Clarke Canada’s new poet laureate

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/01/2016 (3912 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nova Scotia-born poet George Elliott Clarke has been declared Canada’s new parliamentary poet laureate.

Clarke is the seventh poet to hold the position (following Michel Pleau). He is an Officer of the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada, and has received the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Awards Gold Medal for Poetry and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award.

As parliamentary poet laureate, he’ll advise on the Parliamentary Library’s collection of poetry, write poetry for use in Parliament on important occasions, and help sponsor readings.

“I’m humbled and honoured, inspired and eager, to follow previous parliamentary poets laureate in valuing in verse our supernatural nation’s exemplary experiments in democratized humanism,” Clarke said in a statement.

***

What’s your gut telling you?

The University of Manitoba Café Scientifique is giving Winnipeggers a chance to chew on this question. The Café will present “Gut Instinct: The science behind the brain-gut connection” at McNally Robinson on Wednesday at 7 p.m.

Panelists include Dr. Jean-Eric Ghia and Dr. Lesley Graff, as well as patient Paula Storney. The panel discussion, which will be moderated by Dr. Charles Bernstein, will get into the nitty-gritty of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), its impact on Canadians, and progress in research.

***

Hark! A Vagrant creator Kate Beaton‘s second picture book, King Baby, will be published by Scholastic Books imprint Arthur A. Levine Books in September 2016.

Beaton’s galloping success shows no sign of slowing — her first picture book, The Princess and the Pony, was published in July, followed by her third collection of strips, Step Aside, Pops (Drawn & Quarterly) in September, both to immediate acclaim.

The book will be edited by Cheryl Klein and Emily Clement. “We immediately loved the idea of a baby that rules over everybody’s life, who remains charming throughout in part because he remains so oblivious,” Klein said in an interview with Publishers Weekly.

Beaton fans have likely encountered King Baby already, in the cartoonist’s latest strips on www.harkavagrant.com or on Twitter at @beatonna.

***

At least 10 prominent comic book artists have withdrawn from the Angoulême comics festival’s lifetime achievement award contest in protest at this year’s all-male shortlist.

Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Riad Sattouf, Joann Sfar, Milo Manara, Pierre Christin, Etienne Davodeau, Christophe Blain and Brian Michael Bendis pulled out of the running after the Women in Comics Collective Against Sexism called for a boycott of the prize.

This year’s shortlist included 30 male artists. In the 43-year history of the prize, reported the Guardian, a woman has won only once.

“I am angry when I hear us being called ‘politically correct.’ I have never asked for parity. That would make all the nominated women suspect; people would say that they did not deserve their place and they were there just to satisfy quotas,” Sfar wrote in an editorial for the French edition of The Huffington Post.

“I simply do not want to participate in a ceremony that is at this point disconnected from the reality of the current comics world. Thirty names without a single woman is a slap at those who have devoted their lives to creating or loving comics.”

julienne.isaacs@gmail.com