Antony Di Nardo has written nine books of poetry. His award-winning work appears widely in journals and anthologies across Canada and internationally and has been translated into several languages. His long poem suite May June July was winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for 2017 and was short-listed for a National Magazine Award. He is an active member of the League of Canadian Poets and the Cobourg Poetry Workshop. The winner of the inaugural Don Gutteridge Poetry Award, Through Yonder Window Breaks was published by Wet Ink Books. Antony’s present project is his collection Cloudspotting which he will present with his insights into the work of Antonio Damasio at the Accenti Festival of the Arts hosted by the University of PEI in Charlottetown this coming June.
poetry month
Phyliss Wright
Phyliss Wright’s journey as a poet started in university days, when she edited a literary magazine in Colorado during the tumultuous sixties, where she also taught mountain climbing and piton-craft. She returned to writing poetry after a stint in the Marines as an air traffic controller. Poems are a way she explores the world and her own thoughts about life. Her work is shaped by her adventures in Afghanistan, Spain, Poland, and Siberia. But her formative work began in widowhood, when she served as a hospital director in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan, and then as a teacher in the United Arab Emirates. She wrote with the Kent State University Writers Group for over twenty years and still meets with them remotely. Recently she married Canadian, Eric Wright, who is a Northumberland writer. A new resident of Port Hope, she writes with the Cobourg Poetry Workshop, has two children, four grandchildren and a cat who came with her from the United Arab Emirates.
PJ Thomas
Canadian poet, PJ Thomas writes and publishes poetry in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. She has launched three full collections in the Water Trilogy; Undertow (2020), Waves (2022), and Drifting (2024). Thomas wrote the lyrics to three songs on the Rick Fines Juno Award-nominated album, Solar Powered Too. Her work has been published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. Thomas’s books have met with critical acclaim. She recently received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to write her next manuscript, Afterwaves. Thomas is a member of both the League of Canadian Poets, and The Writers’ Union of Canada. As an experimental poet, she creates verse about the local geography, the cosmos, natural bodies of water, community, and how they shape emotion. Ms. Thomas makes her home with her cat by the Otonabee River.
Matthew King
This week we celebrate the last week of poetry month with Matthew King. Matthew taught philosophy at York University for a number of years before he moved to the Marmora area in 2015—or, as he likes to say, “what Al Purdy called ‘the country north of Belleville’”—where he tries to grow things, counts birds, and takes pictures mostly of flowers with bugs on them. Over the last several years, catalyzed in part by winning the Spirit of the Hills Festival Poetry Prize in 2019, he has increasingly been concentrating his energies on poetry. In 2020 he won the FreeFall magazine poetry contest; in 2023 he was a runner-up for Plough Quarterly’s Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award, won Arc magazine’s “Award of Awesomeness” for June, and had a poem selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2024. Others of his poems have appeared in various magazines in print and online.
Kathryn MacDonald
Our third celebration of Poetry Month features poet Kathryn MacDonald. Kathryn has published in Room, FreeFall and other Canadian literary journals and anthologies, as well as internationally in the U.K., U.S. and even Indonesia. Her poem, “Duty / Deon” won the Arc Award of Awesomeness (January 2021). “Seduction” was entered in the Freefall Annual Poetry Contest and published in Freefall (Fall 2020). Kathryn is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon: Enchantments (poetry chapbook), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems and Calla & Édouard (fiction), as well as a book of essays and recipes, The Farm & City Cookbook with its philosophy of “eat natural, eat local.” Kathryn lives in Belleville on the north shore of Lake Ontario where the Moira River flows into the Bay of Quinte. Kathryn taught literature as well as creative and nonfiction writing in Ontario’s college system in addition to facilitating writing workshops and coaching sessions. For pleasure she pursues photography and sketching.
Allan Briesmaster
This week we celebrate Poetry Month with Allan Briesmaster. Allan is a poet, freelance editor and publisher, active on the Toronto-area literary scene for many years. He has been a workshop leader and reading series organizer and was a partner in Quattro Books in 2006-2017. He currently operates his own small, independent press, Aeolus House, specializing in custom-designed, limited-edition books of poetry. The most recent of Allan’s nine poetry collections are The Long Bond: Selected and New Poems, from Guernica Editions in 2019, and Windfor, from Ekstasis Editions in 2021. He has read his poetry, given talks, been on panels, and hosted events at venues from Victoria to St. John’s. He is a Life Member of The League of Canadian Poets and of The Ontario Poetry Society. Due to an unexpected problem with the sound on the programme when it was recorded recently, this episode is is an encore presentation from 2021. The episode originally proposed for this week will be re-recorded for broadcast this summer.
Kate Rogers
On our first show for Poetry Month this year, we interview poet, Kate Rogers. Kate’s poetry collection, The Meaning of Leaving, launches in Toronto on April 20th. Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Donna Langevin, debuted in the first week of January 2024. Kate recently won first place in the subTerrain magazine 2023 Lush Triumphant Contest for her suite of poems, “My Mother’s House.” Her poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. She has been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She is a Co-Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series. More at: katerogers.ca
James Pickersgill
We interview James Pickersgill this week. If asked, “When did you most recently compose a poem?” James will likely be able to say, “A few hours ago” or “Earlier today, I was continuing to work on a current one.”
Any poem James writes will very often be a love poem for his wife, who consistently refuses to be identified as “his muse” and rightly so.
James has been a happy-warrior type of poetry activist in our lively Cobourg Arts scene for many years, including service as a member of the various selection Committees appointed by Town Council to discern who should be our 2nd, 3rd and 4th Poets Laureate. James is the coordinator of the Third Thursday Readings and the Cobourg Poetry Workshop.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Kate Rogers
Kate Rogers describes herself as a transnational poet. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals and anthologies based in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada, the U.S. and U.K. During her more than two decades in Asia, Kate was inspired to write about the impact of colonialism and the destruction of the natural environment. Kate’s collection, Out of Place expresses her life in the liminal zone between countries, cultures and identities. Kate repatriated to Canada in December 2019 after spending one third of her life in Asia. The poems in Out of Place evoke for the reader the experience of being of a place, yet never belonging; they explore longing and transformation. Kate Rogers’ next poetry collection, The Meaning of Leaving, is forthcoming with Montreal-based publisher, Ace of Swords (AOS), in early 2024. Her poems recently appeared in SubTerrain, The Windsor Review and Looking Back at Hong Kong.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Antony di Nardo
Our celebration of Poetry Month continues with a conversation and reading from Antony di Nardo which we made last year. Antony has written six books of poetry. His work appears widely in journals and anthologies across Canada and internationally, and has been translated into several languages. His long poem suite May June July was winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for 2017 and was short-listed for a National Magazine Award. He spent the last years of a teaching career in Beirut where he launched his first book of poetry Alien, Correspondent in 2010. His collection Forget – Sadness – Grass was recently released by Ronsdale Press. The winner of the inaugural Don Gutteridge Poetry Award, Through Yonder Window Breaks is published by Wet Ink Books.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Word on the Hills Radio Program 