The Factory Reading Series @ VERSeFest: Paige Ackerson-Kiely + Barry McKinnon, March 4, 2012

The Factory Reading Series
as part of the second annual VERSeFest poetry festival

The Factory Reading Series Lecture Series, two talks and readings by:

Paige Ackerson-Kiely (Vermont)
and Barry McKinnon (Prince George BC)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan,

Sunday, March 4, 2012
FREE ADMISSION!
4:30pm at The Mercury Lounge, 56 Byward Market Square, Ottawa
check the VERSeFest link for the full schedule of events!
February 28-March 4, 2012

Paige Ackerson-Kiely‘s first collection, In No One’s Land, was chosen by DA Powell and published by Ahsahta Press in 2007. Her second book, My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta, 2012)  began as a response to Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s memoir Alone, and is concerned with exploration, leave-taking and thwarted journeys. Paige has also published a chapbook of prose poems, Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed (above/ground 2011) and a letterpress art folio, This Landscape (Argos, 2010).  Her poems have appeared widely in journals here and abroad, and have been translated into several languages. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her work from such organizations as Poets & Writers, The Jentel Foundation, Vermont Arts Council and others.

Currently Paige lives in West Addison, Vermont where she is employed at a homeless shelter in a neighboring town. In her spare time she co-edits the poetry annual A Handsome Journal, a subsidiary of Black Ocean (Cambridge, MA.) She is working on a second novel, Made to Lie Down in Green Pastures, a third collection of poetry, and a lyrical comic book illustrated with medium format photographs and centered around the life of Kate Marsden, particularly her time spent in Siberian leper colonies.
http://www.versefest.ca/poets/paige-ackerson-kiely/

Barry McKinnon was born in 1944 in Calgary Alberta, where he grew up.  In 1965, after two years at Mount Royal College, he went to Sir George Williams University in Montreal and took poetry courses with Irving Layton.  He graduated in 1967 with a B.A. degree.  In 1969, he graduated with an M.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and was hired that same year to teach English at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George where he has lived and worked ever since.

Barry McKinnon’s The the was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1080.  Pulp Log was the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for the B.C. Book Prizes in 1991 and Arrhythmia was the winner of the bp Nichol Chapbook Award for the best chapbook published in Canada in English in 1994. His chapbook Surety Disappears was the runner-up for the bp Nichol Award in 2008.

McKinnon's latest trade collections:
In the Millennium. Vancouver: New Star, 2009.
The Centre:  Poems 1970-2000. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2004.
http://www.versefest.ca/poets/barry-mckinnon/