Poets

Karen Solie has published six books from Short Haul Engine (2001) to The Caiplie Caves (2019). She is a recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Latner Writer’s Trust Poetry Prize. She has also been nominated or shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, Gerald Lampert, and ReLit awards. Solie was the Associate Director of the Banff Writing Studio and now teaches at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She has also taught at the University of Manchester and been a writer-in residence at the University of Toronto and a Holloway Visiting Writer at University of California Berkeley. Her work has been translated into eight languages.

NourbeSe was born in Tobago and moved to Ontario in 1968, where she studied political science and law at Western. She practiced law for seven years before becoming a full-time writer and independent scholar whose 14 published works reinvent the genres of poetry, drama, novel, and essay. Her seminal work Zong! dissects a two-page legal text to give voice to 150+ African slaves and was one of World Literature Today’s 21 Books for the 21st Century. She is the recipient of a Chalmers Fellowship in Poetry and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy. Her recent awards include the 2020 PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature and the 2021 Canada Council for the Arts’ Molson Prize.

A. F. Moritz has written more than twenty books of poetry and has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His collection, The Sentinel, won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award, and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 of the Year. His recent work includes The Sparrow (2018), As Far As You Know (2020), and Great Silent Ballad (2024). He lives in Toronto, where he recently served as the city’s sixth Poet Laureate. 

Lillian Allen is an educator, activist, and leading international exponent of dub poetry. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied in New York and Toronto after moving away from the Caribbean as a teenager. In 2003, she helped found the Dub Poets Collective and in 2004 hosted Wordbeat, a CBC radio program on poetry and spoken word. She is a Creative Writing professor at OCAD and an internationally recognized authority and activist on cultural diversity and equity. Her work for young people includes Why Me, If You See Truth, and Nothing But a Hero. She was also featured in the film Unnatural Causes (1989) and co-produced and co-directed the documentary Blakk Wi Blakk (1994). Her honours and awards include a City of Toronto Cultural Champion Award and a William P. Hubbard Award for Race Relations.

Gregory Scofield is of Red River Métis ancestry rooted in the historic Kinosota-Reedy Creek, Manitoba. He has taught at Brandon, Emily Carr, the Alberta University of the Arts, and Laurentian, having served as writer-in residence at the universities of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and Victoria as well as Memorial University of Newfoundland. Since winning the 1994 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for The Gathering, Scofield has published over half a dozen volumes of poetry. He has also received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012) and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize (2016).

Katherena Vermette is a Michif (Red River Métis) writer from Treaty 1 territory, the heart of the Métis Nation. Born in Winnipeg, her Michif roots on her paternal side run deep in St. Boniface, St. Norbert, and beyond. Her maternal side is Mennonite from the Altona and Rosenfeld area (Treaty 1). In 2013, her first book, North End Love Songs, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her novels The Break and The Strangers as well as The Circle were all national best sellers and won multiple literary awards. Vermette’s work for children and young adults includes the picture book, The Girl and The Wolf, and the graphic novel series, A Girl Called Echo. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from UBC and an honourary Doctor of Letters from the University of Manitoba.

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread, Forward, and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 2009 to 2019. Her many collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake, and The Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. In 2021, she was awarded the international lifetime achievement award the Golden Wreath for her achievements in poetry.

Daphne Marlatt was born in Melbourne, Australia, and spent her formative years in Penang, Malaysia. She immigrated to Canada with her family in 1951. Her many poetry titles include Steveston, The Given, and Liquidities. House of Anansi published a new edition of her acclaimed novel Ana Historic, and Wilfred Laurier University Press released her selected poetry, Rivering, edited by Susan Knutson. In 1998, she published Readings from the Labyrinth, a collection of essays spanning over fifteen years. She was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2006 and in 2012 received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.