Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading featuring Liz Howard

Please join SFU English for the second annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading, featuring Liz Howard with guests Selina Boan, Sophie McCall, and June Scudeler. This free event takes place on Saturday, April 13th (Doors: 6:30 PM; Event: 7 PM) at the Segal Building (SG 1300). Enjoy readings, discussion, and light refreshments. The Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading honours a Canadian poet with a cash award and a celebration of their work. This event will occur each April and will be organized and administered by the Poetry in Canada Society, https://www.poetrycanada.org/. This year’s event acknowledges the generous support of SFU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and a City of Vancouver Communities and Artists Shifting Culture Grant. A Governor General’s Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Phyllis Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, publishing ten celebrated collections of poetry and prose and co-founding the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When “words abandoned” her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting. As Stephen Scobie once wrote, the work of Phyllis Webb “has always been distinguished by the profundity of her insights, the depth of her emotional feeling, the delicacy and accuracy of her rhythms, the beauty and mysterious resonance of her images – and by her luminous intelligence.” It is this legacy that the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading seeks to honour, by selecting a poet who is distinguished by similar qualities. In 2024, the second annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading honours poet Liz Howard. Howard’s work explores Anishinaabe ways of knowing, cosmology, ecology, and the liberatory potentials of language as art. Her first collection, “Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent”, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, “Letters in a Bruised Cosmos”, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at the University of Toronto, the rare Charitable Research Reserve, University of Winnipeg, McGill University, University of Calgary, UBC Okanagan, Douglas College, Sheridan College, and for The Capilano Review, and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Concordia University. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage, she currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Howard’s work reaches towards essential things—meaning and the mind and history—plumbing at once cosmic outsides, and deeply personal psychic insides, the mysteries of the universe and of the self. It is her embracing of wonder and of not knowing, of having questions, but not answers, that makes this poetry so philosophically and emotionally powerful. Important Information: Sponsors: This event is in collaboration with SFU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, SFU’s Department of English, Poetry in Canada, and the City of Vancouver Venue and Accessibility: The Segal Graduate School of Business is located at 500 Granville Street, Vancouver. The building is a brief walk from both the Granville and Waterfront SkyTrain stations, along with numerous bus stops. Plan your trip with TransLink’s Trip Planner. Limited bike racks are available out front, with others close by. Nearby paid parking is available at 443 Seymour St. Public parking is available at many locations near the Segal Building. The closest parking lot is at 400 West Cordova Street. All floors and washrooms within SFU Segal are wheelchair accessible. The Segal building has all-gender washrooms on the main floor, SB 1540 & SB 1640. COVID Protocols: Mask-wearing in indoor spaces is recommended at SFU campuses. Hand sanitizer will be available on site. Please note: This event may be recorded and photographed. If you do not wish to be photographed, please inform the photographer.