KAREN CALVELLE PhD. is a Winnipeg poet, writer, and editor, whose debut poetry collection, IOLAIRE (Turnstone), won the John Hirsch Most Promising Writer Award (2018). IOLAIRE weaves a heart-rending story around imagined letters and voices from the historical sinking of HMY IOLAIRE, Jan 1, 1919. IOLAIRE was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet’s Gerald Lampert Award for Most Promising Writer (2018), the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, and the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Karen is also the author of The Seasons, (At Bay Press), the whimsical correspondence and rhymes of a renegade Mother Goose in The Mother Goose Letters (At Bay Press), BiRDSONG (Atelier78), and most recently, Songs to My Portuguese / Minhas Canções Para Portugal, tr. Lívia Penado Jacob (forthcoming). Karen’s work has been published in At Bay’s Fiction Annual (2018), Border Crossings, CVII, Prairie Fire, and academic journals. Her play, “Crossword,” was a finalist in the “Sarasvati Bake Offs” (2015). A champion of prairie writing, Karen is a founding member of the enigmatic and longtime, somnambulant pachyderm press.
Photo: Leif Norman
Annotated correspondence between Mother Goose and her cohorts in Britain.
Captures the power that secrets and lies have in both the creation and destruction of the lives we build.
