Canada's most generous poetry award, founded by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin.
Past Griffin Poetry Prize Winner Kaie Kellough will discuss his book Dominoes at the Crossroad. Contact Paul Barrett for the Zoom link: barrettp@uoguelph.ca
Manchester Literature Festival is thrilled to present an evening with Somali-British poet and writer Warsan Shire.
Born in Nairobi and raised in London, Warsan was awarded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London. She has written two chapbooks, Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth and Her Blue Body, and wrote the poetry for the award-winning visual album Lemonade and the Disney film Black is King in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
One of the most exciting poets of her generation, Warsan builds on the power of individual poems like ‘Home’ and ‘For Women Who Are Difficult to Love’ with her first full-length collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by A Voice in Her Head. Beautifully crafted and profoundly moving, it’s a collection that explores home and exile, migration and assimilation, faith and family alongside love, desire, trauma and womanhood. Join us to see Warsan discuss her work and perform some of her fierce and tender poems.
Hosted by Malika Booker. The founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, Malika is a British poet and theatre-maker of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage. Her poetry collection Pepper Seed was shortlisted for the OCM Botas Prize and her poem The Little Miracles won the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem
Presented in partnership with Centre for New Writing, Creative Manchester and Waterstones Deansgate.
Copies of Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head will be available to collect before the event.
copyright ©2013
I took a trip to Ukraine. It was June.
I waded in the fields, all full of dust
and pollen in the air. I searched, but those
I loved had disappeared below the ground,
deeper than decades of ants. I asked
about them everywhere, but grass and leaves
have been growing, bees swarming. So I lay down,
face to the ground, and said this incantation —
you can come out, it’s over. And the ground,
and moles and earthworms in it, shifted, shook,
kingdoms of ants came crawling, bees began
to fly from everywhere. I said come out,
I spoke directly to the ground and felt
the field grow vast and wild around my head.
Notes on the Poem
This week’s poem is from the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize-shortlisted collection, Colonies, by Mira Rosenthal, translated from the Polish written by Tomasz Rózycki (Zephyr Press). Of the collection, the judges said: “In Mira Rosenthal’s translation of this work, English-speaking readers can themselves confront the sonnet as something supple, fresh and a little bit strange. Rózycki’s quirky and self-deprecating humour permeates the poems. So does his sense of the fundamental homelessness of 21st-century human beings. Nine of these seventy-seven sonnets begin with some variation on the line ‘When I began to write, I didn’t know . . .’ and blossom into wry and hilarious reflections on the writing life. Others exude a heart-rending nostalgia for a world that is constantly being translated from meaning into money, and thus constantly destroyed.” Listen to Mira Rosenthal and Tomasz Rózycki read from Colonies here.
The Canadian Literature Centre, MacEwan University, and Athabasca University are once again teaming up to bring you the 2022 CLC Poetry Contest! We’re looking for the best poem in English or in French from a University of Alberta, MacEwan University, or Athabasca University student on the theme of “Listening.”
Entrants should submit their poem in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format, without any identifying information in the document, to clccomm@ualberta.ca by March 14, 2022. Please include name, email address, phone number, mailing address, departmental and university affiliation in the body of the email, and use the subject line: “Last Name: CLC Poetry Contest.”
For the 7th year in a row, the Winnipeg Free Press will be publishing poetry by Manitoba writers for National Poetry Month in partnership with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. As always, we’ll be taking a page from the League of Canadian Poets, which means that this year’s theme will be?Intimacy.?
However you interpret the theme, editors Ariel Gordon and Duncan Mercredi are looking forward to reading your poems!
Eligible writers: Manitoba poets, working in English and French. Writes of Spring is committed to a diversity of voices: emerging, PoC, urban, spoken word, Indigenous, established, rural, Black, 2SLGBTQ+, newcomer, and page poets.
The DEADLINE for submissions is Monday, March 14, 2022.
Twelve poems will be selected, and each poet will receive a $75 honorarium as well as publication in the Winnipeg Free Press on Saturday, April 23.
