You know about The Griffin, right? That would be the most lucrative poetry award in Canada? $50k to the winner. To win it, you can’t be a slouch like me. You gotta have some book.

A book by one of our featured headliners is up for the award. Jeramy Dodds and his book Crabwise to the Hounds is on the shortlist for the Lampert prize — best first book of poetry by a Canadian — and for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize. That’s a one-two punch of poetic awesomeness! So, WHERE can you catch Jeramy during PoFest? Well, he’s smacking it down during our pub crawl on Friday, April 24. Here’s the information page. Axis Cafe. 10349 Jasper Avenue. 8:00pm, and he’s reading with none other than Douglas Barbour. Should be a wild show!

By the way, that evening at the Axis also features Jeramy’s partner in crime, Matthew Tierney, along with local poetess Nicole Pakan (CBC Poetry Face Off reigning queen). Jeramy and Matthew are traveling across this great nation of ours on the train of all things. Man, poets haven’t done that since 1960! They didn’t even have cars then! Anyways, these two nuts are documenting their travels on a blog: Two on a Choo Choo. Looks pretty cool, but the lack of nudity and compromising photos on that site is disappointing.

And hey, don’t forget that tonight the Raving Poets are hosting CR Avery. That should also be a killer show.

PoFest proper kicks off tomorrow evening with the Killer Blinks at the Artery. Don’t miss it!