Events Schedule

It’s tough to be on zoom all day, so some of our authors have recorded readings that you can download and enjoy on your own time. The readings are free, and will be released on October 15.

If you buy the book when you sign up for the reading, we’ll deliver a small “experience” package along with the book! That way you can listen to the reading and engage with it in a hands-on way. To get the book+package for the October 15 release day, please complete your purchase by October 12.

Special thanks to our local business partners that helped make this happen: Italian Centre Shop, Duchess Bake Shop, and Silk Road Spice Market.

Beyond the Food Court: An Anthology of Literary Cuisines: The authors of this book are all writers from diverse ethnic backgrounds that call Edmonton home. The reading is a selection of short parts from five of the contributors, each with a musing on foods found here and in their homeland. Enjoy this with a mix of international spices and accompanying recipes.

Venue

Online

It’s tough to be on zoom all day, so some of our authors have recorded readings that you can download and enjoy on your own time. The readings are free, and will be released on October 15.

If you buy the book when you sign up for the reading, we’ll deliver a small “experience” package along with the book! That way you can listen to the reading and engage with it in a hands-on way. To get the book+package for the October 15 release day, please complete your purchase by October 12.

Vivek Shraya, God Loves Hair: Colour in Juliana Neufeld’s illustrations from the 10th anniversary edition of the book as you listen. This book comes with an author-signed bookplate.

Venue

Online

It’s tough to be on zoom all day, so some of our authors have recorded readings that you can download and enjoy on your own time. The readings are free, and will be released on October 15.

If you buy the book when you sign up for the reading, we’ll deliver a small “experience” package along with the book! That way you can listen to the reading and engage with it in a hands-on way. To get the book+package for the October 15 release day, please complete your purchase by October 12.

Special thanks to our local business partners that helped make this happen: Italian Centre Shop, Duchess Bake Shop, and Silk Road Spice Market.

Michelle Parise, Alone: A Love Story: Experience a bit of Parise’s Calabrese heritage as you cook along with her reading. Food is love, family, and all things Italian.

Venue

Online

The Edmonton Poetry Festival is happy to share that award-winning author Jordan Abel will be hosting a special workshop on manuscripts. Are you an author with a whole lot of writing, and no idea what to do next? This workshop might be just what you need!

Registration is free! This workshop will help writers of all disciplines prepare their manuscripts for submission, walking through helpful insight for writers hoping to take their next steps. Click here to register!

This event is funded by the Edmonton Arts Council and the Edmonton Community Foundation. Please share with writers all around! Registration is limited, so register early to secure your seat.

Venue

Online

What does it mean to translate home? How does the concept of “home” change when you identify as multilingual/multicultural? What are the connections between the languages we speak and the lands we have inhabited? Ten poets from The Polyglot’s latest issues, Lunch Box and Unfaithful, explore multilayered meanings of home through poems in Arabic, Italian, Irish, Nêhiyawêwin, Portuguese, Romanian, Somali, Spanish, and Tagalog.

Whether this land has been your ancestral home for generations or you have settled here after leaving your home behind, the need to “code-switch” between languages and lands results in the constant re-examining of our maps of meaning. Home becomes the place where our life experiences get lost (and found) in translation, as we simultaneously make new connections between past and present. Multilingual poetry then becomes the ideal vehicle to safely “break the code,” building a more spacious home, with room for the old and the new.

As the closing event for Edmonton Poetry Festival 2019, The Polyglot will serve up an unforgettable reading by ten multilingual poets who will be reading and performing work from the magazine’s latest issues, Lunch Box (a poetry and art issue about food, guest-edited by Mimi Okabe) and Unfaithful (a multimodal issue of poetry in translation).

Venue

CKUA Performance Space

9804 Jasper Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 0C5 Canada

Wind down festival week with our traditional chorus of local voices. You’ve got all the choice in the world as our café readings mark the festival’s last day. Dozens of poets will share brief readings of their work in cafes around downtown. It’s for young and old, newbies and pros – just sign up as a member of the Edmonton Poetry Festival and then come and share the company of Edmonton’s poetry community.

