1 stage. 20 poets. 1 winner.
In 2009 Authors at Harbourfront Centre posted its first ever open call for submissions. The standard of entries was astonishing and the resulting event was one of the highlights of our year. Everyone loves a good thing, so in 2010 we’re repeating the concept. And this time, we’re partnering with our friends at
NOW Magazine to make it even bigger and better!
On the eve of National Poetry Month, this popular event featuring 20 poets on one stage returns.
One poet will receive an automatic invitation to read at the 31st annual International Festival of Authors, AND an ad for their book in NOW!
20 Poets:
Domenico Capilongo
Brian Day
Dayle Furlong
Len Gasparini
Sky Gilbert
Susan Holbrook
M.T. Kelly
Alexis Kienlen
Michael Lista
Irene Marques
Chris Pannell
Damian Rogers
Julie Roorda
David Sobelman
Fraser Sutherland
Matthew Tierney
Priscila Uppal
Paul Vermeersch
Patrick Watson
Tara-Michelle Ziniuk
Judges:
Geoffrey E. Taylor, Director, Authors at Harbourfront Centre;
Jen Tindall, Artistic Associate, Authors at Harbourfront Centre;
Robert Priest, author and
NOW Magazine contributor.
Host:
Jacob McArthur Mooney, winner of last year's Open Stage.
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Domenico Capilongo’s writing has appeared in publications abroad and in a number of Canadian literary journals including The New Quarterly, Filling Station, Descant, and Acta Victoriana. In 2005 his work was nominated for the Journey Prize and he received an honourable mention in the Toronto Star Poetry Contest in 2004. Capilongo lived in Vancouver and Swift Current, Saskatchewan before settling in Toronto. Karate, fatherhood, travel, and Italian-Canadian identity are the cornerstones of Capilongo’s I thought elvis was italian, an outstanding debut collection cherishing family and the ties that bind us to one another.
Brian Day is the author of Conjuring Jesus, Azure and Love is not Native to my Blood. His poetry has appeared in the anthologies Seminal, Bent on Writing and ReCreations, as well as in journals including Descant, Arc and The Malahat Review. Provocative and alluring, Conjuring Jesus is a disarmingly fresh portrait of the figure of Jesus. In poems disruptive and devotional, controversial and contemplative, it reveals a man moved by a persistent impulse toward sinuous reshaping and a liberating awareness of his own sexuality.
Dayle Furlong’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Taddle Creek, Kiss Machine, The Puritan, Word, and The Voice. She works as a literary publicist and has worked as a screenwriter’s assistant for the television series Slings & Arrows. She lives and writes in Toronto. Furlong’s debut collection, Open Slowly, is a rich and sensuous look at the world around us that allows the reader to experience the memory of childhood dreams, hopes and terrors, and eavesdrop on the romances, friendships and conflicts we engage in as adults.
Len Gasparini is the author of three story collections – The Undertaker’s Wife, Blind Spot and A Demon in My View – and a work of non-fiction, Erase Me. In 1990, he was awarded the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize for poetry. Bringing together more than 200 of Gasparini’s published poems, The Broken World: Poems 1967-1998 speaks to the human condition, exploring disparate realities both ordinary and extraordinary. He is the winner of the 2010 NOW Open Poetry Stage event.
Sky Gilbert is a writer, director and drag queen extraordinaire. He is the author of six novels, including the ReLit Award-winning An English Gentleman. Gilbert currently holds a University Research Chair in Creative Writing and Theatre Studies at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Written with mordant wit and dark humour, Gilbert’s third full-length poetry collection, A Nice Place to Visit, explores notions of sex and love, memory and aging. These poems are odes to young lovers, old faces, past lives, and new life.
Susan Holbrook is a poet and fiction writer whose first book, misled, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and Stephen J. Stephensson Award. She teaches North American literature and creative writing at the University of Windsor and recently co-edited The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation. Joy Is So Exhausting is a collection of poems that imports shapes and source texts from elsewhere – home inspection reports, tampon instructions, poems by Lorca – in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word.
M.T. Kelly’s most popular and critically acclaimed novel, A Dream Like Mine, won a Governor General’s Literary Award and was adapted for the screen and filmed as Clearcut in 1989. His fiction includes I Do Remember the Fall, The More Loving One, The Ruined Season, A Dream Like Mine, and the poetry collection Country You Can’t Walk In. Kelly’s new collection, Downriver, is full of forceful poems of grace, grit and determination; poems of the city and poems of the countryside.
Alexis Kienlen is an award-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and editor originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Strike the Wok, Ottawa Citizen, Broken Pencil, and Prairie Fire. She currently lives in Edmonton where she is a reporter for Alberta Farmer and writes a weekly column about books for the Daily Herald Tribune. Kienlen’s debut collection, She Dreams in Red, explores her unique cultural background, history, travels, and encounters with love and loss.
