Caroline Everson was born in England and came to Port Hope with her family as a young child. She still lives there today. She graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a BA in Geography, and has worked in banking, retail, advertising & small businesses while raising three children. She also found time to write. In the past, her work has been published in local newspapers and magazines, and she has won two writing contests with her short fiction. Some of her stories were included in “It Ain’t Shakespeare”, a collection published by Cobourg’s Pollard Writers Guild in 2004. Caroline’s first book sale came in 2007. “Ali Runs With the Pack” was part of an educational program from Scholastic Canada. Her picture book, “Song on the Wind”, was published at the end of 2017. It’s an end-of-the-day poem, beautifully illustrated by Anne Marie Bourgeois.

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This week we play our interview with poet, Kate Rogers, who has lived and worked in Hong Kong for many years. While visiting Cobourg in the summer, to read her poetry, she told us about living in Hong Kong and the strength of the protests by young people against the extradition law proposed by the Hong Kong government and the erosion of freedoms in the city. She respects and admires the protesters’ bravery and determination to continue their fight for their “Five demands, not one less” and is deeply concerned about the the growing violence of the police in the face of the protest movement. Kate also talks about her repatriation to Canada this month, and her concept of home.
Kate Rogers’ poetry has appeared in literary journals in the U.S., Canada, UK; Hong Kong; Japan and Malaysia. Highlights include World Literature Today; the Fieldstone Review (University of Saskatchewan); Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century; Algebra of Owls; Voice and Verse; Twin Cities Cinema (Hong Kong-Singapore); Juniper; The Guardian; Asia Literary Review; Cha: an Asian Literary Journal; The Goose: a journal of Arts, Environment and Culture; Many Mountains Moving and Kyoto Journal. Her poems won second place in the 2018-2019 Big Pond Rumours Contest. They have been shortlisted for the 2018 Vancouver Tagore Society Contest and the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Kate’s latest poetry collection is, “Out of Place” (Aeolus House–an imprint of Quattro Books– Toronto, 2017). Kate will repatriate to Canada from Hong Kong in late November 2019. 

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This week meet Greg Kieszkowski who was born in Poland and came to Canada with his family when he was 15. Settling here wasn’t all that easy but Greg graduated from high school took a business diploma from George Brown College and then studied Philosophy and English at York graduating from there with a teaching diploma in 2000. He has taught at an Ajax high school for nearly 20 years. Two years ago he took a 3 day workshop and since then has started writing. His first book called Quintessential Quotations was released recently and he is planning a whole series

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Matthew KIng grew up in Etobicoke, and was deeply shaped by his summers at the cottage his grandfather built on Wollaston Lake in Hastings County. He began writing poetry in high-school in a largely unsuccessful attempt to get girls to fall in love with him. He veered from English into philosophy  and published a book based on his doctoral work titled Heidegger and Happiness: Dwelling on Fitting and Being. He taught at York until 2014, and in 2015 he moved to the Marmora area with his partner Brenda and their three cats. Since then he has made the trek back from philosophy to what Heidegger calls the “neighbouring mountaintop” of poetry. He is the winner of the poetry prize in Spirit of the Hills Writing contest this year.

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