The Cafe Readings are full. We are no longer accepting signups for this event. Thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm and interest!

Venues:
Audreys Books 10702 Jasper Avenue
Three Bananas Café 9918 102 Ave
The Nook Café 10153 97 St NW

Click here to download the cafe readings schedule.

Venue

Multiple Venues (See Description for Details)

This event is sponsored by Robert Less-Miller.

The Edmonton Poetry Festival is throwing it’s annual poetry party and volunteer appreciation night, with internationally acclaimed poets and local superstars to show what the power of poetic performance is all about. This exciting event brings in some of the most powerful voices active in poetry today. Join us as we welcome the renowned Buddy Wakefield as well as Lady Vanessa, Nasra Adem, Ahmed Knowmadic, and musician Selassie Drah to celebrate poetry at its most vivid form.

Venue

The Matrix Hotel

10640 100 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3N8 Canada

The River City Lecture, Sponsored by Alice Major.

Poetry translates experience into writing that often helps us navigate compromised categories of belonging and home. As poets, our perceptions of the world departs from and involves our use of language—and depends on the social for meanings to cohere. Poetry offers many reminders to ourselves, that to use language to create is always an act of transgression—less about a strict crossing of decided borders than an act that puts us imminently always in relation to someone else, in their own place, with their own ways of seeing and being and moving through the world. We are as poets always in search of marking our encounters by shaping language towards making something concrete of the mysteries that surround us. Poetry is a means of entering abstract categories in order to turn out forms and shapes for our lives beyond the mere immediacy of what is legible. Poets, and perhaps all writers, invite wonder into these attempts, to be sure, offering room for multiplicity and other modes of homing. In poetry where we are alive through the porosity of voice, we seek new legibilities for the homeward work of language. Our way of being in the world happens in the accumulation of small acts of creation that move us beyond paltry romanticisms of home.

Venue

The Matrix Hotel

10640 100 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3N8 Canada

Alive! Is a heavy-hitting, multidisciplinary poetry experience curated and performed by nationally-celebrated poet Brandon Wint as well as an accompaniment of dancers and musicians who have created a one-of-a-kind showcase. Brandon will be accompanied by Justin Khuong, Rebecca Parsons, Mpoe Mogale, Jane Berry, Bhuyash Neupane, Jeannie Vandekerkhove and Amy Voyer. Following Alive! will be award-winning poet Titilope Sonuga’s internationally-acclaimed poetry and musical showcase, Open, which recently hit the world stage on tour before being brought back home for new enthusiasts and old friends alike to take in and enjoy. Open is backed by local favourites MelAfrique.

Venue

The Matrix Hotel

10640 100 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3N8 Canada

Homebody invites prominent queer poets from across Canada to showcase their work in an exploration of the way home, and their place in it, manifests in themselves. Bringing in Victoria poet Arleen Paré, queer Peranakan poet Natalie Wee, editor of Glass Buffalo Matthew Stepanic, and local author Jason Purcell, this event will hopes to highlight the cross-section of poetry and queerness in today’s world and what it means for these authors.

Venue

The Matrix Hotel

10640 100 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3N8 Canada

Presented in partnership with the Canadian Authors Association.

Arleen Paré will explore rhyme, rhythm and repetition in poetry through this extended workshop, presented in part with the Canadian Authors Association. This intensive workshop will guide participants through an understanding of musicality and how it affects the word, shaping the form and cadence of our writing and how it meets the open air when spoken out loud.

Venue

The Matrix Hotel

10640 100 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3N8 Canada

The ever-popular Wine and Wild Women Wordsmiths is back! And this year’s readers amplify the power of the female voice. Like poetry, there is a sea of wine styles and types to choose from. Just like Women, the anthocyanins in wine have great heart-health benefits. It’s Friday night and we invite you to enjoy distilled words, quality grapes, and the company of women who speak up, and make their voice heard. This event is hosted by S.G. Wong.

And the price of admission includes a sample of four wines to match our distinct female poets. Thank you to our friends at Prestige for sponsoring our wine samples tonight.