Michael Lista is a poet and essayist whose work has been published in the Walrus, Maisonneuve, Malahat Review, Arc, Descant, Canadian Literature, and Border Crossings. Lista’s most recent poetry collection, Bloom, draws upon the still-mysterious events of May 21, 1946 when a Canadian physicist, preparing the bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, decided to forego the standard safety procedures, which resulted in an accident: the plutonium went critical, a phenomenon scientists call a “bloom.”
Irene Marques (Canada/Portugal) teaches African Literature, Comparative Literature and English at the Ontario College of Art and Design. She has also worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto since 1998. Her first short story collection, Habitando na Metáfora do Tempo, was recently released in Portugal and her academic monograph, Trans-national Discourses on Class, Gender and Cultural Identity, is forthcoming in 2010. Marques’s Wearing Glasses of Water brings together different geographical, temporal and cultural spaces to explore spiritual alienation and the nature of being, as well as the power of language both to liberate and to oppress.
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Jacob McArthur Mooney is the author of The New Layman’s Almanac. His second poetry collection, Folk, will be published in 2011.
Chris Pannell moved from Toronto to Hamilton in 1988, where he founded the New Writing Workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. In 1997, he joined the Watershed books publishing collective based in Toronto, which included A.F. Moritz and Allan Briesmaster, among others. He has been published in several anthologies and literary magazines across Canada and internationally. In Drive, his fourth collection of poetry, Pannell looks into the rearview mirror of his bus – and his life – to celebrate the humanity of his passengers, and himself.
Damian Rogers (Canada/USA) was born and raised in suburban Detroit and now lives in Toronto. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a graduate degree from the Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College. Her poetry has appeared in Brick, The Walrus, MoonLit, Maisonneuve, Salt Hill, This Magazine, and Matrix. Paper Radio, her first book, tracks the transformative moment where emotion and deep memory seek form through sound and image.
Julie Roorda is the author of three volumes of poetry, including Eleventh Toe and Courage Underground, as well as a collection of short stories, Naked in the Sanctuary. Her most recent novel is a book for young adults, Wings of a Bee. Roorda presents her poetry collection, Floating Bodies, which offers a complex interweave of intimate and public moments that ask the question, is there meaning in suffering?
David Sobelman is a writer-producer-director of film and television programmes. Born in to a Jewish-French family in Haifa, Israel, he moved to Toronto in 1972 to study at York University. After graduating, he decided to stay in exile and make his home in Canada. Depicting a metaphysical bridge between a poet’s being and the life of his soul, After The End is a sequence of linked narrative poems revealing a philosophical encounter between various necessary polarities including faith and reason, essence and existence.
Fraser Sutherland was born in Nova Scotia, and has lived in Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, and Nelson, BC. He currently resides in Toronto. A freelance writer, critic, editor, and lexicographer, his work has been translated into Albanian, Farsi, French, Italian, and Serbo-Croatian. His volumes of poetry include Jonestown and The Matuschka Case, Selected Poems. In Manual for Emigrants, the myriad aspects of exile and belonging are explored in ways both witty and moving. The voices of the outsider and the voices of those who believe they belong are juxtaposed in an impassioned dialogue that resists conclusion.
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Matthew Tierney is the author of two books of poetry, Full speed through the morning dark and The Hayflick Limit, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. In 2005, he won first and second place in This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and in 2006 was a recipient of the K. M. Hunter Award. Tierney presents poems from his latest collection, The Hayflick Limit, which gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe.
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Priscila Uppal is a poet, novelist and professor at York University. Among her critically-acclaimed publications are five collections of poetry and the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation and To Whom It May Concern. Her work has been published internationally and translated into Croatian, Dutch, Greek, Korean, Latvian, and Italian. In Traumatology, Uppal’s sixth major collection of poetry, the standards by which we define our mental, physical and spiritual health are dissected in the poet’s holistic laboratory.
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Paul Vermeersch is the author of three previous collections of poetry and the editor of The I.V. Lounge Reader and The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology. His writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail and been featured on CBC Radio. His poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies in Canada and internationally. He lives in Toronto and is the poetry editor for Insomniac Press. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is poetry of the human body’s experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics and electronics.
Patrick Watson, the first independent chairman of the CBC, is best known for his work in current affairs television and documentary film, but has also remained involved in dramatic production and acting. Watson’s books include novels, biographies and works of social and political studies. In 1981, he was named a Companion of the Order of Canada. A poet, a painter and a cartoonist – all Canadian – share their collective love of all things Irish in Finn’s Thin Book of Irish Ironies, a wonderfully imagined collection of poetry.
Author, performer and activist, Tara-Michelle Ziniuk was born in Montreal and now lives in Guelph. She has been published in magazines and anthologies across North America and is a regular contributor to NOW, Broken Pencil and Herizons. She has also written for This Magazine, $pread, HOUR and others. Her first book, Emergency Contact, was published in 2006 to critical acclaim. Dangerously sarcastic and bruising in its honesty, Somewhere to Run From challenges the notions of what a girl runs from, both literally and figuratively.
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