2015 Cascadia Poetry Festival 3 – NANAIMO POETS

Samar Abulhassan

Samar Abulhassan is a poet and teaching artist living in Seattle. She has worked for Seattle Arts and Lectures’ Writers in the Schools Program for the past seven years, and continues to teach writing to teens and adults at the Hugo House. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, where she studied fiction. She has published five chapbooks, and loves working between poetry and prose. Born to immigrant parents, she has a deep interest in the potent spaces between languages and aspects of being.

Yvonne Blomer

Yvonne Blomer, Victoria’s new Poet Laureate, was born in Zimbabwe and came to Canada when she was two years old. Her first collection a broken mirror, fallen leaf was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Yvonne has also published two chap books Landscapes and Home: Ghazals (Leaf Press, 2011) and Bicycle Brand Journey (JackPine Press, 2012), and is the co-editor of Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press, 2013) out of the Planet Earth Poetry reading series, of which she is the Artistic Director. In 2014 her third full collection of poems As if a Raven was released with Palimpsest Press.

Sara Brickman

Sara Brickman is an author, performer, and activist from Ann Arbor, MI. The recipient of a grant from 4Culture, winner of the third annual Split This Rock Abortion Rights poetry contest and an Artist Trust EDGE fellow, Sara’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Bestiary, Hoarse, The New, Alight, and Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls. A teacher with Writers in the Schools and the 2013 Rain City Women of the World Slam Champion, Sara has performed her work at venues across North America, including the Bumbershoot Music Festival, Northwest Folklife, and Tedx Seattle. In 2010 she founded a multimedia reading series in her living room called The Hootenanny, to showcase groundbreaking writers and performers.  She lives and writes in Seattle, WA, where she would love doing the robot with you.

Robert Bringhurst

Robert Bringhurst is the author of more than thirty books. More than half of these are poetry. He is also known for his studies of Haida and Navajo oral literature, and for his work in the field of typography. His Selected Poems are published by Jonathan Cape, (London). Two volumes of his selected essays and lectures – The Tree of Meaning and Everywhere Being Is Dancing – are published by Counterpoint (Berkeley). Other books include A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World and The Elements of Typographic Style, which is now in its fourth edition and has been translated into ten languages. He lives on Quadra Island, off the British Columbia coast.

Kim Clark

Kim Clark: Disease and desire, mothering and the mundane propel Kim Clark’s ongoing journey between poetry and prose, page and stage. Clark has published poetry—Middle Child of Summer (Leaf Press), Sit You Waiting (Caitlin Press), and Dis ease ad De sire, the M anu S cript (Lipstick Press) and short fiction—Attemptations (Caitlin Press). She was a finalist in Theatre BC’s 2013 Playwrights Competition, has had her novella optioned for a feature-length film and her debut novel is hitting bookshelves in 2015. Clark  lives in Cedar on Vancouver Island.  kimclarkwriter.com

Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is a poet and professor of contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. His many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; second edition 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013), and DECOMP (Coach House 2013). He has also written two books of criticism and a novel, The Red Album (BookThug 2013). His collection of essays on the Occupy movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (Talon Books 2012), is a philosophical meditation on activist tactics, social movements, and change. He is currently writing about walking, resource extraction, and the climate commons.

Peter Culley (1958 – 2015)

Peter Culley (1958 – 2015) Peter was born in Sudbury, Ontario in 1958 and grew up on RCAF bases in Holberg, British Columbia, Cold Lake, Alberta, Dana, Saskatchewan, Clinton, Ontario and for four years in Ayr, Scotland. He has lived in and around Nanaimo since 1972 and now lives in the former coal-mining town of South Wellington, beside the main line of the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway. His books include Hammertown, The Age of Briggs & Stratton and To The Dogs (Arsenal Pulp Press).

Amber Dawn

Amber Dawn is a writer from Vancouver, Canada. Author of the memoir How Poetry Saved My Life (2013) and the Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa (2010), and editor of the anthologies Fist of the Spider Women: Fear and Queer Desire (2009) and With A Rough Tongue (2005). Her work has been published widely in Canadian and the USA literary magazine, most recently SubTerrain, Event, Prism International, Room, Plenitude, Matrix, Poetry is Dead, and ADRIENNE, A Poetry Journal of Queer Women. Amber Dawn was 2012 winner of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT writers and and the 2012 winner of the Eli Coppola Memorial Chapbook Award. In 2013, she was presented with the Vancouver Book Award. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Douglas College and the University of British Columbia, and is working on a second speculative fiction novel.

