Spring Poetry Colloquium

May 10th to 23rd

 

Don McKay

McKay has published numerous books of poetry and several books of essays. The poetry has been recognized with a number of awards, including two Governor-General’s Awards and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His most recent book of essays, The Shell of the Tortoise, received the BMO Winterset Award for Excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador Writing for 2011. Paradoxides, his most recent book of poems, includes meditations on geology and deep time, while pursuing ongoing obsessions with birds and tools. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

 

Summer Adult Programmes

July 23rd to August 1st

 

Introduction to Writing Fiction & Poetry

Kimmy Beach

Beach’s fifth book is The Last Temptation of Bond (The University of Alberta Press, 2013). Her four previous titles (all with Turnstone Press) are Nice Day for Murder: poems for James Cagney (2001, second printing 2004), Alarum Within: theatre poems (2003), fake Paul (2005), and in Cars (2007). Alarum Within was longlisted for the ReLit Award and has twice been adapted as a full-length stage play. In 2005, she was the International Guest Poet for the Dead Good Poets Society in Liverpool, UK, where she launched fake Paul onstage at the Cavern Club in Mathew Street. Kimmy has served as Writer in Residence for the Parkland Regional Library, The Alberta Library Association, The Writers Guild of Alberta, and The Saskatchewan Writers Guild. She also organizes and facilitates a writing retreat/workshop on the Greek island of Crete. Two poems from fake Paul are anthologized in Newspaper Taxis: Poetry after the Beatles (Seren Press, Wales, 2013). Kimmy holds a First Class Honors Degree in English from The University of Alberta. Her work appears in dozens of journals – both print on online – and she has read across Canada, in the UK, and on Crete.

 

John Gould

Gould is the author of the novel Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good, and of two collections of very short stories, most recently Kilter, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize and a Globe and Mail Best Book. His fiction has appeared in literary periodicals across the country, and has been adapted for short films. Gould has written freelance nonfiction, and has worked as an environmental researcher, tree planter, and carpenter. As an arts administrator he created and coordinated writing programs for the BC Festival of the Arts and the Victoria School of Writing. He has led writing workshops in various venues, and teaches in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria, where he also serves on the editorial board of the Malahat Review.

 

Poetry Workshop

Priscila Uppal

Priscila Uppal is an internationally-published poet, fiction, non-fiction writer, and York University professor. Among her publications are eight collections of poetry, including Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize), and Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.); and the critically-acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009). Upcoming publications for 2013 include Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother and Summer Sport: Poems. Time Out London dubbed Uppal “Canada’s coolest poet.” For more information visit priscilauppal.ca

 

Fiction Workshop

Helen Humphreys

Humphreys is the award-winning author of five novels, four books of poetry, and one work of creative non-fiction. Her fiction has been published around the world, and her novel, Wild Dogs has been optioned for film. In 2009 she was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.”

 

Poetry Colloquium

Ken Babstock

Babstock is the author, most recently, of Methodist Hatchet which won the 2011 Griffin Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. He has written three other collections, Mean, winner of the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Milton Acorn People’s Poet Award, Days into Flatspin, winner of a K.M. Hunter Award and finalist for the Winterset Prize, and Airstream Land Yacht, finalist for the Griffin Prize for Poetry, the Governor General’s Literary Award and The Winterset Prize, and winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. All four titles were named Globe 100 Books of the Year.

 

Fiction Colloquium

Lawrence Hill

Hill’s third novel was published as The Book of Negroes in Canada and the UK, and as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand. It won various prizes including the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. Hill is also the author of the novels Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing. Hill’s most recently published fiction is the short story Meet You at the Door, in the January-February, 2011 issue of The Walrus magazine. His best-selling memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada is about growing up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the sixties. This year, the University of Alberta Press published Hill’s essay Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: an Anatomy of a Book Burning. He is completing a new novel and will deliver the Massey Lectures across Canada in the fall of 2013. For more information: www.lawrencehill.com

 

Non-Fiction Workshop

Denise Chong

Chong, a two-time finalist for the Governor-General’s award, is best known for her family memoir, The Concubine’s Children, one of the first non-fiction narratives of a Chinese family in Canada, and a Globe and Mail bestseller for 93 weeks. She also published The Girl in the Picture, about a girl who survived a napalm attack, and which was also ground breaking in its portrayal of life in war-torn Vietnam. Her book Egg on Mao, is a meditation on human rights, spanning 20th century China and pivoting on a bus mechanic’s defiant act in defacing Mao’s iconic portrait during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.