Griffin Poetry Prize nominee Soraya Peerbaye and recent University of New Brunswick MA graduate Izza Hassan will be reading Thursday October 25 at 7:30pm in the Alumni Memorial Building Lounge at the University of New Brunswick – Fredericton. This event is sponsored by The University of New Brunswick Department of English, the University of New Brunswick Bookstore, The Fiddlehead, Icehouse Poetry, and The Canada Council for the Arts, and is free and open to the public.
Peerbaye’s most recent collection Tell: poems for a girlhood was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. Chronicling the 1997 murder of Reena Virk in Saanich, British Columbia, poems in this collection incorporate witness statements, Virk’s autopsy report, and the history of Saanich itself to drive “readers into excruciating proximity with our own adolescent longing, fear, shame and rage” (Griffin Judges’ Citation). Furious and heart-wrenching, Tell eschews sentimentality while leaving an indelible mark on its audience.
Soraya Peerbaye’s most recent collection of poetry, Tell: Poems for a Girlhood (Pedlar Press, 2015), won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry prize. Her first collection, Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (Goose Lane Editions, 2009) was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her poems have appeared in Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Women Poets, and the chapbook anthology Translating Horses. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.
Izza Hassan is an emerging writer from Aylmer, Quebec and a recent UNB MA graduate. Izza primarily writes fiction and nonfiction that centres on themes of identity, home, and immigration trauma. She has worked as an assistant editor for Cosmonauts Avenue, Cadence, and Qwerty. She currently lives in Halifax and is completing her first book.
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