a former editor of the long-time literary magazine, Grain. Two of her previous books, A Blue with Blood in it and Beyond my Keeping, both received the Saskatchewan Poetry Award. She has edited numerous poetry collections and has taught creative writing in the Banff Wired Studio, the Banff Writing with Style program, and the Sage Hill Writing Experience.
Anna
Marie Sewell
Anna Marie Sewell writes and performs poetry, theatre, stories and songs. Of Mi’gmaq/Anishnabe/Polish heritage, she has always worked cross-culturally. From 1998 to 2001, she ran Big Sky Theatre, which produced original Aboriginal theatre in Edmonton and on tour. As Big Sky Artistic Director, she was also active on the international Aboriginal theatre scene, through conferences, committee work and creative gatherings.
In Edmonton’s poetry scene, Anna Marie was a founding member of the Stroll of Poets Society and gleefully involved in Raving Poets doings. Other poetry highlights include headlining at the Shinchihaya Word Exchange in Kyoto, Japan, and a recurring gig as “the Bike-nik Poet” at Edmonton Bikeology festival.
Heart of the Flower, a chronicle of a half-breed farm-girl transplanted to Japan, earned her the Prince and Princess Edward Prize in Aboriginal Literature, a one-time endowment from Canada Council in celebration of the Prince’s marriage. Her poetry, plays and essays have been variously anthologised.
Richard
Stevenson
Richard Stevenson has read to enthusiastic audiences across the country and is the author of 22 full-length books and 7 chapbooks, including, most recently, A Murder of Crows: New & Selected Poems; Live Evil: Homage To Miles Davis, Nothing Definite Yeti (YA verse), and Hot Flashes: Maiduguri Haiku, Senryu, and Tanka.
Richard also performs with the young adult rock/ poetry group Sasquatch and the adult jazz/poetry ensemble Naked Ear, which recently recorded a CD, See 4/4 Miles. He regularly reviews poetry and fiction, and periodically runs adult and young adult workshops. He holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from The University of Victoria and University of British Columbia and teaches Canadian Literature, Creative Writing, and Business Communication at Lethbridge College in southern Alberta.
