 Poets2009 Poetry FestivalMichael Ondaatje
"Ondaatje is one of the country's best, a formidable craftsman and artist...The intensity and originality of his language are rare." -Kingston Whig-Standard "Michael Ondaatje defies the normal distinction between poet and novelist. His writing is consistently tuned to a visionary pitch."--Graham Swift Michael Ondaatje is one of Canada's foremost writers. He was born in Sri Lanka and has lived in Canada since 1963. His works include Divisadero (2007), The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002), Anil's Ghost (2000), The English Patient (1992), In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Coming Through Slaughter (1976), The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), and his memoir, Running in the Family (1982). His collections of poetry include Secular Love (1984), The Cinnamon Peeler (1992) and Handwriting (1998). Ondaatje's work has received five Governor General's Literary Awards, The Giller Prize, the Irish Times International Fiction Award, the Prix Médicis, and the Booker Prize. Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto. Don McKay
"He is our most inventive poet, a master of metaphor and a stylist with impeccable tone." -Patrick Lane, Globe and Mail "Canada's greatest living poet." -Walrus Magazine Don McKay is one of Canada's most celebrated poets. He is the author of 12 books of poetry including Birding, or desire (1983), Apparatus (1997), Camber: Selected Poems (2004), and The Muskwa Assemblage (2009). He has received the Governor General's Award twice, for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000), as well as the Griffin Prize for Strike/Slip (2007). He has also written two books on the poetics of wilderness: Vis à Vis (2001) and Deactivated West 100 (2005). He is presently the Associate Director for Poetry at the Banff Centre, and in 2009 he was named to the Order of Canada. Don McKay has lived all over Canada, and currently makes his home in St. John's Newfoundland. Erín Moure
"...a radically experimental poet whose larger poetic mandate is to literally recreate the whole process of writing and reading." -The Edmonton Journal Erín Moure is an acclaimed poet and translator. She has published thirteen books of poetry and seven books of poetry in translation. Six of her books were finalists for the Governor General's Award (one, Furious, won the award in 1988) and two were finalists for the Griffin Prize. Her most recent book, O Cadoiro (2007), was inspired by the medieval Iberian cantigas. Other recent books include Little Theatres (2005), winner of the AJM Klein Prize; O Cidadan (2002), and Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001), a translation from the Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa. A contributing editor to The Capilano Review and member of the editorial board of the Galician Review, Moure lives in Montreal and works as a commercial translator. C.D. Wright
"There is no one like Wright. Her voice [is] crackling and edgy, corporeal and erotic." -Angela Garbes C.D. Wright, one of America's most compelling and idiosyncratic poets, was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has published a dozen collections of poetry, most recently, Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008) and Like Something Flying Backwards, New and Selected Poems (2007). Steal Away was on the international shortlist of the Griffin Trust Award and String Light won the 1992 Poetry Center book Award. Wright is a recipient of a Macarthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the Robert Creeley Award, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor at Brown University and lives outside of Providence with her husband, poet Forrest Gander. Adam Sol
"Sol is a superb virtuoso whose range is unique. Listen to the sounds and ready for the transcending moments." -Yusef Komunyakaa Adam Sol is the author of three collections of poetry, Jonah's Promise (2000), which won MidList Press's First Series Book Award, Crowd of Sounds (2003), which won Ontario's Trillium Award, and Jeremiah, Ohio (2008), a novel in poems. Sol is also the author of numerous essays and reviews for publications as various as The Globe and Mail, The Forward, Critique and CNQ. Originally from Connecticut, he holds an MFA from Indiana University, as well as a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Laurentian University, Georgian College. Sol lives in Toronto with his wife and their three sons. Michael Eden Reynolds
“Here is a poet whose eye and ear and heart are open to the pulsations of life on the planet and beyond.” –Erling Friis-Baastad Michael Eden Reynolds’ first book of poetry, Slant Room, will be published in fall 2009 with Porcupine’s Quill. His poems have won the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the PRISM international poetry contest, and the John Haines Award for poetry. He was also a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in 2005, the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award in 2006, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Contest in 2007. His work has been anthologized in The Best of Canadian Poetry in English 2008, edited by Molly Peacock and Stephanie Bolster. Michael lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, with his wife Jenny and their two children. Hal Wake
Hal Wake has a well-earned national reputation for engaging audiences in stimulating explorations of ideas, through public discussions on a wide-range of issues. In his 17-year career at CBC Radio he was the host of the Early Edition and a producer at Morningside. Now Wake applies his experience engaging audiences as the Artistic Director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival. Hal Wake will be joining the Whitehorse Poetry Festival to moderate a panel discussion and to give a trade talk. 2008 Poetry of the Atlantic ProvincesLorri Neilsen Glenn
Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s poems welcome the reader into a place where the strange is made familiar and the familiar reveals its own magic. Here the combustible materials of childhood and old age are always potentially present, and the attention paid to them multi-dimensional. Her poems engage their subjects whether the occasion is an encounter with the full moon during a lonely drive, a raucous community dance at the oldest dance hall in the Maritimes, or the opening of the door into “the small town inside”. Reaching from nature and human experience, often drawn by the long line and the hum of loss, Neilsen Glenn explores a full range of poetic possibilities. Lorri Neilsen Glenn was born and raised in western Canada and moved to Nova Scotia in 1983. An ethnographer and essayist, she is the author and editor of six academic books on research and literacy. Her first book of poems, all the perfect disguises, appeared in 2003. She was appointed Poet Laureate for Halifax for 2005-2009. “…these are poems with a wonderfully long reach, honed through an awareness of mortality and time’s looping returns… Neilsen Glenn’s ear is contemporary, her humour mordant at times, her lyric radar open to dark silhouettes of absence and moments packed with the phenomenally joyous. ‘Clutching a piece of the brink,’ she nets lives with a clear eye and a precision of image that’s startling.” – Daphne Marlatt Agnes Walsh
Agnes Walsh’s first book, In the Old Country of My Heart, is one of the most read and best loved books of poetry to come out of Newfoundland. Going Around with Bachelors continues and extends Walsh’s distinctive subject matter: the past in the present, Ireland and Portugal in Newfoundland, weather internal and external, the Cape Shore. Here are poems of place and of people in place, of family both immediate and extended. They are also absolutely contemporary poems by a poet, gifted with a remarkably flexible and distinctive voice, who is planted, in her own words, “straight up and down into what’s new.” Born and brought up in Placentia, Newfoundland, Walsh is an actor, playwright, storyteller and poet. She divides her time between St. John’s and Patrick’s Cove on the Cape Shore. Her poems have won Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters awards, and have been translated into French and Portugese. In 2006 Walsh was named the inaugural St. John’s Poet Laureate. “…Walsh’s poetry is like nothing else you will read: ‘clean as a shriek,’ declarative, funny in all the unexpected places, full of unadorned wisdom and bone-naked sadness. There is no word for what you will find here—the closest we have is truth.” – Lisa Moore 2007 Whitehorse Poetry FestivalJohn Haines
“A writer of rare vision and poetic eloquence.” – New York Times Book Review John Haines spent more than twenty years homesteading in Alaska. This experience and his love of the natural world, resonates in his poetry. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, John Haines’ recent works include At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-1954 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997); The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993); and New Poems 1980-88 (1990), for which he received both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Western States Book Award. He has also published a book of essays entitled Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays (1996), and a memoir, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-five Years in the Northern Wilderness (1989). Haines has taught at Ohio University, George Washington University, and the University of Cincinnati. Named a Fellow by The Academy of American Poets in 1997, his other honors include the Alaska Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress. Sharon Thesen
“Thesen sparkles, locating unexpected humour, the surreal, in the everyday. Her voice blends humour with razor blades.” - The Globe and Mail In crisp, intimate, and uncluttered language, award-winning and critically acclaimed poet Sharon Thesen gives us a layered meditation on energy and endings: the irrepressible energy of life, and the end of everything – the natural world, home, love, youth, safety, all we understand to be familiar. In an unforgettable sequence of poems on a wildfire that denudes hills around her home and forces an evacuation, Thesen brilliantly marries these preoccupations. Sharon Thesen’s eighth and most recent book of poems, The Good Bacteria, was published by Anansi in 2006. Other books include the award-winning A Pair of Scissors (Anansi, 2000); and a selected poems, News & Smoke (Talon Books, 1999). From 2001 to 2006 Thesen edited The Capilano Review out of Capilano College in North Vancouver, where she taught for many years. She now lives near Kelowna, BC and teaches in the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan. Jan Zwicky
“Jan Zwicky’s delightfully erudite poems are made with an ear to music and an eye for precise light off everyday things.” – George Bowering "Jan Zwicky has an extraordinary ear; her sense of tone, rhythm and diction is almost unerring, so that a poem, which can't be described as making any large statement, rings with poetic energy.You get to the end with that wonderful feeling of having more than the usual amount of oxygen in the brain." -- David Helwig, Toronto Star Jan Zwicky taught both philosophy and creative writing at the University of New Brunswick before joining the philosophy department at the University of Victoria in 1996. Some of her publications include: Where Have We Been (Brick Books, 1982), Wittgenstein Elegies (Brick Books, 1986), The New Room (Coach House Press, 1989), Lyric Philosophy (University of Toronto Press, 1992), and Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (Brick Books, 1998) which won of the Governor General’s Award for poetry. Zwicky won the BC Book Prize for poetry in 1999 and was short-listed for Pat Lowther Memorial Award for the Best Book of Poetry by a Canadian Woman. Barry McKinnon
