An award-winning writer of Cree/Métis ancestry, Marilyn Dumont earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has been widely published in literary journals around the world. Marilyn’s first collection, A Really Good Brown Girl, won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award presented by the League of Canadian Poets. This collection is now in its 11th printing, and selections from it are widely anthologized in literary texts. Her second collection, Green Girl Dreams Mountains, won the 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award from the Writer’s Guild of Alberta. That Tongued Belonging, her third collection, was awarded the 2007 Anskohk Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year, and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year.

Date: 10 January 2012
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: LEVA Cappuccino Bar
Address: 11053 86 ave

Sean Garritty studied science and later English and Creative Writing at the University of Alberta. He completed an MFA in poetry at Brooklyn College in 2006. In 2004, he had the opportunity to read at the Olive as part of Olga Costopoulos’s Write 494 class reading. His first book, The Lie Nearest Truth, will be released by Sheep Meadow Press of New York in December of 2011. Sean currently works in publishing and as a freelance writer and communications consultant.

Nico Rogers is the author of a collection of short poetic fiction based in Outport Newfoundland. The Fetch was published by Brick Books in 2010. He is currently completing a novel tentatively titled Beyond Long Hungry, narrated in the voice of an elderly woman. Beyond writing, he has worked as a post-secondary instructor, carpenter and waiter. This summer he paddled from Yellowknife, NWT, to Baker Lake Nunavut, a 50 day trek covering nearly 1600 kms. The poems he submitted for the Olive chapbook are drafts toward a project that may never see the light of day again: a novella in verse called My Wife’s New Lover.

Date: 8 November 2011
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: LEVA Cappuccino Bar
Address: 11053 86 ave

open mic to follow.

Date: 11 October 2011
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: LEVA Cappuccino Bar
Address: 11053 86 ave

On September 13, 2011 The Olive Reading Series opened our 12th season with a performance by Montreal-based poet and translator Oana Avasilichioaei.
Oana Avasilichioaei is the 2010 – 2011 Canadian Writer-in-Residence. She will be in residence at the U of C from September 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011.

Avasilichioaei’s work explores history, geography, public space, textual architecture, multilingualism, translation, and textual and collaborative performance.

Her first book of poetry, Abandon, wandered amid abandoned markets, voices and forces in a forgotten corner of Eastern Europe, while her second collection, feria: a poempark, delved into the fissures and fractures of a public park. Her recently completed manuscript, We, Beasts, steps through the beastfullness and foliage of language to compose debauched poetic tales about a child, a tyrant and a wolfbat.

She has translated poetry of Nobel-nominated, Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu, published as Occupational Sickness, and collaborated with Erín Moure on Expeditions of a Chimæra, a dialogic work on authorial experiments and translational impossibilities. Currently, she is translating Les Îles by Quebecoise poet, Louise Cotnoir, to be published in 2011 as The Islands.

Avasilichioaei has performed her work and given talks on poetics and translation at readings, conferences and festivals in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe and was the founder and curator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series in Montreal from 2004 to 2009. In the fall of 2009, she was the Canada Council writer-in-residence at Green College, University of British Columbia.

While in Calgary, she will be exploring a new body of work that will cross between performance, orality and the book object, as well as expanding a poetry project inspired by her own field translation of the early Romanian works of Paul Celan
Date: 13 September 2011
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: LEVA Cappuccino Bar
Address: 11053 86 ave

Date: 8 March 2011
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: LEVA Cappuccino Bar
Address: 11053 86 ave

Christine Wiesenthal is a poet, nonfiction writer and editor, who teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Her books include Instruments of Surrender (2001, short-listed for the Gerald Lampert and Stephan G. Stephannson poetry awards), a biography, The Half-Lives of Pat Lowther (2005, finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction and winner of the Clio Prize in History), and The Collected Works of Pat Lowther (2010). Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in numerous U.S. and Canadian magazines and anthologies. “Horses of the Ghost,” her most recent work, was originally commissioned by the Banff Center for the Arts for the 2009 Literary Journalism Program, and appears in LAKE: A Journal of Arts and the Environment (Spring 2010).

Hope to see you there!

Date: 8 February 2011
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: LEVA Cappuccino Bar
Address: 11053 86 ave

Dennis Cooley grew up in Southern Saskatchewan, studied at the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Rochester. He has lived with his family in Winnipeg since 1973. His latest title is correction line, which draws heavily on memories of family and of his life in and around Estevan. He is working on several manuscripts, including a collection of essays on Robert Kroetsch.

Come and join us for a night of great poetry!

Date: WEDNESDAY, 12 January 2011
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: LEVA Cappuccino Bar
Address: 11053 86 ave

Louis Cabri is author of Poetryworld, forthcoming from CUE. Coach House published his book The Mood Embosser, which was acclaimed a book of the year by Small Press Traffic in San Francisco. Recent chapbooks include What Is Venice? (Wrinkle) and — that can’t (Nomados). He is editor of a selected poems by Fred Wah (The False Laws of Narrative, Wilfrid Laurier UP) and with Peter Quartermain an issue of critical essays on sound and poetry for ESC: English Studies in Canada (accompanying CD edited by Michael S. Hennessey). Past projects include the poets’ exchange PhillyTalks (with Aaron Levy), a double issue of open letters to/from poets for Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory (with Nicole Markotić), and hole magazine and books (with Rob Manery). He has written on Jackson Mac Low, Michael Gottlieb, bp Nichol, Catriona Strang, among other poets, and teaches modern and contemporary poetry, literary theory, and creative writing at the University of Windsor, in Ontario.

Please note that this month’s reading takes place on a Wednesday and not the regular Tuesday. Hope to see you there!