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Wendy McGrath is a Canadian poet and novelist.
Broke City (NeWest Press 2019) is the final novel in McGrath's Santa Rosa Trilogy. The second novel in the trilogy, North East (NeWest Press 2014) was nominated for the Georges Bugnet Prize for Fiction. The Santa Rosa Trilogy is set primarily in Edmonton, Alberta circa 1960s. Santa Rosa, the first book in the series, was nominated for the 2012 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize.
McGrath released the EP BOX (spring 2017) with the group Quarto & Sound—made up of Edmonton musicians Sascha Liebrand, Yana Loo, and writer McGrath. BOX is an adaptation of McGrath's eponymous "mirror poem"—a collaboration of poetry, jazz, spoken word, instrumental experimental music, and voice. Quarto & Sound is currently working on an arrangement and adaptation of McGrath's long poem inspired by the North Saskatchewan River.
McGrath's most recent poetry collection is A Revision of Forward (NeWest Press 2015). The book is the culmination of a decade-long poetry/print collaboration with printmaker Walter Jule, who also contributed cover art for McGrath's first book common place ecstasies (Beach Holme Publishing 2000). A Revision of Forward launched at Edmonton's SNAP Gallery in October, 2015. Natalie Olsen received an Honourable Mention Alcuin Society Award for Excellence in Book Design for her design work on the book, which incorporated image fragments from Jule's prints.
Recurring Fictions (University of Alberta Press 2002), McGrath's first novel, is an experimental work chronicling the history of a Canadian family. The plot structure of this novel is non-linear, with shifts in narrative viewpoint and time. The first line of the novel, "Johnny Cash played the harmonica imitating the sound of trains" hints at one of the novel's recurring motifs. The often poetic style of this novel is multi-layered with spaces in the text and on pages providing literal and figurative openings for the reader to enter the world of the narrator(s). Short fragments of the text are also repeated at the bottom of some of the pages.
Her first book of poetry, common place ecstasies (Beach Holme Publishing, 2000), explores themes of home, and childhood. A long poem, "Preserving," which is included in this collection was also published in chapbook form by Rubicon Press (February 2011). "Preserving" uses found portions of text extracted from a home canning pamphlet as a springboard for poetic narrative that tells the multi-generational story of prairie women. As noted on the Rubicon Press website: "McGrath's grandmother gave her that brochure and it was a palimpsest of sorts, with notes on the recipes and unexpected doodles penciled in. Publications like that brochure, as well as cookbooks, seemed to be in the background of her grandmothers' and her mother's lives when she was growing up. But, when she encountered these texts as an adult, their meaning became quite different."
McGrath's fiction and poetry has been broadcast on CBC Radio and has appeared in numerous literary journals. Her non-fiction has been published locally and nationally.
Stéphane Mallarmé, pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.
Di Brandt often stylized as di brandt, is a Canadian poet and scholar from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She became Winnipeg's first Poet Laureate in 2018.
Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during the Blitz, H.D.'s poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the poem.
George Harry Bowering, is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He was the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
Leona Gom is a Canadian poet and novelist. Born on an isolated farm in northern Alberta, she received her B.Ed. and M.A. from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She has published six books of poetry and eight novels and has won both the Canadian Authors Association Award for her poetry collection Land of the Peace in 1980 and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for her novel Housebroken in 1986.
Myrna Kostash is a Canadian writer and journalist. She has published several non-fiction books and written for many Canadian magazines including Chatelaine. Of Ukrainian descent, she was born in Edmonton, Alberta and educated at the University of Alberta, the University of Washington, and the University of Toronto. She resides in Edmonton, Alberta.
Aritha van Herk,, is a Canadian writer, critic, editor, public intellectual, and university professor. Her work often includes feminist themes, and depicts and analyzes the culture of western Canada.
Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow, which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.
Thomas Wharton is a Canadian writer from Edmonton, Alberta.
Louis Daniel Brodsky was an American poet, short story writer, and Faulkner scholar.
Video poetry is poetry in video form. It is also known as videopoetry, video-visual poetry, poetronica, poetry video, media poetry, or Cin(E)-Poetry depending on the length and content of the video work and the techniques employed in its creation.
David Dephy, also known as David Dephy Gogibedashvili, is a Georgian / American poet, novelist, essayist, performer, multimedia artist, painter, the founder of Poetry Orchestra and the poetic order Samcaully. He is the author of eight novels and seventeen collections of verse and three poetry bilingual audio albums with orchestra and electronic bands. Named as Literature Luminary by Bowery Poetry, Stellar Poet by Voices of Poetry, Incomparable Poet by Statorec, Brilliant Grace by Headline Poetry & Press and Extremely Unique Poetic Voice by Cultural Daily. He lives and works in New York City, USA.
Arthur Stringer was a Canadian novelist, screenwriter, and poet who later moved to the United States.
Joseph Rosenblatt was a Canadian poet who lived in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia. He won Canada's Governor-General's Award and British Columbia's B.C. Book Prize for poetry. He was also a talented artist, whose "line drawings, paintings, and sketches often illustrate his own and other poets’ books of poetry."
Wilfred Watson was professor emeritus of English at Canada's University of Alberta for many years. He was also an experimental Canadian poet and dramatist, whose innovative plays had a considerable influence in the 1960s. The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) says that "Watson ushered in an avant-garde in Canadian theater years before the rear guard had fully emerged."
Nancy-Gay Rotstein is a Canadian poet and novelist. In addition to her books of poetry, she is author of the novel Shattering Glass, a story about today's woman trying to balance career and family.
NeWest Press is a Canadian publishing company. Established in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1977, the company grew out of a literary magazine, NeWest Review, which had been launched in 1975. Early members of the collective that established the company included writer Rudy Wiebe and University of Alberta academics Douglas Barbour, George Melnyk, and Diane Bessai.
Norma Dunning is an Inuk Canadian writer and assistant lecturer at the University of Alberta, who won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2018 for her short story collection Annie Muktuk and Other Stories. In the same year, she won the Writers' Guild of Alberta's Howard O'Hagan Award for the short story "Elipsee", and was a shortlisted finalist for the City of Edmonton Book Award. She published in 2020 a collection of poetry and stories entitled Eskimo Pie: A Poetics of Inuit Identity.
Robin McGrath is a Canadian writer from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.