Chris Hancock Donaldson

Chris Hancock Donaldson is our official photographer. She’s also a poet and occasional actor. She has developed her writing skills in recent years with the help of many fine writers like Betsy Warland, Susan Stenson and John Lent at Sage Hill in Saskatchewan and Patrick Lane at his Honeymoon Bay retreats. In 2013, she was a featured reader at Words on Fire in Port Alberni and at Wordstorm in Nanaimo. Chris is published in an anthology edited by Patrick Lane.

Chris’s photography was used on the cover of Poems from Planet Earth edited by Yvonne Blomer and Cynthia Woodman Kerkham. She recently took photos of Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier at home for a special issue of the Federation of BC Writer’s magazine. Her photo story, “When Light Hits the Body,” was part of the 2014 Alberni Valley Fringe Festival. You can see her photos at www.chrishancockdonaldson.com

David Fraser

David Fraser is a poet, spoken-word performer, publisher and editor. He lives in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island. He is the founder and editor of Ascent Aspirations Magazine. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and recently Tesseracts 18. He has published five collections of poetry, most recently Paper Boats, 2012. In addition David has co-authored with Naomi Beth Wakan, On Poetry, an inspirational book on poetics and poetry and has recently completed a response poem collection, Maybe We Could Dance, with poet Pat Smekal. His forthcoming collection of poetry, After All the Scissor Work is Done will be published by Leaf Press in the fall of 2015. He is the artistic director of Nanaimo’s spoken-word series, WordStorm. He participated in Random Acts of Poetry, a national poetry program that brought poetry to the streets of Canada. David is a member of the League of Canadian Poets.

Kim Goldberg

Kim Goldberg is an award-winning poet, journalist, spoken-word performer, and the author of six books. Her Red Zone collection of poems about urban homelessness has been taught in university literature courses. Her previous collection, Ride Backwards on Dragon, was a finalist for Canada’s Gerald Lampert Award. She is a winner of the Rannu Fund Poetry Prize for Speculative Literature, the Goodwin’s Award for Excellence in Alternative Journalism, and other distinctions. Kim holds a degree in biology and has written extensively on environmental topics. Her nonfiction book Refugium, about people living with electrosensitivity and the perils of electro-pollution, will be published in 2015. She lives in Nanaimo, BC, and online at http://pigsquash.wordpress.com/.

Philip Gordon

Philip Gordon is a creative writing student from Vancouver Island, recipient of the 2014 Kevin Roberts poetry award, an editor of the literary magazines Ash Tree Journal and Text (launching in September, 2014), and reader for PANK. His work has been published in The Puritan, theNewerYork, The Suburban Review, (parenthetical), The YOLO Pages, and in numerous other places. Philip is a romantic dork, lover of shades, and proponent of the Oxford Comma. He can be stalked at twitter.com/greymusic_ and grey-music.tumblr.com

Garry Gottfriedson

Garry Gottfriedson is from Kamloops, BC. He is a self-employed rancher from the Secwepemc Nation. Gottfriedson is strongly rooted in his cultural teachings. He is currently the Principal at the Sk’elep School of Excellence in Kamloops. He holds a Masters Degree in Education. In 1987, the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado awarded a Creative Writing Scholarship to Gottfriedson. There, he studied under Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Faithful and others. Gottfriedson has 8 published books. He has read from his work across Canada, United States, Europe, and Asia. His work has been anthologized and published nationally and internationally.

Sam Hamill

Sam Hamill was born in 1943, probably in northern California. Orphaned during the war, he was adopted and grew up on a Utah farm. He is the author of eighteen volumes of poetry including Habitation: Collected Poems, four collections of literary essays, and some of the most distinguished translations of ancient Chinese and Japanese classics of the last half-century. He is Founding Editor, and for thirty-two years was Editor, at Copper Canyon Press. He taught in prisons for fourteen years and has worked extensively with battered women and children. In 2003, declining an invitation to the White House, he founded Poets Against the War, compiling the largest single-theme poetry anthology in history: 30,000 poems by 26,000 poets. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Fund, and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. Other honors include the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing, the Washington Poets’ Association Lifetime Achievement in Poetry Award, two Washington Governor’s Arts Awards, a Western States Book Award, a PEN-Oakland Anti-censorship Award, a PEN Center/USA First Amendment Award, the Charity Randall Award from The Poetry Forum, and the Condecoración de la Universidad de Carabobo in Valencia, Venezuela. His work has been translated into a dozen languages. He lives in Anacortes, Washington.

Brenda Hillman

Brenda Hillman has published eight collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Practical Water (2009), for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry; and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982); Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995); and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). Her ninth collection of poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize, and won the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Dean Rader wrote, “Seasonal Works With Letters On Fire is a profoundly humane work. In language that moves from the chatty to the experimental to the heightened to the rhetorical. Seasonal Works With Letters On Fire won the 2014 Griffin Prize.

