WHAT: The Present of Poetics, the Poetics of the Present
WHEN: Thursday, February 9th, at 7:30 PM
WHERE: The Auburn Saloon, #163 115 9th Ave SE
How does poetry respond to the current moment? In a time of increasingly global economic disparity, ecological disaster, and seemingly endless social and political challenges, poets note and record the era. How they do so remains a matter for discussion -- as well as a very fertile terrain for aesthetics. This event, curated by Mount Royal University's Kit Dobson, features Rita Wong, Rachel Zolf, and Sharron Proulx-Turner.
About the participants:
Kit Dobson specializes in Canadian literature and globalization studies. After growing up in Calgary, Kit studied at the universities of Victoria, York (UK), and Toronto before joining Mount Royal University. His first book, Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization, was published in 2009 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. His teaching interests include twentieth-century and contemporary Canadian literature, film studies, and writing.
Rita Wong is the author of three books of poetry: sybil unrest (co-written with Larissa Lai, Line Books, 2008), forage (Nightwood 2007), and monkeypuzzle (Press Gang 1998). forage won Canada Reads Poetry 2011. Wong received the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award in 1997, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008. An Associate Professor in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, she has developed a humanities course focused on water, for which she received a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is currently researching the poetics of water with the support of a SSHRC Research/Creation grant.
Rachel Zolf is a poet and editor from Toronto who is presently living in New York. Her third full-length collection Human Resources won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for a Lambda Award. Previous collections include Shoot & Weep (Nomados), Human Resources (Belladonna books), Masque (The Mercury Press) and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks).
Sharron Proulx-Turner is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. Originally from the Ottawa river valley, she’s from Mohawk, Algonquin, Wyandot, Ojibwe, Mi’kmaw, French, Scottish and Irish ancestry. Her previously published memoir, Where the Rivers Join (1995), written under a pseudonym, was a finalist for the Edna Staebler award for creative non-fiction, and her second book, what the auntys say (2002), was a finalist for the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Prize for best first book of poetry. Sharron’s work appears in several anthologies and journals. Her latest book, she walks for days/ inside a thousand eyes/ (a two-spirit story), was released by Turnstone press.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, The League of Canadian Poets and Calgary Arts Development.
