Location: The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Ulrich Recital Hall
Join the UMD Department of English for a Writers Here and Now event featuring Karen Solie and LaToya Watkins.
Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up on the family farm in southwest Saskatchewan, Canada. She is the author of five collections of poetry. Short Haul Engine (Brick Books, 2001) won the Dorothy Livesay Award and was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005) was shortlisted for the Trillium Poetry Prize. Pigeon (Anansi, 2009) won the Pat Lowther Award, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Prize. The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, FSG, 2014) was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. The Caiplie Caves (Anansi, Picador, 2019; FSG, 2020) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Her selected poems, The Living Option, published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2013, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has received the Latner Poetry Prize and the Canada Council for the Arts Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for an artist in mid-career. The 2021 Jack McClelland Writer in Residence for the University of Toronto, and the 2022 Holloway Visiting Poet for the University of California at Berkeley, she is currently a lecturer in creative writing with the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
LaToya Watkins’ writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Sun, Kweli Journal, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. She is a Kimibilo fellow and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, MacDowell, OMI: Arts, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Camargo Foundation. She is the author of Perish and Holler, Child.
Center for Literary and Comparative Studies | College of Arts and Humanities | English | Jimenez-Porter Writers' House