Venue

The Matrix Hotel

10640 100 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3N8 Canada

Presented in partnership with the Canadian Authors Association.

The Story of Home will be a shifting talk about the term and concept of home – the complexity of it and the confusions – with exhortations for listeners to write about home. Listeners will be invited to ruminate on their own understanding of the home as a more than just a physical place as Arleen explores the vast surroundings that couch the idea of what a home is, what it means, and how it comes to show in our writing.

Venue

The Matrix Hotel

10640 100 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3N8 Canada

Where are you going? Where have you been? If there was ever a more Edmonton question, these poets would love to hear it! Take a listen as these mostly-local writers define home in unusual ways, searching for it in the strangest places inside and outside the city. Come out and listen to stories of how they come and go, bringing their work to CBC’s Centre Stage.

Sharing the spotlight are Zachary Polis, Catherine Owen, Marita Dachsel, and Nermeen Youssef. Hosted by Michael Gravel.

Venue

CBC Centre Stage @ Edmonton City Centre

10062 102 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 2Y8 Canada

In this workshop, participants will explore how the lands we carry with us can be both places of belonging and epicentres of disconnection. Drawing from Robert Macfarlane’s lyrical book of essays, Landmarks, participants look at creating their own word-hoards for the places they live and the landscapes we carry within them in the form of personal or familial memories. Writers of all genres and all levels are most welcome. Please come prepared with notebook and pen/pencil, and some sturdy shoes for walking in the Garden.

This is a workshop event. Admission to this event is not included in a festival pass.

U of A Botanic Garden

Venue

University of Alberta Botanic Garden

51227 AB-60
Spruce Grove, AB T7Y 1C5 Canada

Poets and visual artists come together in an evening of live-painting inspired by the poets’ work. This event pairs each prominent poet with an artist who will seek to capture the essences of the words on their canvases. Poets Dwennimen, Doyali Islam, Liam Coady, Claire Kelly, and Megan Dart join visual artists Rebecca Pickard, Adriana Onita, Alyson Davies, Lindsay Knox, and Hilary Mussell.

Venue

Elder Jerry Wood Atrium (Allard Hall) @ MacEwan University

11110 104 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 4S2 Canada

The 8th edition of French Twist, Edmonton Poetry Festival’s francophone event, is designed and hosted by Josée Thibeault with the view to inviting audience members into a unique bilingual experience of poetry at the heart of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. This year’s edition featured at Café Bicyclette in the French quarter will highlight an exciting array of poets reading and performing in French and in translation. Pierrette Requier, Edmonton’s former poet laureate, instigator and coordinator of the last 7 editions of French Twist, will grace us with her presence and her works. We look forward to sharing our Mots de chez nous !

La 8e édition du French Twist, l’événement francophone du Edmonton Poetry Festival, est conçue et animée par Josée Thibeault. Le public est invité à vivre une expérience bilingue et unique en poésie, au cœur du Festival de poésie d’Edmonton. L’édition de cette année présentée au Café Bicyclette, dans le quartier francophone, mettra en vedette un éventail passionnant de poètes lisant et se produisant en français et en d’autres langues. Pierrette Requier, ancienne poète officielle de la ville d’Edmonton, instigatrice et coordinatrice des 7 dernières éditions du French Twist, nous honorera de sa présence et de ses oeuvres. Nous sommes heureux de partager les Mots de chez nous !

RAFA

Venue

Café Bicyclette

8627 91 Street NW, #004
Edmonton, AB T6C 3N1 Canada

Presented in Partnership with Glass Buffalo Magazine.

Glass Buffalo is back again with their annual showcase of up-and-coming voices, as well as beloved favourites, to the poetry scene. Hear from emerging poets who are fresh and skilled in their craft, as they share their work and discuss the role poetry plays in making a home for themselves in their communities. Featured contributors to the magazine Alex Allen, Paige Cardinal, and James Collier will be joined with special guest and celebrated poet Randy Lundy.

