Stephen Collis – “Project Space: The Long Poem and the Field of Dissent.”
Stephen Collis is a poet and professor of contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. His many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008), On the Material (Talon Books 2010 — awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), and To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013). He has also written two books of criticism and a novel, The Red Album (BookThug 2013). His collection of essays on the Occupy movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (Talon Books 2012), is a philosophical meditation on activist tactics, social movements, and change. In September 2013 Coach House Books published DECOMP, a collaborative photo-essay and long poem written with Jordan Scott. Collis lives near Vancouver, in Tsawwassen BC, Coast Salish Territories.
Margaret Christakos – “Crossing Over: Temporalities of Erasure and Recuperation in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Erin Moure’s The Unmemntioable.”
Margaret Christakos is the author of a novel and nine collections of poetry including Sooner (2005), What Stirs (2010), and Multitudes (2013), from Coach House Books. In fall 2012 on a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, she conducted research in Greece and England in relation to her long poem-in-process Tumultetudes. From 2006 to 2012, she designed and facilitated “Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon” in the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies Creative Writing program, hosting more than 85 Canadian poets, and founded the online poetics resource influencysalon.ca. She teaches Creative Writing and Poetry in the SCS program, and works on occasion as Associate Faculty with the University of Guelph-Humber Creative Writing MFA program.
Michael Boughn – “How long is long?”
Michael Boughn was described in the Globe and Mail as “an obscure, veteran poet with a history of being overlooked.” His longish poem, Cosmographia – a post-Lucretian faux micro-epic was a GG Loser in 2011. It is the only extant faux micro-epic currently known to literary criticism.
Brenda Carr Vellino – “Nadine McGinnis’s Two Hemispheres: The Psychiatric Essay Poem, Spectatorship, Intersubjectivity, and Stigma.”
Brenda Carr Vellino is an Associate Professor of English at Carleton University with a teaching and research focus on American and Canadian poetry, Conflict Zone literature, and Canadian and Transnational Conflict Transformation Theatre. She has published on Seamus Heaney and post-conflict transitional justice (Peace Review), on Dionne Brand’s Inventory and translocal citizen witness (University of Toronto Quarterly) and on Canadian and transnational redress theatre in Canadian Literature and College Literature (both co-authored with Sarah Waisvisz). She is completing a manuscript on “The Secondary Witness in Translocal Human Rights Poetry”. Her current research project is titled “Rebuilding Treaty Relationships: Indigenous – Settler Redress Theatre.”