This Sunday I venture to Perth again. There’s a Sunday matinee reading for First Edition Reading Series, a special event called Readings on the Tay with Holly Luhning, Catherine Graham, Susan Gillis and myself at the Ecotay Education Centre, 942 Upper Scotch Line.
Raised in rural Saskatchewan and now living in Toronto, HOLLY LUHNING holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature, madness and theories of the body. She has received a Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Arts Award, and her collection of poetry, Sway, was nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award. Her first novel, Quiver, was released in January 2011 by HarperCollins Canada to much critical praise. Of the psychological thriller, the National Post boasted: “Fast and wicked and dark. The writing in this novel is as clean and slick as a stiletto between the ribs.”
CATHERINE GRAHAM, a poet and educator, was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and educated in Canada and the United Kingdom. She is the author of four critically acclaimed poetry collections: Winterkill, The Red Element, Pupa, and The Watch. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals in North America, the United Kingdom and Ireland and has been frequently anthologized. Graham earned an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University in England. She now lives and writes in Toronto, where she teaches creative writing and designs and delivers workshops on creativity for the business and academic community. She is Marketing Coordinator of the Rowers Pub Reading Series and Vice President of the non-profit organization Project Bookmark Canada, which works to place fictional text in our everyday geography.
Ottawa poet PEARL PIRIE’s chapbooks have been published by above/ground and AngelHouse Press. Her book been shed bore came out from Chaudiere Books in 2010. Her poems were included in ditch, anthology 4. Her poems have been published in places such as dandelion and This Magazine, and in small press including gar, unarmed and 1cent as well as in chapbooks and broadsheets of Haiku Canada and Haiku North America. She has coordinated the Pre-Tree Poetry Workshops since 2009 and does chapbooks phafours. Her manuscript Thirsts won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2010. This, her second collection, will be released this fall by Snare.
SUSAN GILLIS has lived on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and now divides her time between Montreal and the Tay Valley. The Rapids, her third book of poems, is forthcoming from Brick in 2012.