The Olive Reading Series Presents: Alice Major and Alexis Kienlen

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

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

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

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Sean Garritty and Nico Rogers

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

The Olive Reading Series Presents: Michael Penny

Michael Penny was born in Australia, but moved to Canada as a teenager. He has four books: Bear, from Bard Press (1976), My Chimera, Bushekbooks (2006), Completing the Kora, La so so la Press (2006) and Particles, McGill-Queen’s University Press (2011). Still needing to make a living, he does so as Director of Policy with the Law Society of Alberta.

open mic to follow.

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

The 2011-2012 Olive Reading Series Opens with Oana Avasilichioaei

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

A Celebration of Pat Lowther with Christine Wiesenthal reading

In a special night celebrating the poetry of Pat Lowther, The Olive is excited to welcome the most wonderful Christine Wiesenthal.

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!