New poetry for a new year
December 29th, 2023
Sponsored by the locally produced poetry magazine Some, Vancouver poet Fred Wah will be joining visiting poets from North Carolina, Tessa Bolsover and Michael Cavuto on Tuesday, January 3 at People’s Co-op Bookstore.
Details
Place: 1391 Commercial Drive
Time: 7 pm
Free admission
About Fred Wah:
Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in 1939, and he grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia.
Studying at UBC in the early 1960s, he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH.
After graduate work with Robert Creeley at the University of New Mexico and with Charles Olson at SUNY, Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960s, founding the writing program at DTUC before moving on to teach at the University of Calgary. A pioneer of online publishing, he has mentored a generation of some of the most exciting new voices in poetry today.
Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door (Talonbooks, 2009) received the Dorothy Livesay Prize for poetry, Waiting For Saskatchewan (Turnstone Press, 1985) received the Governor-General’s Award and So Far (Talonbooks, 1991) was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill (NeWest Press, 1996; 2006), a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity (NeWest Press, 2000) received the Gabrielle Roy Prize.
Wah was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2012. He served as Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013.
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