Poets & Other Writers! Week 3′s Line-Up
I think that it’s fair to say that the recent discussions & arguments of Vancouver poets and poetry qualifies as the Least Likely Cultural Debate expected to come out the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
What better time to showcase Vancouver poets and other writers? And what better stage than the independently Non-VANOC-related W2 Real Vancouver Writers’ Series?
Gonna be another great night!
Teresa McWhirter
Teresa McWirter.
Teresa McWhirter grew up in Kimberley, in the east Kootenays of interior BC. After finishing high school she spent a year in Europe and returned to attend the University of Victoria, where she received a BA with a double major in English and Creative Writing (with Distinction). She has taught English in Korea, spent time in Thailand and Costa Rica, and traveled extensively throughout Canada and the US.
Her first novel, Some Girls Do was published by Raincoast books (Vancouver: 2002)
After an assortment of jobs including driving an ice cream truck and as a monster in the haunted house of an amusement park, she published her second novel, Dirtbags (Anvil Press, Vancouver: 2007)
During the past few years Teresa has toured Europe and North America with punk rock bands, gathering material for her recently completed third novel, Five Little Bitches.
She lives on Vancouver’s east side.
Heather Susan Haley
Heather Haley.
Trailblazing poet, author, musician and media artist Heather Susan Haley pushes boundaries by creatively integrating disciplines, genres and media.
Published in numerous journals and anthologies, she was an editor for the LA Weekly, publisher of Rattler and the Edgewise Café, one of Canada’s first electronic literary magazines. Architect of the Edgewise ElectroLit Centre and the Vancouver Videopoem Festival, her own works have been official selections at dozens of international film festivals.
She is the host and curator of SEE THE VOICE: Visible Verse at Pacific Cinémathèque.
An engaging performer, Haley has shared her poetry and music with audiences around the world. Most recently she toured eastern Canada and the U.S. in support of her critically acclaimed AURAL Heather CD of spoken word songs, Princess Nut.
Heather’s most recent book, Three Blocks West of Wonderland, was recently published by Ekstasis Editions.
Nikki Reimer
Nikki Reimer
Nikki Reimer is a poet, blogger, curator, arts event planner and photographer of cats in East Vancouver.
Recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in W, WCL, Matrix, Front, Prism International, BafterC.
Her chapbook fist things first was published by Wrinkle Press in 2009, and her first book of poetry, [sic], will be published by Frontenac House in spring 2010.
Reimer lives in Vancouver where she is a member of the Kootenay School of Writing and a board member at W2 Community | Media | Arts.
Chris Hutchinson
Chris Hutchinson.
Chris Hutchinson was born in Montreal and has lived in Victoria, Edmonton, Vancouver and most recently Phoenix, Arizona.
He now lives in a really nice house in Kelowna.
His poems have been translated into Chinese and have appeared in numerous Canadian and U.S. publications.
He is the author of the poetry collection, Unfamiliar Weather (Muses’ Company, 2005).
Other People’s Lives is his second collection.
Chris was also the very first guest on the Books on the Radio program.
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Dina Del Bucchia
Dina Del Bucchia
Dina Del Bucchia used to totally sometimes works at Duthie Books and definitely at other times writes stuff.
Her work has appeared in some journals, like Matrix, and will appear in others, Event for instance.
A recent UBC MFA graduate she is working on her first novel.
Over the years she has hosted events and readings and has facilitated writing workshops for teens.
Don’t underestimate them.
She did not win the Mad Men contest, but probably spends as much time watching television as she does reading, and thinks it’s for the best.
Donato Mancini
Donato Mancini.
Donato Mancini has worked within the worlds of concrete poetry and visual art since 2000.
In 2005, his first volume of verse, Ligatures, explored his fascination with the typographical possibilities of the alphabet. It garnered an honourable mention in the Alcuin book design awards, was shortlisted for the ReLit, and was reviewed favourably by respected American writer Kevin Killian on Amazon.com.
Mancini continues to experiment in a variety of media. 911/7-Eleven is a chapbook, published by Victoria’s Open Space Gallery in 2004, that parodies corporate strategizing in a high-gloss format.
In 2004, Mancini’s “monument of concrete poetry,” ligature, was on show at the Western Front Gallery. In 2003, he sampled passerby’s conversations and displayed the results in the window at Artspeak, a gallery in Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood where artists, the indigent and tourists on cruise-ship junkets coexist in uneasy proximity.
