City seeking first poet laureate

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This article was published 24/06/2017 (3350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg Arts Foundation is searching for Winnipeg’s first-ever poet laureate to celebrate the city, and the art form, in words.

“A poet laureate participates actively in the cultural life of the city and serves as a literary ambassador,” says Carol A. Phillips, executive director of the Winnipeg Arts Council. “The poet laureate creates new works, but also takes on the role of celebrating the city and facilitating connections between communities through the arts.”

Over a two-year term, the poet laureate will produce new works of poetry as well as a poetry-related event. Details and application forms are available on the foundation’s website at winnipegarts.ca.

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A summer job at a remote fishing lodge northeast of Cranberry Portage set Winnipeg high school student Bruce Masterman on the path to become an award-winning author and outdoor writer for newspapers and magazines.

A reflection on that long-ago summer and his outdoor mentor, a guide and trapper named Henry Bradley, is one of the pieces collected in Masterman’s book, One Last Cast: Reflections of an Outdoor Life (Rocky Mountain Books).

Masterman launches the book at McNally Robinson Booksellers tomorrow at 2 p.m. in an event co-sponsored by Ducks Unlimited.

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Winnipegger Anna Albo is one of 50 writers having their self-published stories on the reading platform Wattpad turned into audiobooks through a partnership between the platform and the giant Hachette Book Group.

Albo’s young adult romantic novel The Senator’s Son earned her a Watty award last year and chalked up 14 million reads on Wattpad.

As an audiobook, it will be available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other online retailers and will be available on CD for libraries. The Hachette Audiobooks: Powered by Wattpad partnership launched this year, selecting 50 stories from 375 million on Wattpad.

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Two Winnipeg high-needs schools have received funding from the Indigo Love of Reading Foundation to enrich their library resources and help students become confident readers.

The foundation has awarded Niji Mahkwa School $60,000 and Victor Wyatt School $40,000 as part of its commitment to support reading and literacy in Canada.

Since 2004, the foundation, Indigo Books and its staff and customers have provided more than $25 million to 3,000 schools across Canada. The foundation has also recently created a 35-minute video, called Between the Lines, on the importance of literacy education and the problem of underfunded libraries in high-needs schools. The video is posted on the website at loveofreading.org.

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The memoir of a multilingual 500-year-old parrot has earned Ontario writer Gary Barwin the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

Barwin won the award for his first novel, Yiddish for Pirates, the story of a Jewish pirate who survives the Inquisition, sails with Columbus and searches for the Fountain of Youth, accompanied by his wise-cracking African parrot. Barwin has written more than 20 books of poetry, children’s books and others to his name.

The annual prize, worth $15,000, began in 1947 and is awarded in Orillia, Ont., the hometown of the humorist for which it is named.

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A critical examination of Canadian graphic autobiographies has earned University of Winnipeg English professor Candida Rifkind a piece of this year’s Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best book of literary criticism in English in Canada.

Rifkind edited Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives with University of Waterloo English professor Linda Warley.

In 2009, Rifkind published an award-winning book on female writers and the left in the 1930s.

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