Events Schedule

In these pandemic times, we’re all looking for ways to spend time in the great outdoors. Authors Gina Rae La Cerva (Feasting Wild), Julia Zarankin (Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder), and Tørbjørn Ekelund (In Praise of Paths) offer stories and ideas on how to make the most of your time outside.

Authors & Presenters

Alexis Kienlen    Gina Rae La Cerva    Julia Zarankin    Tørbjørn Ekelund

Three panelists with memoirs on incredible resilience, and finding your identity amid challenges of all kinds. Panelists include Helen Knott, David A. Robertson and Christa Couture.

Authors & Presenters

Christa Couture    David A. Robertson    Emily Riddle    Helen Knott

How do you harness the power of social media and other digital tools to reach a wider audience? What platforms should you invest your time in to engage with your audience? How can your digital presence help you make a good impression on publishers, producers and potential collaborators? How long does it take to make those efforts pay off? And how do you make sure all of this doesn’t suck your time away and drain you of the creativity that feeds your art? We will explore all of this and more with four digitally savvy creators whose experience is applicable to a poet’s work.

Presented in partnership with the Writer’s Guild of Alberta.

The Polyglot will host a poetry reading and roundtable on the topic of including multilingual poetic voices in the CanLit canon. Their event will feature readings by ten local polyglot poets, whose work is featured in our third ekphrastic issue, CanLit: Curating our Canons (Spring 2018), guest-edited by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi. After the readings, the poets will discuss questions such as: How can we better honour and support “non-official” multilingual voices in our community? How can we open up the literary canon to create an inclusive in-between space of dialogue in Canada? How can we “level the playing field” by creatively curating our own multilingual canons?

Performers

• Adriana Onita is the program coordinator for the Edmonton Poetry Festival and the founder of The Polyglot, a multilingual magazine of poetry and art. She writes poetry in English, Spanish, Romanian, French, and Italian. Her passion for languages has led her to pursue a PhD in second language education.
• Award-winning poet, Ahmed “Knowmadic” Ali, is a full-time writer, actor, comedian, public speaker and youth worker who inspires with his dynamic, thought-provoking and humorous poetry. He is the seventh and current Poet Laureate of Edmonton, Alberta Canada. Ahmed is the co-founder and current artistic director of Edmonton’s only spoken word collective: Breath In Poetry.
• Anna Marie Sewell was Edmonton’s 4th Poet Laureate (2011-13). Her works include her debut collection Fifth World Drum (Frontenac Press, 2009) and For the Changing Moon (September, Thistledown Press). Her poems incorporate the traditional language of her mother’s family, Polish and the traditional languages of her father’s family, Anishinabemowin and Lnuisi.
• Luciana Erregue-Sacchi is a Canadian Argentinian art historian, art educator and poet. Her workshops, blog and poetry (Spanish, English) address the connection between visual and literary canons, immigration, nature, memory and trauma. Luciana “lives the life ekphrastic,” thinking constantly of images. She lives in Edmonton, AB.
• Medgine Mathurin is a Haitian-born poet, psalmist and spoken word artist. Her multilingual upbringing (French, Creole, English) not only prompted her to begin experimenting with the potential and magic of language, but naturally compelled her into a deep love of poetry.
• Nicole Lachat is a trilingual poet, daughter to a Peruvian mother and Swiss father. She recently completed her Master’s in Fine Arts from New York University.
• Nisha Patel is an Indo-Canadian spoken word poetry author, artist, public speaker, and writer in Edmonton, Alberta. She is the inaugural 2018 Nook Café Artist in Residence.
• Peter Midgley writes in both English and Afrikaans. His last collection, Unquiet Bones, was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Award.
• Pierrette Requier, Edmonton’s 6th poet laureate (2015-2017), is a bilingual writer, (French English) an arts advocate and mentor. She has presented at festivals across Canada. Pierrette enjoys translating, collaborating across artistic disciplines as well as cross-generationally. She is interested in finding ways to create space for the potential and actual multilingual literary wealth of Canadians to emerge.
• Yasser Abdel-Latif is a writer and poet from Cairo, Egypt. He has lived and worked in Edmonton, Canada since 2010. His debut novel, Law of Inheritance (2002), won the Sawiris Prize in 2005 in the young writers category. His collection of short stories, Jonah in the Belly of the Whale, won the same prize in the category of prominent writers in 2013.

