Feast your eyes on this powerhouse lineup:
Jen Currin will read John Ashbery (1927-2017)
Arleen Paré will read Don Domanski (1950-2020)
Melanie Siebert will read Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938)
Ali Blythe will read Jean Valentine (1934-2020)
Location:
Cross and Crows Books (2836 Commercial Drive)
Accessibility: Note that the venue is wheelchair accessible, however the washroom is not accessible. This is a masks-required event to keep things as safe and accessible as possible for everyone.
Reader Bios:
Jen Currin's Hider/Seeker: Stories won a Canadian Independent Book Award and was named a 2018 Globe and Mail Best Book. Their most recent book is Disembark
(House of Anansi, 2024), a collection of stories that focuses on queer
relationships. They have also published five collections of poetry, most
recently Trinity Street (Anansi, 2023) and The Inquisition Yours (Coach
House, 2010), which won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
and was a finalist for three other awards. Currin lives on the ancestral
and unceded territories of the Halkomelem-speaking peoples, including
the Qayqayt, Musqueam, Kwikwetlem, and Kwantlen Nations, in New
Westminster, BC. They teach creative writing and English at Kwantlen
Polytechnic University.
Arleen
Paré is a Victoria writer with ten collections of poetry, and two
edited anthologies. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and
anthologies. She has been short-listed for the BC Dorothy Livesay BC
Award for Poetry and she has won the American Golden Crown Award for
Lesbian Poetry, twice, the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie
Award, and a Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry, as well as the
bpnichols chapbook award. She lives in Victoria on the lands of the
Coast Salish people with her wife, Chris Fox.
Melanie Siebert’s most recent poetry collection, Signal Infinities, explores the intelligences and limits of the body, as a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake. As pain arrives. As glaciers and ancient forests are disappearing. Her first book of poetry, Deepwater Vee, traverses rivers she worked on as a wilderness guide and was a finalist for a Governor General's Award. Melanie also writes creative nonfiction and her book Heads Up is the go-to guide for young adults on mental health, trauma and recovery.Melanie lives with Ali Blythe in Victoria on the homelands of the W̱SÁNEĆ Nations and the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.
Ali Blythe is author of critically acclaimed collections exploring trans-poetics. His latest, Stedfast,
writes marginality into the cannon by breaking the fourteen lines of
Keats’s last sonnet “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art”
into a sequence of twenty-eight titles. Blythe’s poems and essays are
published in national and international literary journals and
anthologies, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature. Of
Blythe, Stewart Cole has written “It’s exciting to see a writer so
conscious of building a body of work within and across collections,
pursuing not just a set of ideas and concerns but an artistic vision.”
Dead Poets Bios:
Don Domanski
was an acclaimed Canadian poet who published nine books of poetry
during his lifetime. He received the Governor General’s Award, the
Atlantic Poetry Prize and the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia
Masterworks Arts Award.
Jean Valentine was born on April 27, 1934 in Chicago and died in Manhattan on Dec. 29, 2021 at the age of 86. She published 14 collections over six decades, winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1964 for her first book Dream Barker and Other Poems and a National Book Award in poetry for her selected, Door in the Mountain in 2004. Her work is minimal and restrained, but charged as though bolting awake from a dream.
Osip Mandelstam - In a time of war and revolution, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) wrote amid tumult, suspicion and hunger. He remained devoted to a crystalline sense of form, a restless music paced out as he composed in his head, and the possibility of vast emotion unfurling in a single word. After reciting his poem “The Stalin Epigram,” he was arrested and exiled, eventually dying at the age of 47 in a Soviet labour camp.
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28, 1927. He was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including A Wave (Viking, 1984) which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975) which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award for Poetry. Ashbery served as the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003. Ashbery’s poetry challenges its readers to discard all presumptions about the aims, themes, and stylistic scaffolding of verse in favor of a literature that reflects upon the limits of language and the volatility of consciousness. He died on September 3, 2017.
John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, on July 28, 1927. He was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including A Wave (Viking, 1984) which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975) which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award for Poetry. Ashbery served as the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003. Ashbery’s poetry challenges its readers to discard all presumptions about the aims, themes, and stylistic scaffolding of verse in favor of a literature that reflects upon the limits of language and the volatility of consciousness. He died on September 3, 2017.
