Globe and Mail Africa Special Feature

The Globe and Mail is edited on May 10 by two guest editors – anti-poverty activists Bono and Bob Geldof – who produced a special issue focused on the future of Africa and its importance not just for the more than 1 billion people living on that continent, but for Canadians and the rest of the West as well.  See the full section here.

BACHINSKY AND QUEYRAS SHORTLISTED FOR PAT LOWTHER AWARD

SLS Montreal faculty members Elizabeth Bachisnky and Sina Queyras have both been shortlisted for the 2010 Pat Lowther Award for Poetry.  The Award is given annually to a female poet for a collection published in the previous year.  Deanne Beattie of the Vancouver Review called Bachinsky’s God of Missed Connections “a formidable work from this young poet: a considered and important contribution to the quintessential dialogue on Canada’s fractured collective history,” while Xtra! says in a review of Queyras’s Expressway, “[she] writes circles around her contemporaries.” Queyras has previously won the Lowther Award, for 2007’s Lemon Hound.

(via Books Under Skin)

ANN DIAMOND

Dear SLS,

Congratulations on your new blog. I will be going there next…. but in the meantime, since you asked, here are some recent publications that might interest people in your international literary community:

http://www.geist.com/web-exclusive/interview-ann-diamond-part-1

http://www.geist.com/story/second-life-karil-kadiiski

All the best to you! Wish I could come to Kenya and say that…

Ann

www.anndiamond.net

IT AIN’T NO SNOWFALL, BUT RATHER A BONA FIDE SNOWSTORM

Here on the ground in Montreal: YT had to run off to streetcorner depanneur for a small grocery item just now, and it definitely is a snowstorm. Yup. No two if’s about it.  

Right now would not be a good time to hold SLS-Montreal program. But in June — oh man.

MEANINGLESS METEOROLOGICAL UPDATE

Some serious snowfall underway in Montreal:

J. MAE BARIZO, CLAUDIA CORTESE, MARIE PONSOT, AND NICK THRAN READING

Former SLS-St. Petersburg participant, J. Mae Barizo, will be reading  at Cornelia Street Cafe in Manhattan on January 27th, along with the great Marie Ponsot and the very talented Claudia Cortese and Nick Thran. YT would strongly encourage those in the large NYC area to attend: one would be foolish not to, frankly, in the absence of an abiding reason to the contrary. In addition to being an exceptionally evocative, powerful and vivid poet — whose work had fairly leapt out at the SLS-Contest readers some few years ago and has of late been drawing an ever-wider measure of well-deserved attention — J. Mae is a highly accomplished, international-level music performer… and just a warm and very smart human being.  

Here are the particulars:

Marie Ponsot
J. Mae Barizo
Claudia Cortese
&
Nick Thran

Where: Cornelia Street Café
When: Wednesday, January 27th, 2010, 6pm
$7 admission gets you one free drink!
 

 Marie Ponsot is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Bird Catcher (1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was named a “notable book of the year” by The New York Times Book Review.  Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, The Robert Frost Poetry Award, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association.

Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo was shortlisted for Canada’s Robert Kroetsch award for Innovative Poetry and Ahsahta Press’s Sawtooth Poetry Prize.  Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Bellingham Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, among others. She is the author “The Concert Review” and “The Marble Palace.”

Nick Thran is the author of one poetry collection, Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac Press, 2006). A second collection, Earworm, will appear in 2011 with Nightwood Editions. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Claudia Cortese is the recipient of Kent State’s Undergraduate Wick Poetry Award. She recently completed her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, where she was the poetry editor for Lumina Magazine and a featured reader at the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review and At-Large Magazine.

The Puritan

Two key SLS people, Mike Spry and John Goldbach, have their work in the current issue of The Puritan magazine: http://www.puritan-magazine.com/Issue8.php.

Check it out; it’s genuinely strong.