Venue

Audreys Books

10702 Jasper Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3J5 Canada

Please join Marita Dachsel, celebrated Victoria-based poet, for drinks as she reads from There Are Not Enough Sad Songs. She will be joined by Edmonton’s own Jenna Butler, poet, professor, essayist, and organic farmer from northern Alberta, reading from Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard. Lastly, they will be joined by Astrid Blodgett, reading as a special tribute for her father, E.D. Blodgett, a well-known and much beloved poet in the community. She will be reading from his work Apostrophes VIII: Nothing is But You and I.

Venue

University of Alberta Faculty Club

11436 Saskatchewan Drive
Edmonton, AB T6G 2G9 Canada

Haven’t been keeping up with CanLit? We have! The Edmonton Poetry Festival is happy to showcase five writers, highlighting the best new books to hit the shelves. Join us as we explore the local, national, international scope of writing in this city. Each poet will share their work, and have an opportunity to chat about their writing.

Sharing the spotlight are Anna Marie Sewell, Matthew Stepanic, Ellen Kartz, Titilope Sonuga, and Doyali Islam. Hosted by Michael Gravel.

Venue

CBC Centre Stage @ Edmonton City Centre

10062 102 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 2Y8 Canada

Poetry Central is your chance for a lunch-time poetry meet-up in the downtown! Watch some of Edmonton’s emerging and established, page and stage poets, have a short-order poem written for you on the spot, and pick up festival information or a free poetry book.

Performers

• Anna Mioduchowska is a poet, translator, author of stories, essays and book reviews. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, literary journals, newspapers, on buses, and has been aired on the radio. She has published two poetry collections.
• Charlotte Cranston‘s passions include words, learning, socially-engaged art, and big messy projects. She was named Edmonton’s first Youth Poet Laureate in 2015.
• Hailey Siracky is a theological librarian in Edmonton. Her poem, “how do you use your voice?” was featured on Edmonton Public Transit in Spring 2018.
• Nermeen Youssef is a multilingual poet documenting life through the lens of an expatriate scientist.
• Julie C. Robinson has many interests but poetry continues to be her favourite. Her book of poetry is Jail Fire (2013) and she is the editor of Looking Back, Moving Forward (2018), a multi-genre anthology of multilingual writers.

Venue

Edmonton City Hall

1 Sir Winston Churchill Square NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 2R7 Canada

An editing masterclass with Peter Midgley.

After Peter won the Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence, he remarked in an interview that editing is like carving a delicate relief on an eggshell, that he is terrified each time he starts to edit a book. Many seasoned editors chastised him for that remark: you should have confidence, they told him. You should think like a winner, for that is what you are. Be bold and confident. Those are fine traits to aspire to, but what gets pushed aside brashly as a result of such thinking is that the craft of editing needs vulnerability. Boldness and confidence in writing and editing emerge from embracing fear and vulnerability. This is a workshop about embracing the hidden potential of vulnerability in your editing practice.

This is a workshop event. Admission to this event is not included in a festival pass.

Venue

The Matrix Hotel

10640 100 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 3N8 Canada

What does it mean to bring the word home? pê-kîwêhtatân itwêwin will posit this question to four talented indigenous poets, listening in on their musings as they showcase their work at the headlining event of the Edmonton Poetry Festival. Amiskwaciwâskahika (Edmonton) sits on Treaty 6 land. Treaty 6 was signed on August 23, 1876 and stretches from western Alberta, through Saskatchewan and into Manitoba; and includes 50 First Nations. Treaty 6 is a traditional gathering place for the Cree, Blackfoot, Metis, Nakota Sioux, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibway/ Saulteaux/Anishinaabe, Inuit, and many others. Their histories, languages, and cultures continue to influence our art and culture communities. This event features nationally-renowned poets and local talent.

Venue

Theatre Lab (Allard Hall) @ MacEwan University

11110 104 Avenue NW
Edmonton, AB T5J 4S2 Canada

All are welcome at this annual evening of well-aged poets features local poets at the SEESA. The evening includes wine and cheese (cash bar available).

Tickets are $5.00 in advance or $7.00 at the door. Note that the 2019 Festival Pass does not include this event.

Venue

SEESA Centre

9350 82 Street
Edmonton, AB T6C 2X8 Canada