A Phenomenal Five for June 6th, 2010

Join us at the Skydragon Centre in Hamilton (27 King William Street) at 7:30 p.m. for five phenomenal poets, some with memoirs, novels and exciting new poetry collections!

Patrick Lane brings his novel Red Dog, Red Dog, along with an extraordinary body of poetry created during a forty-five year career.

Lorna Crozier presents her recent memoir Small Beneath the Sky (Greystone Books) and her poetry collection, The Blue Hour of the Day (McClelland and Stewart).

Bruce Meyer tames the Dog Days: a Comedy of Terriers, poetry from Black Moss Press.

Jacquie Buncel reads from Turning the Corner at Dusk, a new collection of poems released by Wolsak and Wynn in 2010.

Jim Smith reads from his collection of new and selected poems, entitled Back Off Assassin! published in 2009 by Mansfield Press.

Patrick Lane

Patrick Lane was born in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, in 1939. He has no formal education beyond high school which he attended in Vernon, B.C. From 1957 to 1968 he worked at a variety of jobs, from common labourer, truck driver, boxcar loader in the northern bush, to clerk at a number of sawmills in the interior of British Columbia. He has been a salesman, office manager, and an industrial accountant. Much of his life after 1968 has been spent as an itinerant poet, wandering over three continents and many countries. He began writing with serious intent in 1960, and moved to Vancouver in early 1965 to work and to join a new generation of artists and writers who were coming of age in the early Sixties. In 1966, with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne, he established Very Stone House, a partnership devoted to publishing a new post-war generation of poets. In 1968, he decided to devote his life exclusively to writing, and he went to South America where he lived for two years.

In 1978, he became Writer-in-Residence at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg where he began his life with the poet, Lorna Crozier. Since then, he has been a resident writer at Concordia University in Montreal, University of Alberta in Edmonton, the Saskatoon Public Library, and the University of Toronto. He taught English Literature at The University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon from 1986 to 1990, and Creative Writing at the University of Victoria, British Columbia from 1991 to 2004. He is presently retired from institutional teaching, however he leads courses at the Banff Writing Workshops, the University of British Columbia, and Sage Hill in Saskatchewan.

His writing has won many prizes over the past forty-five years, including a Governor-General’s Award for Poems: New & Selected in 1979 and a Canadian Authors Association Award for his Selected Poems in 1988. He has received major awards from the Canada Council and arts boards and councils in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia. He has received National Magazine awards for both his poetry and his fiction. He is the author of more than twenty books. His most recent publications are Go Leaving Strange, a collection of poetry from 2005 that was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and Red Dog, Red Dog, a novel published in 2008.

Lorna Crozier

Lorna Crozier was born in 1948 in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. She published her first poem in Grain magazine, a publication that turned her life toward writing. Her first collection Inside in the Sky came out in 1976. Since then she has written fourteen books of poetry, including Angels of Flesh Angels of Silence, Inventing the Hawk, winner of the 1992 Governor-General’s Award, Everything Arrives at the Light, What the Living Won’t Let Go, and Whetstone. Whether Lorna is writing about angels, aging, or Louis Armstrong’s trout sandwich, she continues to engage readers and writers across Canada and the world with her grace, wisdom and wit. Margaret Laurence has called her “a poet to be grateful for.”

Presently she lives on Vancouver Island, where she teaches and serves as Chair in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria. Crozier has also edited two non-fiction collections – Desire in Seven Voices and Addiction: Notes from the Belly of the Beast. With her husband and fellow poet Patrick Lane, she edited the 1994 landmark collection Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets; in 2004, they co-edited Breathing Fire 2, once again introducing over thirty new writers to the Canadian literary world. She has been a frequent guest on CBC radio where she once worked as a reviewer and arts show host. Wherever she reads she raises the profile and reputation of poetry. Her most recent collection is The Blue Hour of the Day, a book of selected poems published in 2007. Her most recent book is Small Beneath the Sky, a memoir published in 2009 by Greystone Books.

Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is a Canadian poet and educator. He has been the Director of Writing and Literature at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, and has taught at the University of Windsor, McMaster University, Trinity College (at U. of T.), Seneca College, Humber College, and Skidmore College.

Meyer currently teaches English at Laurentian University - Barrie Campus,. His broadcasts on The Great Books for CBC's This Morning are the network's best-selling audiocassette series. He is also the Artistic Director of the annual Leacock Summer Festival of Canadian Literature.
His latest book is a poetry collection entitled Dog Days: a Comedy of Terriers, recently released by Black Moss Press.

Jacquie Buncel

Jacquie Buncel is active in Holocaust education programs across Toronto and has been studying and writing about the Jewish experience for over ten years. She is also the exceutive director of the Sunshine Centre for Seniors, a Toronto-based organization that works with isolated seniors. Jacquie Buncel's poetry has been published in journals such as Fireweed; Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal; Kaleidoscope: An International Journal of Poetry; and CV2. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in a number of anthologies including Outrage: Dykes and BIs Resist Homophobia and Countering the Myths: Lesbians write about the Men in their Lives. She has an honours BA in English Literature from Queen's University and a Masters in Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their two children. Turning the Corner at Dusk, her first collection of poems, was published in 2010 by Wolsak and Wynn.

Jim Smith

Jim Smith was born in 1951. Twenty-one years later sold his first story to the West Coast Review for $5. He was the publisher of Front Magazine from 1972-1980 and Front Press from 1980-1993. During his writing career, Smith has published thirteen poetry books & chapbooks between 1979-1998, including 100 Most Frightening Things (blewointmentpress, 1985), Convincing Americans (Proper Tales Press, 1986), Translating Sleep (Wolsak & Wynn, 1989) and Leone/Roque (Coteau Books, 1998). Smith was called to the Ontario bar in 1999.

Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems appeared from Mansfield Press in November 2009. Jim Smith lives, writes, and litigates in Toronto; he visits Spain as often as possible.