This event is free, but requires registration: https://outlyingvoices.eventbrite.ca

Three poets with strong rural sensibilities (Thomas Trofimuk, Angela Kublik, and Leanne Myggland-Carter) will explore how the big, open spaces outside of urban areas complement and clash with more metropolitan influences and aesthetics.

Our beautiful province is experiencing growing pains as urban centres expand and traditional rural communities shift and change. We all live underneath Alberta’s big prairie sky, but are some voices getting lost? Poetry has the power to bring disparate perspectives together and perhaps this powerful aesthetic can create a space where urban and rural poets focus more on what brings us together instead of what sets us apart.

This event takes place in the art gallery of the historic Stony Plain Multicultural Heritage Centre. Space is limited, so tickets are required, even though this is a FREE event. Please grab your ticket in advance here: outlyingvoices.eventbrite.ca. Together with your entrance, each ticket entitles the bearer to a complimentary glass of wine. Age 18+.

Performers

• Leanne Myggland-Carter is a Spruce Grove writer of poetry and story (lmcwrites.com) whose published collections include _elements_, _Orange_, and _Choices_. For the past 15 years, she has been active in the Greater Edmonton Area literary scene as a writing instructor, manuscript evaluator, and Canadian Authors Association Alberta Branch Operations & Communications Manager (2014-2017).
• Thomas Trofimuk is an Edmonton writer of poetry and fiction, whose novels include The 52nd Poem, Doubting Yourself to the Bone, Waiting for Columbus, and in 2017, the critically acclaimed This is All a Lie. He’s been active in the Edmonton area poetry scene with the Raving Poets, the Stroll of Poets, the ROAR Spoken Word Festival, and his weekly poetic “sorbet” offerings.
• Angela Kublik is an Edmonton-based writer, librarian, editor and publisher whose chapbook, If I Must Leave, was published in 2017 by House of Blue Skies. With Dymphny Dronyk, she edited two best-selling poetry anthologies: Home and Away: Alberta’s Finest Poets Muse on the Meaning of Home (2009) and Writing the Land: Alberta through its Poets (2007).

What is the future of innovative poetry, and what role will our poetic practices play in shaping the future of culture and politics? In this panel discussion, hosted by Christine Stewart, four poets describe their own methods of poetic innovation, and the potential effects and interventions of these innovative poetries.

Douglas Barbour is Professor Emeritus, Department of English & Film Studies, University of Alberta. The University of Alberta Press published his latest book of poems, Listen. If. in Spring 2017. He was inducted into the Edmonton Cultural Hall of Fame in 2003.

Having grown up all over the world, Shane Book writes from a globalized position, employing a formally innovative practice that draws on weaponized techniques of the avant garde, language’s base atomic properties and cloud varieties of cultural production in the Western world and the African Diaspora.

Joel Katelnikoff works on Inhabitations: A Recombinant Theory Project. The project remixes the work of contemporary poets and theorists, using techniques conventionally associated with plagiarism and piracy in order to develop new collaborative methods of critical and poetic writing.

Gregory Scofield is one of Canada’s leading Indigenous writers whose collections of poetry have earned him both a national and international audience. He is known for his unique and dynamic reading style that blends oral storytelling, song, spoken word and the nêhiyaw language. His maternal ancestry can be traced back to the fur trade and to the Métis community of Kinosota, Manitoba, which was established in 1828 by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Presented in partnership with the Canadian Literature Centre.

We are the Writing Revolution in Place Creative Research Collective! Over the past six years we have worked around the city: Boyle Community Services, The Learning Centre at Abbotsfield, HIV Edmonton, Stanley Milner Library, University of Alberta, and this term, we are working at Highlands Library on 118th. As creative researchers, poets, student, as companions & seekers of truth we are always in the act. We are never static. We share opinions and encourage one another to challenge standard accounts of histories & cultures. We seek to unveil lies and deceit & why they have tried hard to be hidden. This year we invite you to join us as we read our collaborative, creative, poetic research drawn from our exploration of Treaty Six and this year’s 140th anniversary of the Papaschase adhesion to Treaty Six. What was the original intention of Treaty Six? What was the the role of the adhesion in Treaty 6? Why did the Papaschase lose their federal reserve? What are our Treaty obligations today? How can we properly and actively honour Treaty Six and the Papaschase people today? How can we be on this land in a good way?