The poets

Sacha
Archer

KIM (2022)

Sacha Archer lives in Ontario, Canada with his wife and two daughters. He is the founder and editor of Simulacrum Press. His book Mother’s Milk was recently published through Timglaset. Archer’s latest chapbooks are Lines of Sight (nOIR:Z, 2020) and Houses (no press, 2020). His book Framing Poems is forthcoming from Timglaset. Archer’s concrete poetry has been exhibited in the USA, Italy, and Canada. Find him on Facebook and Instagram @sachaarcher.

Oana Avasilichioaei

IMPROBABLE THEATRES (2023)

Oana Avasilichioaei interweaves sound, performance, poetry, and translation to expand and trouble ideas of language, histories, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. She has created many performance/sound works that mix electronics, ambient textures, noise, and vocal play, published six collections of poetry hybrids, including award-nominated Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), and written a libretto for a one-act opera (Cells of Wind, 2022).

Gary
Barwin

ME THEN YOU THEN ME THEN (with Kathryn Mockler, 2020)

Gary Barwin is the author of 26 books including a Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and Bird Arsonist (with Tom Prime) His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates  won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long listed for Canada Reads. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario. is the author of 26 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and Bird Arsonist (with Tom Prime) His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long listed for Canada Reads. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Roxanna
Bennett

“BLUE ROSE” BROADSIDE (2019)


UNSEEN GARDEN (2018)

Roxanna Bennett is a disabled queer poet with absolutely no academic credentials who gratefully resides on the aboriginal land covered under the Williams Treaties of 1923. They are the co-editor of Imaginary Safe House: Canadian Dis/Ability Poetics (Hamilton Arts & Letters/Frog Hollow Press, 2019) and the author of the Ontario Trillium Award-winning poetry collection Unmeaningable, (Gordon Hill Press, 2019). Their work centres on the lived experience of disability in all its expressions.

Cody
Caetano

PLEASURE DOME POEMS (2017)

Cody Caetano is a writer of Anishinaabe and Portuguese descent and an off-reserve member of Pinaymootang First Nation. He has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, where he wrote this memoir under the mentorship of Lee Maracle. Excerpts of Half-Bads in White Regalia earned him a 2020 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose.

Brian
Dedora

GET LOST (2022)

British Columbia-born Brian Dedora is a writer and performance artist whose work has been anthologized and widely published in special and limited editions. His books include Eye Where: A Book of Visuals (2014), A Few Sharp Sticks (2011), A Slice of Voice at the Edge of Hearing (2008), which was shortlisted for the ReLit and George Ryga Awards, With WK in the Workshop (1989), as well as White Light (1987). Dedora lives in Toronto, Canada and Granada, Spain.

Amanda
Earl

MATTHEW (2021)

Amanda Earl is the author of Beast Body Epic (AngelHousePress, 2023), Trouble (Hem Press, 2022), Genesis (Timglaset Editions, 2022), Kiki (Chaudiere Books, 2014/Invisible Publishing 2019 and over 30 chapbooks. Earl is editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021), managing editor of Bywords.ca and fallen angel of AngelHousePress. Earl is a pansexual polyamorous feminist writer, visual poet, editor, and publisher who lives on Algonquin Anishinaabeg traditional territory.

John
Elizabeth Stintzi

THE MACHETE TOURIST (2018)

John Elizabeth Stintzi (JES, they/she) is an award-winning novelist, poet, cartoonist, photographer, editor, & teacher who was born and raised on a cattle farm in northwestern Ontario. Their work has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Watermill Center, and Queens University, and they have been awarded the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the inaugural Sator New Works award from Two Dollar Radio. Their novel Vanishing Monuments was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, Junebat was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster award from the League of Canadian Poets, and My Volcano was longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2022 Book Prize for Fiction. Their books have been (or are currently being) translated into Korean, Italian, and Spanish.

Paola
Ferrante

THE DARK UNWIND (2022)

Paola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (2019), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She has won Grain Magazine’s Short Grain Contest for Poetry, The New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Room Magazine’s Fiction Contest, and was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize for the story “When Foxes Die Electric.” Her work appears in After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century (2022), Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (2021), North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto.

Jonathan
Garfinkel

BOCIANY (STORKS) (2021)

Jonathan Garfinkel’s multi-genre writing has been translated into twelve languages, and his plays have been produced throughout Canada, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. He is the author of the book of poems Glass Psalms (Turnstone Press) and has written numerous plays including The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret and the Governor-General shortlisted House of Many Tongues. His memoir Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide was published in five countries to critical acclaim (Penguin Canada and Norton and Norton US). Jonathan is also an award-winning non-fiction writer; his journalism has appeared in places like The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Eighteen Bridges, Tablet and PEN International. In 2015 he was commissioned to adapt Rawi Hage’s Cockroach for the stage, which premiered at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary in 2016. Currently it is in development with Soulpepper. Named by the Toronto Star as “one to watch”, he teaches playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. 

