The Edmonton Poetry Festival is looking for an Executive Director to provide leadership as the festival expands in the years to come. The successful candidate will work with founder Alice Major to co-ordinate the 2012 festival (April 23-29) and the subsequent financial wrap-up, in preparation for assuming the longer-term leadership.
This is a growth position and an opportunity to develop along with a young festival that is already on a sound footing. The society’s vision is:
To engage people from across the city in poetry – people of all ages and cultures – as creators and audiences.
To stimulate the growth and quality of work created and performed by Edmonton artists.
For the festival and for Edmonton, to become a destination for writers and audiences – the place for national and international poets to appear, and the event where you’ll hear the most accomplished, interesting and engaging poetry to be found anywhere.
Responsibilities
The executive director is responsible for the following areas:
Coordinating annual program activities consistent with the festival’s vision.
Corresponding with and booking guest poets.
Coordinating ongoing special projects, such as “The Poetry Route” (the bus poetry project)
Ensuring the festival’s financial health, including budgeting, regular reporting to the board on cashflow, bookkeeping and annual audit reviews.
Submitting appropriate funding applications.
Overseeing marketing and promotion for the festival.
Managing contractors, including publicity, website, event production
Liaising with the board of directors, including standing committees.
Ensuring appropriate records and archives are maintained.
Requirements
In general, the successful candidate must have:
Energy, drive and imagination.
Self motivation, maturity and the ability to work independently.
Excellent attention to detail.
Excellent communications skills, both in person and writing.
An ability to work with the community and inspire enthusiasm.
An interest in poetry and an openness to a wide range of poetic forms (though the executive director is not necessarily a poet him/herself).
In terms of specific requirements, the ideal candidate would have strong expertise in:
Event planning.
Financial management and familiarity with accounting software.
Marketing, publicity (including social media).
Position nature and reporting
This position report to the board of directors, specifically the president (currently Alice Major). The executive director’s work is supported by a number of contractors in areas such as web management, event production, publicity, and financial administration. (The festival has been put on an excellent footing by the work of Al Rasko, financial administration officer.)
The executive director’s position is a part-time contract with flexibility in scheduling, with the annual workload being heaviest in the early months of each year. The contract is for $30,000 annually, with specific hours to be established according to the experience and skill level of the successful candidate. The festival is currently a virtual organization, but will be opening a physical office in the near future.
Deadline for expressions of interest in this position is January 15. Please send your resume, along with a letter of interest outlining your qualifications as they relate to the position, to:
The Edmonton Poetry Festival will bring our poetry community alive from April 23 – 29, 2012. It will be a great week – we hope you’ll help make it that way.
The festival planning committee is willing to entertain proposals for poetry-related activities during that time frame. Here’s what we’re hoping for:
Innovations that take poetry to the public in unusual ways, across the city.
Activities that are consistent with the festival’s vision:
To engage people from across the city, of all ages and cultures, as creators and audiences.
To stimulate the growth and quality of work created and performed by Edmonton artists.
Over the long term, to become a destination for writers and audiences – the place for national and international poets to appear, and the event where you’ll hear the most accomplished, interesting and engaging poetry to be found anywhere.
AND activities organized in a competent, professional way that will do us proud.
Think of it as a BYOV opportunity. The festival will help with marketing and promoting your event. We may be able to help with some of the costs of honoraria and production – our budget is tight, but we recognize that a little help can go a long way to make things happen. We can probably help connect you to other resources.
But we’re not looking for suggestions of bright ideas for us to do – we’ve got plenty of those already. We’re looking for those of you with an idea you’d like to make happen and the commitment to make it so.
We have room for up to five spots of this nature on the 2012 festival calendar. If you’re interested, send us a brief letter of proposal outlining:
The nature of your idea, and the audience it would reach.
What makes it different and how it fits the festival vision.
Any costs you foresee.
The background of the people who want to make it happen.
Deadline for proposals is December 15. We’ll make decisions by the first week in January, and finalize the details with you as soon as possible after that, giving you three months to implement your idea.
Send proposals to the festival's artistic director, Alice Major: ,
and if you have any questions while you're putting your proposal together, contact her at that address.
Here’s your chance to compete for a $100 prize, a place in our online chapbook and a spot on the program at the 2012 Edmonton Poetry Festival. Oh, and to support the festival!
We’re looking for works in any poetry style or discipline. Winners will be selected for an attractive chapbook to be published on the festival website. The Grand Prize winner will receive a cash prize and an opportunity to read the winning poem (and one or two more) at one of the festival’s feature events.
Terms of submission:
All submissions must be sent as a digital attachment in a widely readable format (Microsoft Word, Pdf, etc.)
Standard fonts should be used.
Titles must be indicated on the piece itself, even if "Untitled".
The selection process will be conducted by a blind jury of some of Edmonton's finest poets; therefore, the poet's name should NOT be indicated anywhere on the piece. Poet's name and contact info should be clearly indicated in the subject line and/or body of the submission email.
Only one poem per poet will be accepted.
Maximum submission length is 3 pages or 150 lines.
To submit you must be a Member of the Edmonton Poetry Festival Society. If you're not already a member, please visit our brand new membership page, where you can use PayPal to become a member right away. Membership entitles you to all sorts of other goodies, and helps grease the gears of our growing festival.
Submission deadline is January 15, 2012. Selected poets will be contacted via email.
Please submit your poem as an attachment to
Automatic disqualification may occur if any of these terms are not met.
Note: This contest is open to poets outside Edmonton, but travel to the festival is not included in the Grand Prize.
The Edmonton Poetry Festival and Edmonton Transit have once again partnered up to bring poetry onto Edmonton city buses. During October and November 2011, Take The Poetry Route will feature selections in both Chinese and English – translations of classic pieces as well as contemporary work by local writers. Poets Helen Chan, Wei Wong, Crystal Chin, Jocelyne Verret and Pun Vai Sam contributed and/or translated the four pieces that will be showcased on the buses and LRT trains. Keep an eye out for them, and drop us a line to let us know what you think!
Thinking ever forward, the NEXT round of bus poetry is coming up and submissions are officially open until November 14! A brief rundown follows, and you should check the submission guidelines if you’re interested in flexing your poetic muscles and getting some work out there.
To coincide with the Alberta Winter Youth Games being held east of Edmonton in February 2012, the next batch of bus poetry will feature a Winter Activities theme.
We invite submissions from students in Edmonton-area schools, aged 8 to 18, that celebrate Winter Activities with poems about ice hockey, skating, skiing, sledding, ringette, the Olympics, building snow forts, making snow angels, or any other activity winter makes possible.
Four students whose work is chosen will have their poems displayed in city transit buses and LRT cars, as well as on the ETS website, in February and March 2012. They will also each receive a $50 gift card.
