celebrating
THIRTY-THREE YEARS of continuous activity (and nearly fifteen hundred
publications), Ottawa publisher above/ground press presents:readings
and chapbook launches by:
Stephanie
Bolster (Montreal), Mark Goldstein (Toronto), Cara Goodwin (Ottawa), Sonja
Greckol (Toronto), Harold Hoefle (Ottawa), James Spyker (Toronto) + Grant
Wilkins (Ottawa)
lovingly
hosted by above/ground press editor/publisher rob mclennan
SATURDAY,
AUGUST 22, 2026 at Anina’s Café, 280 Joffre-Bélanger Way
7pm
door/7:30pm reading
$10
at the door / cash or e-transfer / includes 2 chapbooks (of your choice!
[see the report here from last year’s event; and don't forget the 33rd anniversary sale, happening until September 1st!]
Author
biographies:
Stephanie
Bolster’s
latest book of poetry, Long Exposure, appeared with Palimpsest Press in
fall 2025. Excerpts from the book were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize in
2012 and 2019. Bolster’s first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems, won
the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award and was translated
into French as Pierre Blanche. Her poems have also been translated into
Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. Editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in
English 2008 and The Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems by the
late Ottawa poet Diana Brebner, and co-editor of Penned: Zoo Poems, she
was born in Vancouver and grew up in Burnaby, BC. She has been a professor of
creative writing at Concordia University since 2000 and lives in Pointe-Claire,
Québec, on the Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatara:ti.
Stephanie
Bolster will be launching her fifth above/ground press title, BIODÔME:
Twentieth Anniversary Edition (2026).
Born
in Cold Lake, Alberta, on a rainy April day in 1992, Cara Goodwin is the
daughter of a beautiful Cree mother and a doting military father. Her early
years were shaped by movement across the plains: visits to her mother’s
relations on reserve and months spent with her Kokum in British Columbia; a
move to Oromocto, New Brunswick, at age eight, where she developed an East
Coast sense of humour; and a relocation to Yellowknife at fifteen, where she
lived until high school graduation.
After
a year abroad in Australia at eighteen—where she briefly fancied herself a
mysterious foreign waitress before finding work milking cows—Cara moved to
Ottawa at nineteen for school. There, she became roommates with her future best
friend and has built a chosen family of her own. Now thirty-four, and a proud
member of Fort McMurray 468 First Nation, she is focused on deepening her
connection to her Cree heritage and considering how to leave the planet in a
better place for her nieces.
An
Ottawa-based poet, her work has appeared in Bywords, flo. literary magazine,
and Room. Over the past five years, she has received two Honourable Mentions
for the John Newlove Award and was shortlisted for Room’s Annual Poetry Prize
in 2023. In 2025 read as a featured performer for the Riverbed Reading Series,
where her poems traced her ancestral roots across what is now called Canada.
Cara holds a BA (Hons.) in Social Communications and has completed numerous
writing diploma and certificate programs over the years.
Cara Goodwin
will be launching her above/ground press debut, Map of What Was Taken
(2026).
Mark Goldstein is a
writer, editor, translator, and graphic artist. His work includes the serial
poem Endlossong (forthcoming), his book-length translation of poems by Paul
Celan, Thricelandium (2024), his translation of Kafka's novel, The Trial, as
Her Process (2021), poems, essays, and interviews published as Part Thief, Part
Carpenter (2021), his long poem, Form of Forms (2012), which was a finalist for
the International Stiftung Buchkunst 2014 competition in Lipzig, as well as his
poem collection, Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (2010), and After Rilke (2008).
Moreover, he co-edited AnyWord: A Festschrift for Phil Hall (2024), as well as
the virtual anthology Paul Celan/100 (2020). He can be found online at
markgoldstein.ca
Mark Goldstein
will be launching his above/ground press debut, The Common Dark (2026).
Sonja
Greckol lives
in Tkaronto and is grateful for subways, LRTs and bike lanes wherever. No Hay Linea En El Tiempo / No Line in Time
(Manofalsa Press (Lima/Mexico City) is her latest book. She published
Monitoring Station (2023), No Line in Time (2018), Skein of Days (2014) and
Gravity Matters (2008). Monitoring
Station was listed for the Robert Kroetsch Award, No Line in Time for the LCP
Raymond P. Souster Award. Her long poem 'No Line in Time' won the 2017 Briar
Patch Writing in the Margins Poetry Contest. Her translation of Rosío Cerón’s ‘Trances’ appeared in Jan 2025
Asymptote Journal and above/ground press published her translation of Cerón's
Materia Oscura as Dark Matter, Dark Matter —Diverted. She is the founding
poetry editor of Women and Environments International and a member of the
Feminist Caucus (LCP). sonjagreckol.com
Sonja
Greckol will be launching her above/ground press debut,
Dark Matter, by Rosío Céron; translated/etranslated
by Sonja Greckol (2025).
Harold Hoefle’s poems
have won the Bliss Carman Award, the Great Blue Heron Poetry Award (2014), and
a National Magazine Awards silver medal. His debut collection of poems, The
Night Chorus, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He has also
published a collection of short-fiction called The Mountain Clinic (Oberon
Press). Harold lives in Ottawa, teaches in Montreal.
Harold
Hoefle will be launching his above/ground press debut, Leaning In
(2026).
James Spyker is a
book and paper artist based in Toronto. He lives in that building where you
visited your great aunt when you were a kid. He occasionally returns to writing
when blank pages become too much to bear.
James Spyker
will be launching his above/ground press debut, Bedtime stories for my
imaginary fans (2026).
Grant Wilkins is an
occasional poet, printer and papermaker who has made a practice of doing
strange things to other people’s words. He has degrees in History &
Classical Civilization and in English, and he’s working on another one in Art
History. He lives in Ottawa on the unceded and unsurrendered land of the
Algonquin Anishinaabe people.
Grant
Wilkins will be launching his sixth above/ground press chapbook, provocations
(2026).
.heic)