Robert Lashley

Robert Lashley is the author The Homeboy Songs ( Small Doggies Press, April 2014). A semi finalist for the PEN/Rosenthal fellowship, Lashley has had poems published in such Journals as Feminete, No Regrets, and Your Hands, Your Mouth. His work was also featured in Many Trails To The Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and Lyric poetry. To quote James Baldwin, he wants to be an honest man and a good writer.

Christine Leclerc

Christine Leclerc is a Vancouver-based author and activist. She is the author of Counterfeit (2008) and Oilywood (2013) as well as being an editor of (2004) and The Enpipe Line: 70,000+ km of poetry written in resistance to the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal (2010). Leclerc is University of British Columbia Creative Writing Program graduate whose poetry, fiction and essays have appeared internationally. She is a Communications Manager by day and has been known to lead community theatre at corporate headquarters and occupy oil rigs at sea.

Christine Lowther

Christine Lowther is the author of Born Out of This (Caitlin Press), New Power (Broken Jaw Press), My Nature (Leaf Press), and Half-Blood Poems (Zossima Press). She is co-editor and co-author of Writing the West Coast: In Love with Place (Ronsdale Press) and Living Artfully: Reflections from the Far West Coast (The Key Publishing House). Her work has appeared in Force Field: 77 Women Poets of B. C., Quills, Poetry is Dead, subTerrain, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and on Poetry-in-Transit. She lives in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island.

Nadine Antoinette Maestas

Nadine Antoinette Maestas earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington where she wrote a dissertation on Postmodern Anthropoetics. She also holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan where she was awarded the Hopwood Farrar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem-play “Hellen on Wheels: a Play of Rhyme and Reason” was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of Beneath the Bright Discus (Potes & Poets Press, 2000) and has published in Pageboy Magazine, The Germ and Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k). 

Dr. David D. McCloskey

Dr. David D. McCloskey is an Emeritus Professor of Seattle University. He taught in the Sociology/Anthropology Department as well as in the Ecological Studies program for over three decades (1971-2004). He served as chair of both departments, and co-founded Ecological Studies, having designed its curriculum. He created and taught more than one hundred different courses in ten different departments or programs throughout his tenure there. A long-time bioregionalist who has spoken and written widely on the subject and Cascadia, he is the founder and director of the Cascadia Institute. He created the first maps of “The Ish River Country” (now officially the “Salish Sea”) and of Cascadia, the Ecoregions of Cascadia, as well as the soon to be published, “Bioregions of Western North America.” He is currently releasing new GIS-based small and large maps of the bioregion. He has been acknowledged as the “Father of Cascadia”– paulenelson.com/the-father-of-cascadia–interview/. He delivered a keynote presentation on “Cascadia Geography: Place & Spirit” at the 2^nd Cascadia Poetry Fest in Seattle recently. Among other accomplishments, he is the first to conceive of “Cascadia Poetry” and to initiate a region-wide decades’ long search for its possibilities, editing an anthology, “Mountains, Rivers, Sea, and Sky.”

He continues making new maps and is creating the new fields of “Bioregional Geography” and “Cascadia Geography.”       Cascadia-Institute.org          Cascadia.Institute@gmail.com

Leanne McIntosh

Leanne McIntosh lives in Nanaimo. Her poems have been published in literary journals, anthologies, chapbooks and she has been included in the Island Illustrators Society journal, Coastal Moments as well as the Gabriola Arts Council collaboration of photographs and poetry. She has an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry and she has received Honourable Mention for her haiku in Haiku Canada’s Betty Drevniok Award as well as haibun selected for a Haiku Canada Sheet. She is a founding member of Island Women Poets and has facilitated poetry at the Nanaimo Brain Injury Society. Leanne has published three books of poetry, The Sound the Sun Makes and Liminal Space, published by Oolichan Books and Dark Matter, Leaf Press, 2013.

Barry McKinnon

Barry McKinnon was born in 1944 in Calgary Alberta, where he grew up. In 1965, after two years at Mount Royal College, he went to Sir George Williams University in Montreal and took poetry courses with Irving Layton. He graduated in 1967 with a B.A. degree. In 1969, he graduated with an M.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and was hired that same year to teach English at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George where he has lived and worked ever since.

Barry McKinnon’s The the was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1980. Pulp Log was the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for the B.C. Book Prizes in 1991 and Arrhythmia was the winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook Award for the best chapbook published in Canada in English in 1994. His chapbook Surety Disappears was the runner-up for the bp Nichol Award in 2008.

