News Releases

Reworlding Celan

The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands invites you and your students to Reworlding Celan. This conversation brings together poets Carolina Ebeid and Athena Farrokhzad for a grounding with Matakyev Fellows Christian Campbell and Claire Schwartz about the meanings and possibilities of living with the work of Jewish German-language poet Paul Celan. In the wake of Celan’s centennial in 2020, this online gathering seeks to celebrate his life and reworld his work across borders of language, geography, and material, towards questions of dispossession, state violence, translation, aesthetics, and freedom. What routes might be opened up by bringing Celan’s poetry into conversation with Indigenous and diasporic communities? What new ways of being together can we imagine through and with the poetry of Paul Celan?

1 – 2:30 pm MST
(2 pm MDT / 4 pm EDT / 9 pm CET)

The event will have ASL interpretive services as well as closed captioning.

Imagined by Christian Campbell, curated by Christian Campbell & Claire Schwartz

An Evening with Warsan Shire

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.

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Scorched Maps

Mira Rosenthal, translated from the Polish written by Tomasz Rózycki

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.

Canadian Literature Centre Poetry Contest – 2022

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.”

 

Writes of Spring Deadline for Submissions (Manitoba)

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. 

  • Submit a maximum of 5 poems, English or French, on the subject of intimacy. Each poem should be no more than 25 lines. 
  • Submit a short bio (max 30 words). 
  • Questions? Email WritesofSpring@thinairwinnipeg.ca. 
  • Enter your submission materials at THIS LINK.

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

“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

In/Verse Monthly Poetry Reading (BC Federation of Writers)

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. 

Translation Talks: Ani Gjika and Dunya Mikhail

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.

Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, literary translator, and author of Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013). Her translation of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space (Bloodaxe Books/New Directions, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize. She’s a recipient of several awards and fellowships including from the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and, most recently, Restless Books’ 2021 Prize for New Immigrant Writing for her forthcoming memoir.
Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She has received a United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Kresge Fellowship, Arab American Book Award, and UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She is the first contemporary Iraqi woman poet translated into English. Her book The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005), translated by Elizabeth Winslow, was shortlisted for the 2006 International Griffin Poetry Prize. New Directions published three of her other poetry books and her non-fiction book, The Beekeeper, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and for PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. Her debut novel, The Bird Tattoo, shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is coming out on December 6, 2022 from Pegasus. She currently works as a special lecturer of Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan. Visit Dunya Mikhail’s website here and read her recent piece on self-translation.
Translation Talks will run for approximately one hour on Zoom and will be hosted by Griffin Poetry Prize editorial director Adriana Oni??, and social media director Mirene Arsanios. You will receive the Zoom link via Eventbrite after registering.
Our first event, held on January 27, 2022, featured Khaled Mattawa and Sarah Riggs, which you can listen to here.
If you have any questions, please contact Adriana Oni?? at editorialdirector@griffinpoetryprize.com.
The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry is also the proud founder of Poetry In Voice / Les voix de la poésie, which presents regional and national poetry recitation competitions and provides poetry programs and materials to high schools across Canada. Learn more here.