Cross Border Pollination October 29th Reading

Get ready for the next Cross-Border Pollination Reading, this October 29th at SFU Harbour Centre, featuring Rob Taylor, Maureen Hynes, Peggy Shumaker, Rhea Tregebov, Joan Kane and Sherry Simpson. It is an incredible  line-up, and we are especially excited about a few of Alaska’s best who are coming down south to grace our stage. Hope to see you there!

Poster |  Facebook Page

Date / Time : October 29th, 5pm – 7:30pm

Location:  SFU Harbour Centre, 515 W. Hastings Street Room 1415

Admission: Free!

Readers:

Rob Taylor lives in East Vancouver with his wife, Marta. He is the author of the poetry collection The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011), the manuscript for which won the 2010 Alfred G. Bailey Prize.  He is the co-founder and editor of One Ghana, One Voice, Ghana’s first online poetry magazine, and one of the coordinators of Vancouver’s Dead Poets Reading Series.

Maureen Hynes’s book, Rough Skin, won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry by a Canadian. She has also published Harm’s Way (Brick Books), and, this year, Marrow, Willow (Pedlar Press). She is a past winner of the Petra Kenny Poetry Prize (London, England). One of her poems was selected for Best Canadian Poems 2010, edited by Lorna Crozier. Maureen is poetry editor for Our Times magazine (ourtimes.ca) and lives in Toronto, Ont.

Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate.  Her most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. She’s at work on Genesis, Quetzal, a book of poems set in Costa Rica. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska.  She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press.

Rhea Tregebov is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, most
recently (alive): New and selected poems (Wolsak & Wynn, 2004). Her seventh
collection of poetry, tentatively titled “August,” will be published in Fall 2012
by Signal Editions/Véhicule Press (Montreal). Her debut novel, The Knife
Sharpener’s Bell (Coteau, 2009) explores the fate of a Jewish family who moves
from the Prairies to the USSR in the mid-1930s. In addition to her poetry and
fiction, she has written five popular children’s picture books and is the editor ten anthologies of essays, poetry and fiction. Since 2004, she has lived in Vancouver where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, teaching workshops in poetry and translation.

Joan Kane is Inupiaq. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University and is the author of The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, for which she received a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award.  Her recent honors include a National Native Creative Development grant, a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award, and a Fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Alaska Arts and Cultures Foundation. Along with her husband and sons, she lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Sherry Simpson grew up in Juneau and lives in Anchorage, where she teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She also teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She is the author of two collections of essays, The Way Winter Comes and The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Orion, Creative Nonfiction, Alaska Quarterly Review, Brevity, and Pilgrimage. She is finishing a book about relationships between bears and people for the University Press of Kansas.

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We are grateful for the support of SFU Continuing Studies, Poetry Is Dead Magazine and from the U.S. Embassy’s Public Affairs Department.

Cross-Border Pollination – July 9th Reading

This July’s Cross-Border Pollination Reading  is not to be missed. Come take in some spellbinding works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry by incredible writers from Canada, The U.S. and Scotland(!). This reading will feature Carmen Aguirre, Maggie De Vries, Andrew Feld, Robert Alan Jamieson, Bren Simmers and Pimone Triplett.

Date / Time: July  9th   5:00pm – 7pm

Location: SFU Harbour Center, Room 1415

Poster | Facebook page

Carmen is a Vancouver-based playwright and actor whose first book, a memoir entitled Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, has just been published by Douglas & McIntyre. It will be published in the fall by Granta/Portobello in The United Kingdom. She has written and co-written eighteen plays, has sixty stage, film and television credits, and is an acting instructor at Vancouver Film School. Her writing is political in a highly personal way and she is interested in exploring the tension between political commitment and personal desires. Carmen is a graduate of Studio 58.

Prose writer Maggie De Vries has written many children’s works as well as an historical fiction set in Holland and a memoir for adults about her sister, one of Vancouver’s missing women.

Andrew Feld is the author of two books of poetry, Citizen (HarperCollins 2004) and Raptor, forthcoming from the University of Chicago, April 2012.  He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington and the Editor-in-Chief of The Seattle Review.  He is obsessed with forms: highly specialized natural forms like raptors, and the highly specialized artifice that is poetry.