Mary Ann Moore

Mary Ann Moore is a Nanaimo poet and writer whose book of poetry, Fishing for Mermaids, was published by Leaf Press in 2014. Her poetry has appeared in Room, Freefall, Vallum, Carousel, and various anthologies including Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press, 2013). She regularly writes book reviews for the Vancouver Sun and offers writing circles including Poetry as a Doorway In. . . and a Welcome Home as well as a weekly women’s writing circle called Writing Life. Mary Ann is on the WordStorm Society of the Arts board of directors and on the Cascadia Poetry Festival 3 planning committee. She writes a blog at apoetsnanaimo.ca.

Susan Musgrave

Susan Musgrave has received awards in six different categories of writing: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, personal essay, children’s writing and for her work as an editor. She has published close to 30 books; her most recent novel is Given; latest poetry collection Origami Dove.

Musgrave won the Spirit Bear Award in 2012: The tribute recognizes the significance of a vital and enduring contribution to the poetry of the Pacific Northwest. “Her artistic presence over the past 40 years has helped create who we are. She is as important to us as Emily Carr.”

Paul Nelson

Paul Nelson founded SPLAB in Seattle and the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Author of Organic Poetry (essays), a serial poem re-enacting history, A Time Before Slaughter (shortlisted for a 2010 Genius Award by The Stranger) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies. He has interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Sam Hamill, Robin Blaser, Nate Mackey, Joanne Kyger, Brenda Hillman, presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. He was awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, and published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he lives in Seattle with his youngest daughter Ella Roque. http://paulenelson.com/

Missie Peters

Missie Peters is an award-wining spoken word performer from Victoria, BC. She is a two-time Victoria Slam Champion, the former slam master, one half of the improvised spoken word duo SpeakEasy and the director of “Not Your Grandma’s Poetry”. She currently produces the annual Victoria Spoken Word Festival. Her poetry finds the personal in the political and finds the metaphor in the mundane. She is also a huge science fiction geek.

Dan Raphael

Dan Raphael has been active in Pacific Northwest poetry for over 3 decades as poet, performer, editor (26 Books and NRG Magazine,) and reading arranger. The State I’m In (nine muses) and Impulse & Warp: The Selected 20th Century Poems (Wordcraft of Oregon) are the most recent of his 18 published collections. Current poems appear in Caliban, Otoliths, Phantom Drift, Great Weather for Media, Big Bridge and Basalt. He has given over 200 performances, including Bumbershoot, Powell’s Books, Reed College, Elliot Bay Books, Wordstock and the Portland Jazz Festival.

Harold Rhenisch

Harold Rhenisch: Over the last three decades Harold Rhenisch has published twenty-seven books of poetry, environmental writing, social criticism, memoir and stories, and has won numerous writing awards, including The George Ryga Prize for Social Responsibility in British Columbia Literature, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and a CBC Literary Prize, for his sequence of Pow-wow inspired poetry, “Catching a Snare Drum at the Fraser’s Mouth.” For the last three years he has been writing the cross-border environmental blog www.okanaganokanogan.com, which merges science, photography and poetry into a vision for sustainable environmental technology. It is a springboard for two new book projects, a collection of Cascadia poems called The Salmon Shanties and a bioregional book about the history and culture of the Columbia Plateau and the salmon of Nk’mip, called Father Pandosy’s Mission. In 2013 Harold was writer in residence at Skriduklaustur in East Iceland and in 2014 he was the inaugural writer in residence at the Okanagan Regional Library. He edited the anthology of British Columbia poetry Rocksalt with Mona Fertig. Bioregionally, he is the author of Motherstone: British Columbia’s Volcanic Plateau and editor of Spirit in the Grass: The Cariboo-Chilcotin’s Lost Landscape, both with the photographer Chris Harris. After four years in Campbell River, he now lives on the edge of the grasslands above Okanagan Landing. He provided the historical background of the Okanagan fruit industry for Christos Dikeakos’ exhibition “Nature Morte” at the Kelowna Art Gallery (2014). A new book of ghazals is coming out soon.

Jay Ruzesky

Jay Ruzesky’s fiction, poetry, and non-fiction has been published in Canada and internationally and translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. His previous books include Blue Himalayan Poppies, Painting the Yellow House Blue, and Am I Glad To See You. His first novel, The Wolsenburg Clock, was shortlisted for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize and a ReLit Award. He has been on the editorial board of The Malahat Review for over twenty years and is co-founder of Outlaw Editions. He teaches English, Film Studies, and Creative Writing at Vancouver Island University and lives on Vancouver Island.

