About the Event
Poetry in Place is a curated anthology for readers who love both poetry and the land. The subject matter addresses a very specific territory: the “land between the waters” of Lake Ontario and the Grand River, west of Toronto and east of London, in southern Ontario. The anthology includes poems by more than forty contemporary poets of different ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds. They pondered the natural world around them, and asked themselves, “What is it that the land has to say to us?” In these days of climate disruption, biodiversity loss, a new awareness of the dire history of colonized Indigenous peoples, and the spectre of global pandemic, how can we hear the voices of the natural world? We suggest that poetry offers a powerful mode of attention and analysis, now as it always has done. Contributors are also interviewed about their relationship with the land, their spirituality and worldview, and their motivation in writing poetry about the environment.
This event, in partnership with Textile, The Creek Collective and Words Worth Books, launches Poetry in Place: Poetry and Environmental Hope in a Southern Ontario Bioregion (Guernica Editions, 2025, edited by Deborah Bowen), and eight of the poets included in the anthology will join us to read and share their work:
About the Poets
Fitsum Areguy is a scholar-activist and writer based in Kitchener, Ontario. He is a 2025 Musagetes Fellow and a member of the inaugural Nazar Research Cluster (2025) at Concordia University's Dark Opacities Lab. With an interdisciplinary artistic practice that follows radical Black feminist and intellectual traditions, his work is animated by storytelling, place-making, and building cultural infrastructure that interrogates public memory and imagines otherwise worlds. His critical and creative writing have appeared in Briarpatch Magazine, ByBlacks, Canadian Dimension, Breach Media, and New Sociology, among others. He is the co-founder and co-director for Textile, and sits on the board of directors for Multicultural Theatre (MT) Space and Thrive HIV Prevention & Support (formerly ACCKWA).
Janice Jo Lee (she/they) is a queer folk musician, spoken word poet, theatre maker, sound designer and arts educator born and based in Toronto. She has released three albums of music, two poetry chapbooks, and has composed music and sound for two musicals and five stage plays. Janice founded and directed the KW Poetry Slam from 2011-2017.
Mark Kempf is a long-time member of Hamilton Poetry Centre and Brantford & Paris poetry circles, often leading workshops and special events. His major poetry collection, TUG, was published by Ars Omnia Press, (2016) under the pseudonym Mark Leslie Oliver. He is busy now publishing a non-fiction book in 2025, Unfurl Your Sales, and as usual, canoe tripping.
Paula Kienapple-Summers is a poet from Kitchener, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in Existere, The Nashwaak Review, Tower Poetry, Amethyst Review and Spadina Literary Review as well as several anthologies. She’s a recent 3rd prize winner of The Ontario Poetry Society’s “Across the Universe” contest.
Tanis MacDonald is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female as well as six other books of poetry and nonfiction. She teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl, is forthcoming with Book*hug Press.
Geoff Martin’s place-based and environmental essays have won the 2024 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest and been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in Literary Review of Canada, Boulevard, Creative Nonfiction, and The New Quarterly, among others. He is also a co-founder of The Creek Collective in Kitchener. After a decade spent teaching in Chicago, writing in Western Massachusetts, and care-giving in San Francisco, he moved home in 2021 to Waterloo Region, where he grew up.
Elizabeth McCallister grew up in Scarborough. She moved with her husband to Saskatoon to complete his PhD in history, and then back to Ontario, first to Kitchener and then to Brantford. Her work has appeared in Heartbeat: Poems of Family and Hometown, The World Around Us chapbook, Tamaraks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st century, and Voices Israel 2021 Poetry Anthology, as well as other anthologies.
Mariam Pirbhai is an academic and creative writer. She is the author of a book of creative nonfiction titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak and Wynn, 2023), recent winner of the 2024 Sarton Women’s Book award for nonfiction, and finalist for the 2024 Foreword Indies Book Prize for nature writing. She is also the author of two works of fiction titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi House Publishers, 2022) and Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna Publications, 2017), both of which received the IPPY Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction. She is professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she teaches and researches in the area of postcolonial studies, the literatures of the global South Asian diaspora, and creative writing. Pirbhai lives and works in Waterloo, Ontario, the traditional territories of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnawbe, and Haudenosaunee peoples.
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Programmers: Julia and Ikhlas
