The Olive Reading Series in Edmonton

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Jeff Carpenter

Lainna Lane — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:54:18 +0000

The Olive Reading Series is very pleased to present Jeff Carpenter!

Date: Tues 12th February 2013
Time: 7:00pm
Place: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue Edmonton

The Olive is very pleased to host an evening with Jeff Carpenter!

With a style rooted in live performance, collaboration, radical innovation, and formal hybridity, Jeff Carpenter has participated in Edmonton’s diverse and thriving literary and performing arts culture for over ten years. In addition to a growing number of juvenilia and ephemera, he is author of the chapbook malachi on foot (Red Nettle Press, 2008); and, with glenN robsoN, as the sound poetry duo Tonguebath, he authored and performed Dun John & Dr Agon (Extra Virgin Press, 2010). He has collaborated with Mile Zero Dance artists on several multimedia projects. At the John Cage Centennial Celebration put on by New Music Edmonton in 2012, he performed Cage’s Lecture on Nothing in its entirety. He was a featured performer at the Edmonton Poetry Festival in 2010, 2011, and 2012. He has taught sound poetry in workshops in schools, universities, and the Edmonton Public Library.

He is currently wrapping up a poetry+sound ecology project, listen river city, thanks to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts’ generous support. Carpenter is acting Acting Director of the ARG, an award-winning ”pataphysical dunk tank, and is Foreign Correspondent for the ARG’s dead-but-dreaming organ, noth.ca.

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Anna Marie Sewell

Lainna Lane — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 20:12:03 +0000

The Olive Reading Series is very pleased to present Anna Marie Sewell!

Date: Tues 22nd January 2013
Time: 7:00pm
Place: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue Edmonton

The Olive is very pleased to host a night with Edmonton’s current Poet Laureate, Anna Marie Sewell!

Anna Marie Sewell’s first book of poetry, Fifth World Drum, (2009, Frontenac House) was nominated for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award, City of Edmonton Book Prize, the Alberta Readers’ Choice Award and the ReLit award. Fifth World Drum won critical acclaim across Canada, from Malahat Review to the Globe and Mail.

Anna Marie is a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural artist; past work of note includes co-coordinating Honour Songs, a tribute to Aboriginal women, for Edmonton’s 2007 Cultural Capital project; and her award winning Heart of the Flower project. Heart of the Flower was based on writing about the year she spent working in a small city north of Kyoto, Japan.

Anna grew up in the Peace country of northwestern Alberta, and only came to Edmonton when university seemed inevitable. She earned a BA Special in Drama, with a minor in Spanish, from University of Alberta. She has earned her crust as a teacher, community animator, race horse groom, therapist, pasta maker, candy pusher, theatre worker and more. From 1998 – 2001, she even started and ran a company, Big Sky Theatre, producing original Aboriginal theatre. She served on the board of the Edmonton Arts Council from 2003 – 06, which led to such memorable opportunities as visiting Wonju, Korea in pursuit of cultural connections. All along the way, poetry has been a common thread and constant companion.

Anna Marie considers herself to be “quite Canadian” – she is a Status Indian, a Mi’gmaq from Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation in Quebec. And though born in Mi’qmaq territory, in Fredericton, NB, her father’s family are mostly Anishnabe, and this is the part of her Aboriginal heritage with which she was most familiar growing up. On the other hand, Anishnabek are traditionally matrilineal, and Anna’s mother is the daughter of Polish immigrants. So, she is also part of the Slavic wave on the prairies, and first generation metis. She’s also a transplanted farm girl, who still loves to play in the dirt. (Go ahead, give her a pony.)

Anna Marie was a founding member of the Stroll of Poets Society, which has been a remarkable home for poets for 20 years now. She has also taken part in the Edmonton Poetry Festival’s annual month-long shindig, where you might have seen her host the Blinks (80+ poets, 30 seconds each, no hesitation) a time or three.

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Sarah Lang

Lainna Lane — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 13:21:58 +0000

The Olive Reading Series is very pleased to present Sarah Lang!

Date: Tues 11th Dec 2012
Time: 7:00pm
Place: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue Edmonton

Sarah Lang was born in Canada. Her first book The Work of Days was published by Coach House Books. Her second will be published by House of Anansi Press in 2014.

Her work, which includes poetry, prose, personal, critical and medical essays, has been published in numerous periodicals in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States.

Sarah completed her MFA at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and began her PhD in Chicago. Sarah often lives in, and writes of, airports; she intends to orbit the earth before her projected death in 2056.

