For February Find What is Fabulous in Poetry

On the first Sunday in February (the 6th), Lit Live brings you six writers with poetry in their repertoire. One of our committee members, Chris Pannell recently won the 2010 Acorn-Plantos People's Poetry award and Jeff Seffinga will be at Lit Live this night, to make the presentation. Additionally . . .

Jim Johnstone will delve into Patternicity, his collection of poems released last March by Harbour Publishing.

Chris Banks makes his first appearance at Lit Live with his book, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, published by Nightwood Editions.

Chris Pannell will rev your engines with Drive, the book that won the 2010 Acorn-Plantos People's Poetry Award, published by Wolsak and Wynn.

R.W Megens reads from The Infinite Ache, his new collection of poetry recently launched by Serengeti Press.

Kildare Dobbs takes us great distances with Casanova in Venice, his new poems published by The Porcupine's Quill.

David Seymour will warm every corner of the room with Inter Alia, his poetry collection from Brick Books.

Jim Johnstone

Jim Johnstone obtained his M.Sc. in Reproductive Physiology from the University of Toronto, where he is currently a doctoral candidate. He is a two-time winner of the E. J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, the recipient of a 2008 CBC Literary Award and his work has been broadcast on CBC Radio's Between the Covers and published in Canadian periodicals such as The Fiddlehead, Grain and PRISM International. Currently he edits Misunderstandings Magazine, a literary journal he co-founded with Ian Williams and Vicki Sloot. His most recent book of poetry is entitled Patternicity. He keeps a blog at http://jimjohnstone.wordpress.com/

Chris Banks

Raised in the Ontario communities of Bancroft, Sioux Lookout, and Stayner, where his father served postings as a small-town police officer, Chris Banks took his BA at the University of Guelph, a Master's in Creative Writing at Concordia, and an education degree at Western. He currently works as an English and Creative Writing instructor at Bluevale Collegiate Institute in
Waterloo, Ontario. His poetry has previously appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, Carousel and The Antigonish Review. His last poetry collection was entitled The Cold Panes of Surfaces.

Chris Pannell

Chris Pannell is part of the organizing committee for Hamilton’s annual gritLiT literary festival. He also runs the New Writing Workshop through Hamilton Artists Inc., one of Canada’s leading artist-run centres. He has published three poetry books: Drive (2009), Under Old Stars (2002) and Sorry I Spent Your Poem (1999). He won the Arts Hamilton Poetry Book Award in 2010 for Drive and won the Hamilton & Region Arts Council poetry book award in 1997 for a set of poetry broadsheets entitled Fractures, Subluxations and Dislocations. Before his reading, he will be presented with the 2010 Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award by Jeff Seffinga. In a former life, Pannell was a professional technical writer, editor, and systems analyst. Additionally he has worked as a musician, bus driver, sales person, bird breeder, music archivist, and paperboy for The Globe and Mail. He continues to read the Globe, first thing every morning.

R.W Megens

R.W. Megens has edited seven anthologies of poetry and prose, one of which published a short story awarded The Writers' Trust of Canada/McClelland Stewart Journey Prize. He has won the Hamilton and Region Literary Award and the Prickly Poetry Contest. His recent collection of poetry, The Infinite Ache, has been called "a sensual exploration" and described by Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker) as a celebration of "the connection between personal happiness, sexual fulfillment and intimacy."

Kildare Dobbs

Kildare Dobbs was born in Merrut, India, and educated at St Columba's College, Rathfarnum, Ireland, and Jesus College, Cambridge. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy, first as an able seaman and later as a sub-lieutenant, before going into the commandos. After the war he took a teaching diploma at London University before going in 1947 to what was then Tanganyika, where he served as a magistrate. He taught high school in Venice, Ontario, after immigrating to Canada in 1952. Thereafter he worked in Toronto as a book editor for nearly ten years with the Macmillan Company. It was at this time that he began writing and broadcasting radio scripts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. These ranged from short talks and reviews to an impressive exploration of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he was a regular contributor to the CBC's literary program Anthology, produced for most of that time by Robert Weaver with whom, in 1956 Dobbs became one of the founding editors of the influential Tamarack Review. From 1965 to 1967 he served as managing editor of Saturday Night magazine. In 1968 he became a literary columnist for the Toronto Star. Now a free-lance journalist, he is particularly known as a travel writer.

David Seymour

David Seymour's first book, Inter Alia (Brick Books, 2005) was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in journals across Canada. Most recently his poetry was short-listed for the 2009 CBC Literary Award, and twice selected for the Best Canadian Poetry Anthology. David currently lives in Toronto, where he is completing a second and third manuscript.