In collaboration with the Atwater Poetry Project
February 25, 2023 — 2 PM to 4 PM
Toronto-based Poet Liz Howard will perform a commissioned response piece to an issue of quarterly feminist magazine Fireweed, founded in 1978 by an editorial collective. Titled Fireweed 22: Native Women Issue, this magazine was published by a guest editorial collective in 1986 including: Ivy Chaske, Connie Fife, Jan Champagne, Edna King, and Midnight Sun. The pages of this magazine issue resonate with a fierce declaration of sovereignty for Indigenous women and their voices.
Howard will perform her commissioned piece in parallel to the Desire Lines. Displaced Narratives of Place exhibition, and in collaboration with the Atwater Poetry Project (APP). Faith Paré, curator of the APP, will engage in a public conversation with Howard and Desire Lines curator Felicity Tayler following the performance. Desire Lines. Displaced Narratives of Place reads magazines as materially produced in a physical location (Toronto, Ontario) but also distributed and read in multiple localities and across multiple communities.
A must-read on articles: “KWEWAG DREAMING: A BORDERLESS SONIC GEOGRAPHY” by Liz Howard
About our collaborator:
The Atwater Poetry Project is an almost-monthly poetry reading series that brings the best local, Canadian, and international poets together with a passionate audience of poetry fans in the auditorium of our parent organization, the Atwater Library and Computer Centre. From September 2004 through December 2022, the Atwater Poetry Project has featured nearly 300 readings.
The APP disseminates the rich and vibrant variety of living Canadian poets writing in English. Guest poets are broadly geographically representative, and span many cultural communities and identities. The focus on poetry and the high calibre of APP readings make it a pivotal part of English Montreal culture, and an important venue for the presentation of Canadian literature.
For audience members from the English-speaking community of Quebec, and for the writers from here or elsewhere, the Atwater Poetry Project fosters a sense of literary community that transcends geographical and aesthetic boundaries.
Guests biographies:
Liz Howard is a poet, editor and teacher. Her work explores Anishinaabe ways of knowing, cosmology, ecology, and the philosophy and neuroscience of consciousness. Howard’s poetry was awarded the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted again in 2022, she has also been shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the 2022 Trillium Poetry Prize. Howard will be joining Concordia University’s Department of English as an Assistant Professor of creative writing in June 2023. She is of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage.
Faith Paré is a poet of Afro-Guyanese ancestry born on Dish With One Spoon treaty territory. Her writing has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Guts, and The Capilano Review, and she has performed at Canadian arts centres such as the Art Gallery of York University, the Harbourfront Centre, and the Winter Garden Theatre. Faith is the curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, a Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal-based reading series founded in 2004. In 2021 she was an honourable mention for the League of Canadian Poets’ Pavlick Prize, awarded for an outstanding portfolio and significant commitment to national poetry communities.