Poets Corner Reading Series

Tag Archive: Gillian Jerome

Poetry Without a License: Our first live/hybrid reading at Fairleigh Dickinson University

2022-09-22 EVENTS

Posted on behalf of Jillian Maguire

Well, we finally did it.  We had a live reading.  Well, a hybrid reading.  After figuring out all of the technical logistics, we had a wonderful evening of poetry.  The night began with the open mic featuring of “poetry without a license”.  We went down the rabbit-hole of dogs learning to read poetry, buds in the sky, and anthropomarginalization.  We fretted over our place in the sun, slid down the Fairview slippery slope, and heard a poem about everyone’s favourite topic – a skin condition.

Our feature poet was Gillian Jerome, reading walking poems from her new book Never the Less; she dedicated her reading to the women of Iran walking in protest against the “moral police.”  Jerome’s carefully crafted images tickled the senses. The image of blueberries held in shirts contrasted with first blood on underwear.  There were coyotes, crowns of peonies and a viaduct through the historical Hogan’s Alley.  We heard the sound of things dying and splitting open. We experienced the loneliness of the skunk cabbage and we saw Rita Wong, singing through her arrest for protesting the Trans Mountain Pipeline.  There was even a penis shaped like an ampersand – now there’s an image that might keep you up at night.

To cap off the night, we had a poem that was written during the reading and a poem about a father with a “smile as brilliant as the Sicilian sky”.  For all the people who attended, thank you for making the evening a success.  For the rest of you, see you the third Wednesday in October!

Poetry Reading this Wednesday 21st September @730pm (HYRBID)

2022-09-11 EVENTS , , ,

Please join us this Wednesday 21st September at 730pm for our first reading of the Fall semester! We are going HYBRID, We’d love to see you in person at Fairleigh Dickinson University auditorium. Otherwise, you can pre-register for the Zoom info: https://tinyurl.com/3uw73fpu. Our featured poets this month are Gillian Jerome and Dallas Hunt. Bios below!

Gillian Jerome is a mother, writer, teacher who lives on the unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nation. She is the author of two books of poems. Her first book, Red Nest (Nightwood Editions, 2009), was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and won the 2010 ReLit Award for Poetry. Nevertheless: Walking Poems was published by Nightwood Editions in Spring 2022. She co-edited an oral history project,Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2008), which won the 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award.  Her work has been supported by the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. She has taught Creative Writing and Literatures the University of Arizona, Douglas College, and the University of British Columbia.  She now teaches English Language Arts, Creative Writing and Social Studies to Vancouver teenagers. Born in Ottawa, and raised in Orléans, Ontario, she lives in East Vancouver with her partner, Tom Green, and her daughters, Rory and Micah Sophia, and their sweet cat, Pippa.

 

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty Eight territory in northern Alberta. He has had creative works published in Contemporary Verse 2, Prairie Fire, PRISM international and Arc Poetry. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018. His new book, CREELAND, is out through Nightwood Editions. Hunt is an assistant professor of Indigenous literatures at the University of British Columbia.

 

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