Co-editors Ariel Gordon and Duncan Mercredi are looking forward to reviewing all submissions, and will provide thoughtful editorial engagement with all poets accepted into this year’s group.
“The future lives in our bodies”: Poetry & Disability Justice, a virtual reading and discussion, will feature Meg Day, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Travis Chi Wing Lau, who will also host and moderate.
Lambda Literary and Woodland Pattern Book Center are partnering to host this pre-recorded poetry reading and conversation as part of the Poetry Coalition’s shared programming around a theme of social importance. The readings will be followed by a discussion among presenting artists on the topic of Poetry & Disability Justice. The broadcast will feature ASL interpretation and captioning, as well as a PDF pamphlet of each reader’s poems for attendees to view. A commemorative chapbook with poems from each participant will be designed and printed by pitymilk press, and made available free by mail to all who tune in live on March 13th.
The title “The future lives in our bodies” is taken from the poem “Femme Futures” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Join us for In/Verse on Saturday, March 12 at 1:55 pm PT by registering here (bcwriters.ca/events-for-writers) and a Zoom link for the event will be sent to you. When it’s time for the event you can click on the Zoom link to join the event.
Speakers:
Chantal Gibson is an award-winning artist-educator living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish Peoples. Working in the overlap between literary and visual art, her work confronts colonialism head on, imagining the BIPOC voices silenced in the spaces and omissions left by cultural and institutional erasure. Her visual art has been exhibited across Canada and the US. Her debut poetry collection, How She Read (Caitlin Press, 2019) explores the representation of Black women in Canadian history, art, literature. It won the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the 2020 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her follow-up collection, with/holding (Caitlin Press, 2021) brings a critical lens to the representation and reproduction of Blackness across digital media. Recipient of the 20213M National Teaching Fellowship, she teaches in the School of Interactive Arts & Technology at Simon Fraser University.
Barbara Pelman is a retired high school English teacher, and poet. She is a frequent participant and assistant at Planet Earth Poetry. She has three published books of poetry: One Stone (Ekstasis Editions 2005), Borrowed Rooms (Ronsdale Press 2008) and Narrow Bridge (Ronsdale Press 2017) and a chapbook Aubade Amalfi (Rubicon Press 2016). In 2018 her glosa, “Nevertheless” won the Malahat Open Season Poetry Contest. Previously, in 2004 and in 2014, she won the BC Federation of Writers’ poetry contest. Her poems can be found in literary journals and the anthologies “Refugium” and “Sweet Water” (Caitlin Press), and “In Fine Form” (Caitlin Press).
Marc Perez is the author of the poetry chapbook, Borderlands (Anstruther Press, 2020). His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in decomp journal, CV2, PRISM international, Vallum, TAYO, and Ricepaper. He has a BFA from the UBC School of Creative Writing, and he has received support from BC Arts Council. Originally from the Philippines, he lives in unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, where he currently works on a full-length poetry collection. He writes in English as a Second Language.
Host:
Susan Alexander is the author of two collections of poems, The Dance Floor Tilts and Nothing You Can Carry and a former journalist. Her work has won multiple awards, including the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry in 2019. Susan’s poems appear in anthologies and literary magazines in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., have ridden Vancouver buses as part of Poetry in Transit and even shown up in the woods around Whistler. She lives on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, the traditional territory of the Squamish people.
In January 2022, the Griffin Poetry Prize launched Translation Talks, a series of conversations about translation and poetry where past shortlisted and winning authors are invited to discuss their craft.
Join us on Thursday, March 10th at 7pm ET on Zoom for our second Translation Talks, featuring Ani Gjika and Dunya Mikhail.
All money from the event is going to The Ukranian Red Cross & The Refugee Council
Featuring readings from
Charlotte Shevchenko Knight
Oleh Shynkarenko
Tetyana Denford
Joy David
Valya Dudycz Lupescu
Stephen Komarnyckyj
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Nicola Yurcaba