Dean
Garlick

DOMESTIC SUBLIME (2023)

Dean Garlick is a photographer and fiction writer living in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Philip
Hare

“YOU’RE WELCOME” BANDANA (with Kirby, 2020)

Philip Hare is a multi-disciplinary artist living in rural Nova Scotia, Canada.  His work is primarily textile based but also incorporates repurposed materials such as worn denim jeans, safety pins, clothes pegs, and tampons.  He also creates installations that are both immersive and performative.

Jim
Johnstone

THE OUROBOROS (2021)

Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor, and critic. He is the author of seven collections of poetry including The Chemical Life, which was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit Award. Johnstone has also won several awards including the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, a CBC Literary Award, the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, the Robin Blaser Award, and Poetry’s Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, he curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. 

R.
Kolewe

THE WILD FOX (2020)

SILENCE, THEN (2019)

R. Kolewe was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto. Educated in physics and engineering at the University of Toronto, he pursued a successful career in the software industry for many years. He now lives in Toronto and writes full time. His work has appeared in various online and print magazines, and he has published four collections of poetry, A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Talonbooks, 2023), The Absence of Zero (Book*hug, 2021), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017), and Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014) as well as several chapbooks.

Lannii
Layke

OS (2022)

Lannii Layke is a young, Black writer, editor, and interdisciplinary designer from Tkarón:to (Toronto). They attend to crafting memory and fine jewellery. In French, os is bone. This is their first physical collection of poems.

Elianna
Lev

SEX MADE ME (2017)

Elianna Lev is a Toronto-based writer for Yahoo Canada News. Her work has been featured in Vice, The Canadian Press, Leafly and Elle Canada.

Prathna
Lor

7,2 (2019)

Prathna Lor is a poet, essayist, editor and educator, who has published in Canadian Literature, DIAGRAM, C Magazine, Jacket2, Poetry is Dead and Plenitude Magazine, among others. Lor is Poetry Editor at Shrapnel Magazine and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. They live in Montreal, QC.

Jennifer
Lovegrove

THE TINDER SONNETS (2021)

Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of, most recently, the poetry collection Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes (Book*hug 2017). Her novel Watch How We Walk (ECW Press, 2013) was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She works at the University of Toronto, and divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Ontario, Canada. She is learning to play the drums. 

Will
Manning

JOAN WOULD SAY (2023)

Will ‘Sweetpea’ Manning currently cuts at Town Barber, Toronto. Recently on tour this month in support of Don Pyle’s Shot In A Mirror. Joan Would Say is their chapbook debut. Launches at Fertile Fest, 19 AUG. willmanning.ca

Dale
Martin Smith

BLUR (2022)

SONS Broadside (2018)

SONS (2017)

Dale Martin Smith is the author most recently of Flying Red Horse and Sons (KFB, 2017). He teaches poetry at Toronto Metropolitan University. 

Billy
Mavreas

Tenderness (2022)

Billy Mavreas is a Montreal-based writer & artist as well as co-director of Monastiraki, a gallery/boutique in Mile End. His art practice is based on accumulation and accretion, consisting of various personal collections, stacks of drawings, various ephemeral scraps and an assortment of found objects that resonate with him on an aesthetic and spiritual level. He is the author of two graphic novels, one book of posters and countless mini books, zines, pamphlets and assorted ephemera. He is also a co-founder of Expozine, one of Canada’s largest and most well respected Small Press Fairs.

Victoria
Mbabazi

FLIP (2022)

Victoria Mbabazi’s work can be found in several literary magazines. chapbook is available with Anstruther Press and FLIP is available with knife | fork | book. Their full-length collection, The Siren in the Twelfth House, is coming out in Fall 2024 with Palimpsest Press. They’re currently Canadian in Brooklyn, New York.

D. M. Bradford

CALL OUT (2017)

Darby Minott Bradford is a poet, editor, and translator based in Tioh’tia:ke (Montréal). He holds a BA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Guelph. A lifelong Montrealer, Bradford’s work formally engages and frustrates dominant conceptions of Blackness in the Diaspora. His poetry has appeared in, among others, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, filling Station, The Capilano Review, Carte Blanche, and anthologized in The Unpublished City, a 2018 Toronto Book Awards finalist. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Call Out (2017), Nell Zink Is Damn Free (2017), and The Plot (2018). Bradford’s first book, Dream of No One but Myself,  is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the versioning aspects of his and his family’s histories with abuse and trauma.

Kathryn
Mockler

ME THEN YOU THEN ME THEN (with Gary Barwin, 2020)

Kathryn Mockler is the author of five books of poetry. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. She runs Send My Love to Anyone, a literary newsletter, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria where she teaches screenwriting and fiction.