“I read Barry McKinnon like a grasshopper on a leaf, always ready to jump.” –George Bowering Barry McKinnon is a poet based in Prince George, BC. He recently retired from teaching English at the College of New Caledonia. McKinnon writes from city dwellers perspective on wilderness. His publications include: The Centre: Selected Poems 1970-2000 (Talon Books, 2006), The Centre (Caitlin Press, 1995), Four Realities: poets from northern BC (Caitlin Press, 1992), Pulplog (Caitlin Press, 1991), I Wanted to Say Something (Red Deer College Press, 1990), and The The (Coach House Press, 1980). McKinnon’s awards include the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for Pulplog and a nomination for the Governor General's Literary Award for The The. Donna Kane
“Anyone who can describe a pussy willow this way has my attention: “Blind/ and agog, their little/ engines revving.” There’s such a lively intelligence in these poems, the natural images of the world so clearly observed, so lustred and sparked. Kane has musically mapped the richness, beauty and isolation of the North she was born into. And the colder human territory of loneliness and loss. Both these landscapes are rendered with an insider’s knowledge, and a directness that refreshes and renews.” – Lorna Crozier on Somewhere, a Fire Donna Kane's work has appeared in journals, magazines, and anthologies across Canada. In 2000 she received the Lina Chartrand Award for poetry. In 2004, her first book of poems, Somewhere, a Fire, was published by Hagios Press. Her second book of poetry will be published this year. What the critics have said about Kane’s Somewhere, a Fire: “Somewhere, a Fire is a remarkable debut … polished and startling.” – Event (Spring 2005) “This collection is enormously skilful. Form and content are integral to one another, melded so as to become one thing. But what strikes me above all is the integrity of the voice, its determined honesty.” - The Fiddlehead (Spring 2005) Erling Friis-Baastad
“Friis-Baastad demonstrates… a gift for ironic observation and introspection as well as a flair for condensed poetic narrative.” - Poetry Canada “Erling Friis-Baastad’s remarkable poems … become prayer-like in their transcendence of hard conditions. - Victoria Times Colonist Erling Friis-Baastad was born in Norway in 1950. He has spent most of his adult life in the Yukon Territory, where he now serves as an editor for the Yukon News. He was formerly managing editor of the academic journal The Northern Review, published by Yukon College, and regional editor for the literary magazine ICE-FLOE. Friis-Baastad’s poetry is grounded in the realm of the natural world and his books include: Wood Spoken: New and Selected Poems (Northbound Press, 2004) and The Exile House (Salmon Publishing, Ireland, 2001). He was co-editor of Writing North: An Anthology of Contemporary Yukon Writers (Beluga Books, 1992). Gillian Wigmore
“What a wonderful, fresh voice Gillian Wigmore brings to the page. These wise poems know the push and pull within family. They reveal the tender truths behind the rough edges of small-town life. Her voice resonates with authenticity, and whether she is writing about a near drowning or ice fishing, she is ultimately writing about the complications of love. These are poems you will not soon forget.” — Robert Hilles, Governor General’s Award-winner for Poetry Gillian Wigmore’s book of poems, Soft Geography, was published this year by Caitlin Press. The collection is a detailed poetic map and guide to life in Northern British Columbia. Wigmore’s poems adeptly express the region’s landscape, flora and fauna, climate and mindset. Gillian Wigmore grew up in Vanderhoof, BC, received a double major in English and Writing from the University of Victoria in 1999, and currently lives in Prince George with her husband and two small children. She has been published in CV2, filling station, the Inner Harbour Review, and Westwords and Northword magazines. Hal Wake
Hal Wake will be joining the Whitehorse Poetry Festival to moderate two panel discussions on concepts of wilderness and North in contemporary poetry. Hal Wake has a well-earned national reputation for engaging audiences in stimulating explorations of ideas, through public discussions on a wide-range of issues. In his 17-year career at CBC Radio he was the host of the Early Edition and a producer at Morningside. His work in radio and his experience in moderating hundreds of events, has given him a deep understanding of how to create and present entertaining and thoughtful discussions that make a strong and lasting connection with audiences. Now Wake applies his experience engaging audiences as the newly appointed Artistic Director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival. The Writers Festival attracts the world's best writers to Vancouver. Internationally renowned and undiscovered authors mingle with 11,000 readers of all ages in intimate, interactive and informal settings on Granville Island. In its 19 year history, the Festival has presented luminaries such as Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Maeve Binchy, Peter Carey, Roddy Doyle, Timothy Findley, Tomson Highway, John Irving, P.D. James, Thomas Keneally, Rohinton Mistry, Frank McCourt, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Anita Rau Badami, JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Carol Shields.
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 Contact Information: Whitehorse Poetry Society
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