The Angel of the Big Muddy

When: Thursday, March 8, 7 pm.
Where: Aqua Books (274 Garry Street)
Cost: FREE

Mondo! Szumigalski
Mark Abley: Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture
The Angel of the Big Muddy

Followed by a panel discussion on aspects of Szumigalski's work, moderated by Alison Calder and featuring Mark Abley, Mari-Lou Rowley & Catherine Hunter.

The Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture Series, proposed by Regina poet Paul Wilson in 2001 and approved by the League of Canadian Poets’ National Council the same year, commemorates the award-winning Saskatchewan poet, who died two years earlier. Szumigalski was a mentor to numerous prairie poets and much loved in the literary community, especially in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. She was a founder of the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild and of the literary magazine Grain. Her achievements inspired (and she personally aided) the founders of the Manitoba Writers' Guild and the publication that became Prairie Fire. The lecture is delivered every year at the LCP’s Annual General Meeting and is subsequently published in Prairie Fire.

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Mark Abley is a writer and editor living in Montreal. As a young man in Saskatoon, he was deeply influenced by Anne Szumigalski, whose literary executor he would eventually become. He has written three collections of poetry, two books for children, and several non-fiction books. The best-known of them, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, was published internationally and translated into French, Spanish and Japanese. Abley is now preparing a volume of selected poems as well as a creative non-fiction book about Duncan Campbell Scott.

Poet and science writer Mari-Lou Rowley has published seven collections, including Suicide Psalms (Anvil Press), shortlisted for a Sask Book Award, CosmoSonnets (Jackpine Press) and Viral Suite (Anvil Press), which is on university curricula in North America and Europe. In 2010, she was one of twenty invited participants in the workshop Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science at the Banff International Research Station. Her first poem was published when she was eighteen, in the chapbook Saskatoon Poets, a collection of writing by the members of Anne Szumigalski’s poetry group. She moved back to Saskatoon in 2006.

Catherine Hunter teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Winnipeg. For ten years she was the poetry editor of The Muses' Company Press. She is also the author of seven books, including the poetry collection Latent Heat (Signature Editions, 1997), which won the Manitoba Book of the Year Award in 1998. Her most recent work is the crime novel Queen of Diamonds (Turnstone Press, 2006).

Alison Calder's poetry collection, Wolf Tree, won two Manitoba book awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert and the Pat Lowther awards. She teaches Canadian literature and creative writing in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba.

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See you there!