About

 

Photo Credit: Gerry Kingsley, Studio Nine Eight, Sudbury.

I live and write in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.  I’m a secondary school English teacher at Marymount Academy by day, and a fervent reader and writer of poetry by night and on weekends.  My publications include You Must Imagine The Cold Here (Your Scrivener Press, 1997), braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001), The Narcoleptic Madonna (Penumbra Press, 2012), and Some Other Sky (Black Moss Press, 2017). My fifth book of poems, These Wings, will be published by Pedlar Press in Spring 2019.

In 2013, I read at The Battle of the Bards at the IFOA at Harbourfront in Toronto and travelled to work with Ken Babstock as my mentor at the Sage Hill Writing Experience in Lumsden, Saskatchewan.

In 2016, I took part in a historical fiction intensive with Lawrence Hill at the Banff Centre in Alberta and visited Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, to work with brilliant poets John Glenday and Jen Hadfield as my mentors.

My first literary mentor was the late Timothy Findley, through the Humber School for Writers. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to him, and always will, because he helped me to realize that I was a writer above all else.

From 2016-18, I was named the fourth Poet Laureate for the City of Greater Sudbury, and was the first woman appointed to that role. As laureate, I worked with the Northern Initiative for Social Action (NISA) and Open Minds Quarterly (OMQ) to raise awareness of how creative writing, and poetry in particular, can help those with mental health struggles to rise up creatively. I also worked with the Greater Sudbury Airport to put up ‘airport poems’ on the windows of the security area. In addition, I collaborated with Health Sciences North to display stanzas of poems in the windows of the palliative, oncology, and long-term care wards of the North Tower.  Beyond the scope of my projects, though, I hope that I helped to raise the profile of the literary, poetic, theatrical, musical and visual arts in Sudbury.  One of my key goals was to bring a sort of ‘poetic graffiti’ to the city, so that people who normally don’t read poems were exposed to them in a playful manner.

In the last three years or so, I’ve fallen in love with writing plays, thanks to Playwrights’ Junction at the Sudbury Theatre Centre (STC), under the guidance and direction of Matthew Heiti. So far, I’ve had two short plays presented there in staged readings, “Ghost of a Chance” and “Sparrows Over Slag.” I’m continuing to work on my plays, and received an Ontario Arts Council Theatre Creators’ Reserve grant in January 2017 to work on “Sparrows” and get dramaturgical input on the piece.  My first novel, a piece of historical fiction titled The Donoghue Girl, is now looking for a press to call its own.  So far, it’s still out there looking for a home. Currently, I’m taking a year away from classroom teaching to write the draft for the second novel in the trilogy.

I am a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and PEN Canada.  In my spare time, I love to cook for friends, travel, write, walk, listen to (and sing!) traditional Irish music, practice yoga, love taking aerial silks classes in Windsor, sing loudly, dance with my dogs in the living room, and meditate.

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