Mancini earned his BA in art history and music composition at the University of Victoria in 1999.
Donato also participated in Steve Calvert’s Angels in the Angles exhibition at the Atsui Gallery in late 2009.
Sonnet L’Abbé
Sonnet L'Abbé
Sonnet L’Abbé is a Canadian poet and critic. L’Abbé writes about national identity, race, environmental theory, the feminine, language acts, the body, psychology, aesthetics and art.
Born in Toronto, Ontario L’Abbé received a BFA in film and video from York University, and completed a Master’s degree in English literature from the University of Guelph. She has been a script reader and has taught English at universities in South Korea and taught Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. She is also a regular reviewer for The Globe and Mail and Canadian Literature, and an occasional contributor to CBC Radio One. She is currently studying at the University of British Columbia.
Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals and several anthologies including Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets and Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets.
L’Abbé is multiracial; her father is Franco-Ontarian and her mother is Guyanese of South Asian mixed descent. Her father, Jason L’Abbé, is a well-known Canadian ceramic artist.
Jonathon Wilcke
Jonathon Wilcke
Plays alto/tenor saxophones & ludic instruments (a selection of whistles, tubes, reeds , & modified string instruments) in a variety of situations including but not limited to: strict compositions, free &/or structured improvisation, text-sound, vocal accompaniment & soundnoisemaking.
Jonathon is also the author of Pornograph, a book of poems published in 2004 by Red Deer Press.
His most recent book, DUPE, was published in October 2009 by LINEbooks.
Jonathon lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Amber Dawn
Amber Dawn.
Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker and performance artist based in Vancouver.
She is the editor of Fist of the Spider Woman (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008) and co-editor of With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005).
Her award-winning, genderfuck docu-porn, “Girl on Girl,” has been screened in eight countries and added to the gender studies curriculum at Concordia University.
She has toured three times with the infamous Sex Workers’ Art Show in the US. She was voted Xtra! West‘s Hero of the Year in 2008.
She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Currently, she is the director of programming for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.
Catherine Owen.
Catherine Owen
Catherine Owen is the author of 4 previous volumes of poetry, and her work has appeared in periodicals throughout Canada, Austria, New Zealand, and Australia.
Catherine’s books and poems have been nominated for numerous awards, including the Gerald Lampert Award, BC Book Prize, Relit Award, George Ryga Award for Socially Conscious Literature, and The Earle Birney Prize.
She has a Master’s degree in English and plays bass/sings in the metal bands Inhuman and Helgrind.
She collaborates with a variety of artists in various mediums such as photography, multi-media, theatre and visual arts.
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Meredith Quartermain
Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking won the BC Book Award for Poetry in 2006, and Nightmarker was a finalist for the 2009 Vancouver Book Award.
Matter, which came out in 2008, has been described as “prescient, daring.”
Her work has appeared in magazines across Canada including The Walrus, Canadian Literature, the Literary Review of Canada, Matrix, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, filling Station, Prism International, and other magazines.
She taught English Literature and Composition at UBC and Capilano College, and has enjoyed leading workshops at the Naropa Summer Writing Program and the Kootenay School of Writing.
In 2002, she and husband Peter Quartermain founded Nomados Literary Publishers, through which they’ve published more than 30 books of innovative writing.
Lee Henderson
Lee Henderson.
Lee Henderson is the author of the award-winning short story collection The Broken Record Technique (2002).
He is a contributing editor to the arts magazines Border Crossings in Canada and Contemporary in the UK.
He has published fiction and art criticism in numerous periodicals and co-organizes Father Zosima Presents, a monthly night of sound performances where he lives in Vancouver, B.C.
Lee’s most recent novel, The Man Game, won the 2009 Vancouver Book Award.
I cut this bio from the Penguin Books website and can not at this time confirm its veracity.
However, let’s assume that it’s basically correct.
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AND, LET’S NOT FORGET THE MC FOR THE EVENING
Elizabeth Bachinsky
Elizabeth Bachinsky.
Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of three collections of poetry, Curio (BookThug, 2005), Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood, 2006), and God of Missed Connections (Nightwood, 2009).
Her work was nominated for the Kobzar Literary Award in 2009, the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2006 and the Bronwen Wallace Award in 2004, and has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and on film in Canada, the United States, France, Ireland, England, and China.
She is an instructor of creative writing at Douglas College in New Westminster where she is Poetry Editor for Event magazine.
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