Renée Sarojini Saklikar

Renée Sarojini Saklikar writes thecanadaproject, a life-long poem chronicle that includes poetry, fiction, and essays. Work from thecanadaproject appears in literary journals, newspapers, and anthologies, including, ti-TCR / a web folio (The Capilano Review), Literary Review of Canada, The Vancouver Review, Geist, Poetry is Dead, SubTerrain, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Georgia Straight and Ryga, a journal of provocations. The first completed series from thecanadaproject is a book length poem, children of air india, (Nightwood Editions, 2013) about the bombing of Air India Flight 182 shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 2014. 

George Stanley

George Stanley was active on the San Francisco poetry scene in the 1960s. He moved to British Columbia in 1971, and has published nine books of poetry (and several chapbooks) in BC, while also teaching English for twenty-six years in BC community colleges. He is now retired and living in Vancouver. His most recent books are Vancouver: A Poem (2008), After Desire (2013), and North of California St. (Selected Poems 1975-1999) (2014), all from New Star Books of Vancouver.

Sharon Thesen

Sharon Thesen, a poet and editor, is professor emerita of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan.  Her research interests include American mid-century and projectivist poetics and the Canadian long poem.  She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Oyama Pink Shale, The Good Bacteria, and A Pair of Scissors. She has edited two editions of The New Long Poem Anthology, an award-winning selected poems of Phyllis Webb, The Vision Tree, and, with Ralph Maud, Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence.  She was an editor of The Capilano Review when she was teaching English at Capilano College (now University) and continues as one of its contributing editors; at UBC Okanagan she co-edited Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment.

Ursula Vaira

Ursula Vaira has a passion for kayaking and for poetry, having found the two go well together. Her poems are strongly located in landscape; her journeys attempt the wilderness within. She published three chapbooks: And See What Happens, a 30-day paddle in a Coast Salish canoe from Hazelton to Victoria; Last One to Get There, kayaking and wilderness camping from Port Hardy to Zeballos, and Frog River, a stay in an isolated trapper’s cabin in the northern Rockies. Caitlin Press published her first collection And See What Happens in 2011. Ursula is the founder and publisher of Leaf Press, publishing poetry in print and online since 2000.

Naomi Beth Wakan

Naomi Beth Wakan is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Nanaimo (2013). She has published over 50 books. Her essays are in Late Bloomer-on writing later in life; Composition: notes on the written word; Bookends – a year between the covers; and A Roller-coaster ride – Thoughts on aging (all from Wolsak and Wynn). Her poetry books include Sex after 70 and other poems and And After 80… (both from Bevalia Press). Some Sort of Life, is her recent book of memoirs (2014). Naomi is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, Haiku Canada and Tanka Canada. She lives on Gabriola Island with her husband, the sculptor, Elias Wakan. http://www.naomiwakan.com/

Ann Graham Walker

Ann Graham Walker is a journalist and former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio producer who moved to British Columbia in 2002 and began honing her poetry. She has studied with Patrick Lane, at his Glenairley and Honeymoon Bay retreats and has been a finalist in the Prism International and Malahat Open Season Award poetry contests. Her work has been published in literary magazines and in various anthologies, including Rocksalt and Poems from Planet Earth. Her chapbook The Puzzle at the End of Love was published by Leaf Press in 2012. Ann has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College’s Port Townsend (Washington) campus.

Sebastien Wen

Sebastien Wen is a poet and spoken word artist based out of Vancouver. He is the 2013 UBC Slam Champion, the 2014 Vancouver Youth Slam Champion and the 2014 Canadian Individual Youth Slam Champion. He was a member of the 2014 Vancouver Youth Slam team, which went on to win the 2014 YouthCanSlam. His work has featured in journals such as Arc, Ascent Aspirations, Existere and Vallum.

Rita Wong

Rita Wong is the author of three books of poetry: sybil unrest (co-written with Larissa Lai, Line Books, 2008), forage (Nightwood 2007, winner of Canada Reads Poetry 2011), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang 1998). She lives on the unceded Coast Salish territories otherwise known as Vancouver, where her work investigates the relationships between contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology, and decolonization.

Wong’s poems have appeared in anthologies such as Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry; Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics; The Harbrace Anthology of Poetry; Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature; and more. Her poem  “J28” for IdleNoMore can be found in the journal Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society: http://decolonization.wordpress.com. She has received the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Wong teaches in Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, where she has developed a humanities course focused on water, for which she received a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She also serves as the President of Emily Carr University’s Faculty Association, creatively facing the question of what union renewal in contemporary post-secondary education may entail. Currently she is researching the poetics of water (http://downstream.ecuad.ca/) and working toward watershed literacy.