a reading by five out-of-towners: Burnham, Stewart, Belford, Midgley, Smith

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm

The Carleton Tavern (upstairs),
223 Armstrong (at Parkdale)

Monday, May 25, 2009

with readings by:

Clint Burnham (Vancouver)
Christine Stewart (Edmonton)
Ken Belford (Prince George)
Peter Midgley (Edmonton)
& Michelle Smith (Edinburgh)

Clint Burnham is a Vancouver writer and teacher. His most recent books include The Benjamin Sonnets (Bookthug, 2009), Rental Van (Anvil, 2007), and Smoke Show (Arsenal Pulp, 2005).

Christine Stewart writes, teaches and researches experimental poetry and poetics in the English and Film Department, University of Alberta. Selected Publications: “This Then Would Be the Conversation." Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada. The Gig. 2008. Propositions from Under Mill Creek Bridge. Virgin Press. 2007. The Trees of Periphery: above/ground press, 2007. Pessoa's July: or the months of astonishments. Nomados Press. 2006. "We Lunch Nevertheless among Reinvention." Chicago Review. 2006. from Taxonomy. West House Press, 2003.

Ken Belford is the author of six books of poetry including lan(d)guage (Caitlin Press 2008), and when snakes awaken (Nomados 2007). A proponent of what he has termed lan(d)guage, Belford assembles his intellectually independent sequences out of the shifting language of the BC interior, writing out a type of poetic pidgin by mixing language markers of the modern west coast with an older contact lingo of the lands beyond the edge of the farmers and rancher’s field. Self educated, Belford has lived in the roadless mountains of the headwaters of Northern BC's Nass River for half his life. He adapts language and ideas, making a writing with a governance and order of his own. Lan(d)guage is his sixth book. He will be reading from lan(d)guage and a new manuscript, decompositions, to be published by Talon.

Peter Midgley is a storyteller and a writer of children’s books that have won international awards and have been translated into 20 languages. He is also the author of two plays, Archetypes and Namlish, a political farce about Namibian independence. Peter writes in both English and Afrikaans and his poetry has appeared in the South African journals, Literator and New Coin. Some poems also appear in The Story that Brought Me Here: To Edmonton from Everywhere. He is currently working on a bilingual volume of poems, perhaps i should / miskien moet ek and book-length creative non-fiction project, A Truce Stranger than Fiction: Reflections on Namibian Independence.

Michelle Denise Smith is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She was awarded a doctorate in English literature by the University of Alberta in 2008. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Arc, Grain, CV2, and The New Quarterly. She is fascinated by travel or,more to the point, Paris, and she is accordingly at work on a collection of travel essays and a novel titled Hitting the Ground. She is also close to completing her first collection of poems, mnemosyne above dark waters.