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Titilope Sonuga

Lainna Lane — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 21:34:14 +0000

The Olive Reading Series is very pleased to present Titilope Sonuga!

Date: Tues 13th Nov 2012
Time: 7:00pm
Place: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue Edmonton

Titilope Sonuga is a Nigerian-born spoken word poet and winner of the 2011 Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award for her first book Down To Earth. Recently, she won The Edmonton Journal’s Maya Angelou poetry contest. Born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria the duality of her African and Canadian upbringing is clear in her distinct form of storytelling that follows in the oral tradition of her Yoruba roots. She is actively involved in the Canadian poetry community as a member of the Edmonton Poetry Festival Board of Directors, and the SpoCan (Spoken Word of Canada) Board of Directors. She is the founding member of the Breath In Poetry Collective, a group of poets and poetry enthusiast that create spaces for artistic expression in the Edmonton community. Her stories have been told on stages across Canada and have received recognition internationally. She commands the stage with a style of orature that is uniquely sultry and rhythmic.

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Sheila Murphy

Lainna Lane — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 17:52:16 +0000

The Olive Reading Series is very pleased to present Sheila Murphy!

Date: Tuesday 9 October 2012

Time: 7:00pm Reading
Location: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue, Edmonton

Sheila E. Murphy (b. 1951, Mishawaka, Indiana) is an American text and visual poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She earned: With Beverly Carver, Murphy co-founded and coordinated the Scottsdale Center for the Arts Poetry Series for twelve years. Murphy has engaged in a broad range of poetic styles over nearly three decades of writing and publication.

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Iman Mersal

Lainna Lane — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 15:16:08 +0000

The Olive Reading Series is very pleased present Iman Mersal, our first reader of our twelfth season!

Date: Tuesday 11 September 2012
Time: 7:00pm Reading
Location: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue, Edmonton

Iman Mersal is an Assistant Professor in Middle Eastern and African Studies and in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Her work has appeared in The Blackbird, The American Poetry Review, “Parnassus,” and Paris Review. Mersal’s work has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. These are not Oranges, My Love, a selection of Mersal’s work translated into English by Khaled Mattawa, was published by Sheep Meadows in New York in 2008.

“The feeling you get when you are writing a poem is different to any other feeling,” Iman Mersal says.

“You feel your being is in the making or something. You are very involved in everything around you and yet you are completely alienated. It’s a mood. I can feel it in advance.”…

Mersal is one of Edmonton’s best-kept literary secrets. The renowned Egyptian poet has lived here since 1999, teaches while raising two boys and traveling the world to read at poetry events.

“She is definitely one of the best Arab poets of her generation,” says Walid El Khachab, an Arabic professor at York University. “She’s one of the most original, one of the most quoted, one of the most spoken about.” “When you think of the most prominent female Canadian novelist, you think of Margaret Atwood,” El Khachab says. “When I ask myself the same question about Arabic poetry, I automatically think of Iman.”

Mersal was born Nov. 30, 1966 in the village of Mit Adlan, in northern Egypt. She began writing stories at an early age as a way of remembering her mother, who died at age twenty-seven, when Iman was only seven. Mersal published her first poem when she was 16. She studied Arabic literature at university, first in Mansoura, then Cairo, all the while publishing poetry in the country’s leading literary journals.

Her second book, A Dark Alley Suitable For Dance Lessons epitomized the experimental style and intimate focus of young Egyptian writers. Mersal is part of what’s known in the Arabic world as the Nineties generation, a groundbreaking movement of young men and women “writing about themselves, about personal experiences, about details instead of about big social or political issues,” says El Khachab. Her writing made waves because it was mature and challenged the traditional esthetics of poetry, El Khachab says. It talked subtly about private, intimate matters, like sexuality, a taboo for female writers at the time. The work was original, deeply funny. “The intensity of the humour and cynicism was definitely new in poetry,” he says.“I like her absolute literary integrity, her seriousness and her independence of mind”

. . .