Khashayar
Mohammadi

DEAR KESTREL (2019)

Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (They/Them) is a queer, Iranian born, Toronto-based Poet, Writer and Translator. They were shortlisted for the 2021 Austin Clarke poetry prize, 2022’s Arc Poem of the year award, The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season awards for poetry and they are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Prize. They are the author of four poetry chapbooks and three translated poetry chapbooks. They have released two full-length collections of poetry with Gordon Hill Press. Their full-length collaborative poetry manuscript “G” is forthcoming with Palimpsest press Fall 2023, and their full-length collection of experimental dream-poems “Daffod*ls” is forthcoming from Pamenar Press Fall 2023.

Shane
Neilson

WALT (2021)

Shane Neilson is a poet from New Brunswick who can never repay the debt he owes Walt Whitman. This unpayable debt makes for the conditions of a perfect love: nothing is asked for, nothing is required, and yet everything would be given.

John
Nyman

THE DEVIL (2020)

Originally from North York and currently living in Toronto, John Nyman is a writer, scholar, critic, and poet working in traditional verse as well as visual and conceptual forms. John’s first full-length collection of poetry, Players (Palimpsest Press), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award by the League of Canadian Poets. John is also a co-author of the &, poetry collective’s second chapbook, &, 2: this happened to one of us (Publication Studio Guelph), and the author of the manifesto chapbook Slogan, Substance, Dream: keywords for a responsible poetry (Anstruther Press), along with works of concrete poetry, literary and arts criticism, and short fiction. Links to some of John’s online publications can be found on the CV / Publications page, while selections from his visual, conceptual, and erasure projects are regularly featured on his Instagram, @selected.works.

Klara
du Plessis

SKIN & MEAT SKY (with Kadie Salmon, 2022)

Winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Klara du Plessis’ debut collection, Ekke, was released from Palimpsest Press. Her second book is Hell Light Flesh, 2020. Klara is a poet, critic, and literary curator, developing Deep Curation as an experimental practice of poetry reading organization. She resides in Montreal.

Ben
Robinson

WITHOUT FORM (Co-published with The Blasted Tree, 2021)

Ben Robinson is a poet, musician and librarian. He lives in Hamilton, ON on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. His first book, The Book of Benjamin, is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in Fall 2023.

Eric
Schmaltz

Editor of NOT YOUR BEST VOL. 1 (2019)

Eric Schmaltz is an intermedia artist, poet, scholar, and editor. His research focuses on contemporary and twentieth-century Canadian avant-garde literature and art, with a special emphasis on intermedial poetics, small press cultures, and sound studies. His creative work has been published, exhibited, and performed nationally and internationally in Canada, the United States, Ireland, Greece, and elsewhere. His writing can be found in literary journals, including The Capilano Review, Arc Poetry, Berkeley Poetry Review, Trinity Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Travis
Sharp

BEHIND THE POET READING THEIR POEM IS A SIGN SAYING APPLAUSE (2022)

YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER (2021)

Travis Sharp published the chapbook Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press 2018), the artist’s book one plus one is two ones (Recreational Resources 2018), and, with Aimee Harrison and Maria Anderson, co-edited a digital book, Radio: 11.8.16 (Essay Press 2017). He has an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington, Bothell, and is a PhD candidate in the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo. Travis is the editor and director of Essay Press.

Neil
Surkan

RUIN (2023)

THEIR QUEER TENDERNESS (2020)

Neil Surkan was born in Penticton, BC. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections — Unbecoming (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), which was selected as one of three finalists for the City of Calgary’s W.O. Mitchell Award, and On High (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018) — and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness (Knife-Fork-Book, 2020) and Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017). His award-winning poems have appeared in numerous Canadian magazines.

Mark
Truscott

RAIN (2022)

Mark Truscott is the author of three poetry books: Said Like Reeds or Things (Coach House, 2004), Nature (Book*hug, 2010), and Branches (Book*hug, 2018).

Aaron
Tucker

THE PASSAGE BIRD’S FAREWELL (2022)

Aaron Tucker is the author of three books of poems as well as the novel Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books) which was translated by Rachel Martinez into French as Oppenheimer (La Peuplade) in the summer of 2020. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University where he is an Elia Scholar, a VISTA Doctoral Scholar and a 2020 Joseph-Armand BombardierDoctoral Fellow.

Andy
Verboom

DBL (2020)

Andy Verboom is from subrural Nova Scotia and lives in K’jipuktuk (Halifax). He is the founder of Couplets, a lit & art collaboration series, and co-founder of long con, an online magazine for art about art. His poetry has won Frog Hollow’s Chapbook Contest and Descant’s Winston Collins Prize, been shortlisted for CV2‘s Young Buck Prize and Arc‘s Poem of the Year, and appeared in Prism, The Puritan, Vallum, and elsewhere.