The Future is Always Beginning

the-future-is-beginningI am honoured to be asked to participate in the new “Poet Laureate Emerging Writers Reading” on November 25 at 7 p.m., at the Art Gallery of Regina, 2420 Elphinstone Street.

My thanks to Saskatchewan’s poet laureate, Judith Krause, for hosting “The Future is Always Beginning”!

I’ll be reading with Cassidy McFadzean, dee Hobsbawn-Smith and Jim McLean. For an insight into the range of work you’ll hear, here are short bios, from the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild.

Shelley Banks was born in a small town in the BC Rockies, and raised in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Shelley has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, and her first collection of poetry, Exile on a Grid Road, was published this fall by Thistledown Press. Her current writing includes photography blogs about Prairie wildflowers and birds, as well as poetry and fiction projects. Shelley lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Poet, essayist, fiction writer and journalist dee Hobsbawn-Smith is the 35th Writer in Residence at the Saskatoon Public Library. She holds an MFA in Writing. Her writing appears in Canadian, Scottish and American literary journals, anthologies, newspapers and magazines. Her most recent books are What Can’t Be Undone: Stories; Wildness Rushing In, [a finalist for SK Book Awards’ 2015 Best Poetry Collection and Book of the Year]; and Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet.

Cassidy McFadzean was born in Regina, received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches at Luther College. She released her first collection of poems Hacker Packer with McClelland & Stewart this past April, and has published poems in magazines across Canada with new work in Prelude, The Puritan, and The Walrus. She is currently at work on a Saskatchewan Arts Board-funded poetry collection, Drolleries, named for grotesque figures found in Medieval manuscripts. Two poems from Drolleries are long-listed for the 2015 CBC Poetry Prize.

Jim McLean had a long career with Canadian Pacific Railway and with Transport Canada, living and working in various Canadian locations. He is an original member of the Moose Jaw Movement poetry group, and his work has appeared in magazines and anthologies and on CBC Radio. He is the author of The Secret Life of Railroaders and co-author of Wildflowers Across the Prairies. His illustrations have appeared on book covers and in several literary and scientific publications. Coteau Books will publish his poetry manuscript tentatively titled 1957, in early 2017.

AND! For any flower fans in Saskatchewan, I would like to point out that Jim’s book, Wildflowers Across the Prairiesis simply awesome. This is the best guide I have found, and I’ve searched many for my PrairieWildflowers blog! Seriously! You might have to hunt to find it, but copies are out there…

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Shelley Banks

Writer, editor, photographer.