Mersal’s work “manages to be personal without being excessively confessional. … The word integrity keeps coming to my mind.” –Bert Almon

Did she pull her hair from the tines of her comb, afraid of black magic or fire, or the neighbors’ mischief?
My mother’s hair slithers out, a gift, a punishment.
What binds us now? -an excerpt from “They Tear Down My Family Home”–

(some material was taken from Elizabeth Withey’s article in The Edmonton Journal, July 6th, 2012)

The Olive Reading Series at Edmonton Poetry Festival

Lainna Lane — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:33:56 +0000

The Olive reading series has been shaking/stirring the poetry spirit since 2000 with monthly readings featuring poets from Edmonton and across the country. To celebrate a dozen years of performance and the 2012 Edmonton Poetry Festival, the members of the Olive collective are staging an evening of brief readings from their own work. Join us to raise a martini glass to performers Thea Bowering, Doug Barbour, Jenna Butler, glenN robson, Adam Wilson, Lainna Lane El Jabi. Michael Penny, Kath Maclean, and Christine Stewart.

Tuesday April 24, 2012
7:00pm – 8:30pm
Latitude 53
10248 – 106 Street
Edmonton, AB
Free
http://www.edmontonpoetryfestival.com/schedule/the-olive

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Alice Major and Alexis Kienlen

Lainna Lane — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 16:24:22 +0000

Alice Major

Alice served as the first poet laureate for the city of Edmonton from 2005-2007. She has published numerous collections of poetry and a novel for young adults. Among her previous books are Memory’s Daughter, for which she won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award in 2011; The Occupied World; and The Office Tower Tales, for which she won the Pat Lowther Award in 2009. In 2010, she received a lifetime achievement award, presented by the City of Edmonton and the Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton. Her most recent book, Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science is published by University of Alberta Press.

Alexis Kienlen

Alexis was born on Friday, August 13, 1976, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her second full-length book of poetry 13 creatively examines beauty and darkness in many areas including the workings of bee hive, board games, childhood depression, the personal lives of monsters and a failed romantic relationship in a beautiful Canadian city. She holds degrees in International Studies and Journalism and currently works as an agricultural journalist.

Date: 13 March 2012 Tuesday
Time: 6:00pm Doors | 7:00pm Reading
Location: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue, Edmonton

Special Event: The Olive Reading Series Presents: Erín Moure Book Launch

Lainna Lane — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:03:30 +0000

The Olive Reading Series presents a special event on THURSDAY March 1st at the EMPRESS ALE HOUSE | Erín Moure launches her newest poetry title, from Anansi Press, The Unmemntioable.

We are honoured to host Erín Moure as she launches The Unmemntioable. This book-length poem delves into the fraught history of war, loss, and emigration from Western Ukraine. The Unmemntioable joins letters that should not be joined. There is, in this word, an act of force. Of devastation. The unmentionable is love, of course. But in Moure’s poems, love is bound to a duty: to comprehend what it was that the immigrants would not speak of. Now they are dead; their children and grandchildren know but an anecdotal pastiche of Ukrainian history. On Saskatoon Mountain in Alberta where they settled, only the chatter of the leaves remains of their presence. What was not spoken is sealed over, unmemntioable. There is no one left to contact in the Old Country. Can the unmemntioable retain its silence, yet be eased into words? Can experience still be spoken?

Erín Moure is one of Canada’s most eminent and respected poets, and a translator of poetry from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese to English. She has read from her work in English, French and Galician in Canada, USA, England, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Germany and Japan, and has given seminars in translation, language and construction of identity, and poetics. Of Moure’s work, Melissa Jacques has written:

[her] poetry is fragmented, meta-critical and explicitly deconstructive.
Folding everyday events and ordinary people into complex and often irresolvable philosophical dilemmas,
Mouré challenges the standards of accessibility and common sense

Moure’s most recent works include:

Little theatres – 2005 (winner of the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry, nominated for a Governor General’s Award, nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, shortlisted for the 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize)O Cadoiro – 2007
Expeditions of a Chimæra(collaboration with Oana Avasilichioaei) – 2009
O Resplandor – 2010
The Unmemntionable – 2012
The Unmemntioable blog: http://unmemntioable.wordpress.com

Date: 1 March 2012 *THURSDAY*
Time: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Location: Empress Ale House
Address: 9912 82 Avenue, Edmonton

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Marilyn Dumont

Lainna Lane — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:27:21 +0000

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.
Marilyn has held several positions as Writer-in-Residence at academic institutions including: University of Alberta, University of Toronto, University of Windsor, Grant MacEwan Community College, and Massey College. She was a mentor for the 2006 Wired Writing program at The Banff Centre, and currently teaches Creative Writing at Athabasca University. In 2008, she was Writer-in-Residence at Edmonton Public Library. Marilyn is currently working on her fourth manuscript in which she explores Métis history, politics and identity through her ancestral descendant of note, Gabriel Dumont.

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