Robert Alan Jamieson is a Scottish novelist and poet, originally from the Shetland Isles, who teaches Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. His last novel – ‘Da Happie Laand’ (2010) – was shortlisted for both the Saltire Prize and the SMIT Scottish Book of the Year, and his most recent book of poetry is ‘Nort Atlantik Drift’ (2007). His current project is a Scottish/Canadian story spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bren Simmers lives in Vancouver, where she works as a park interpreter. Winner of the Arc Poem of the Year Award, and finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, her first book of poems, Night Gears, was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2010. She is currently working on a cycle of poems about seasonal changes in her East Van neighbourhood.

Pimone Triplett is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Washington and the author of three books, as well as the coeditor, with Dan Tobin, of the essay anthology, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play (2008).

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We are grateful for the support of SFU Continuing Studies, Poetry Is Dead Magazine and from the U.S. Embassy’s Public Affairs Department.

May 14th Reading

The Cross Border Pollination Reading Series descends upon SFU once again with some incredible readers from both sides of the border. Our May event features Jericho Brown, Catherine Owen, Roberta Rich, Sheryda Warrener and Michael Dylan Welch.

Date / Time: May 14th   5:00pm – 7pm

Location: SFU Harbour Center, Room 700, Earl & Jennie Lohn Policy Room, Vancouver.

Poster | Facebook page

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Oxford American, A Public Space, and 100 Best African American Poems.  His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award.

Catherine Owen is a Vancouver writer & author of eight poetry collections, one book of essays, several collaborative multimedia projects and co-creator of three metal bands.

Roberta Rich is a former family law lawyer turned historical novelist.

Originally from Grimsby, Ontario, Sheryda Warrener has lived in Japan and Sweden, and now calls Vancouver home. Her first book of poetry Hard Feelings was released by Snare Books in Fall 2010.

Michael Dylan Welch (www.graceguts.com) is vice president of the Haiku Society of America, director of the Haiku North Ameica conference (coming to Seattle August 3-7, 2011), and has published dozens of books, translations, and anthologies of haiku, tanka, and longer poetry.

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We are grateful for the support of SFU Continuing Studies, Poetry Is Dead Magazine and from the U.S. Embassy’s Public Affairs Department.

March 12th Reading

The Cross Border Pollination Reading Series returns again with some amazing authors! Come out to hear an eclectic mix of literary talents from the U.S. and Canada.

Details:
5pm – 7:30pm
Simon Fraser University Harbour Center, 515 W. Hastings, Room 2270 Sauder Insdustries Policy Room.
Entry is free.
Our Facebook event page is here.

Featured Readers:

Sarah Leavitt is a writer and cartoonist from Vancouver. Her graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me was published in September 2010, and was the first graphic narrative to be nominated for a Writer’s Trust of Canada prize.

Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of the newly-released Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, as well as two other books of poems. www.agodon.com

Miranda Pearson’ s poetry has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies, and her first collection “ Prime” was published in 2001. “ The Aviary” was released in 2006 from Oolichan Books and was awarded the Alfred G. Bailey pri ze. Her l atest book, “ Harbour” , also from Oolichan, was shortlisted for the 2010 BC Book Prize for poetry. Miranda holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and currently teaches in Simon Fraser University’ s Writing and Publishing program.

Wayde Compton is a Vancouver writer whose books include After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region, Performance Bond, Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature and 49th Parallel Psalm. He and Jason de Couto perform turntable-based sound poetry as a duo called The Contact Zone Crew. Compton is also a co-founding member of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, an organization dedicated to preserving the public memory of Vancouver’s original black community.

Jacqueline Osherow is the author of five books of poetry. Osherow has been awarded the Witter Bynner Prize by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and a number of prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Twentieth Century American Poetry, The Wadsworth Anthology of Poety and The Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Poetry, Best American Poetry (1995 and 1998), The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, The New Yorker, Paris Review and many others. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Utah.

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We are grateful for the support of SFU Continuing Studies, Poetry Is Dead Magazine and from the U.S. Embassy’s Public Affairs Department.