About

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

I live and write in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. 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), Some Other Sky (Black Moss Press, 2017), and These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). My next book of poems, Emptying the Ocean, will be published by Frontenac House in Fall 2022.

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 six 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.  Sparrows had a staged reading at the Sudbury Theatre Centre in May 2018 as part of the PlaySmelter New Work Theatre Festival (organized by Pat the Dog Theatre Creation). In May 2019, my play Letters to the Man in the Moon also had a staged reading at the STC.

My first novel, a piece of historical fiction titled The Donoghue Girl, is now looking for a press to call its own.

I am a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario Representative for The Writers’ Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.  In my spare time, I love to cook for friends, travel, write, hike in the woods, swing kettlebells in dangerous ways, canoe, snowshoe, and listen to (and sing!) traditional Irish music. I also practice yoga regularly. I mostly love to walk…wherever and whenever I can…but especially out in the woods or near lakes because I love birds and trees.

My author website is http://www.kimfahner.com