Poets & Pints Celebrating National Poetry Month
“The purpose of poetry is to restore to mankind the possibility to wonder.” — Octavio Paz
April is National Poetry Month!
Bookmark is pleased to host our first annual Poets and Pints event, a celebration of our local poets during poetry month, taking place in the An Seanchai Room at The Olde Triangle Irish Alehouse, 5136 Prince Street on Monday, April 3rd from 6:30 – 9 pm.
This year’s event will feature local poets Annick MacAskill, Claire Goulet and Cory Lavender reading from their new poetry collections followed by a moderated conversation between the poets and an audience Q&A hosted by Heather Jessup.
The event will conclude with an open mic where other poets and aspiring poets can read their poetry to the audience. The open mic is limited to 10 participants. Please register for the open mic by emailing halifax@bookmarkreads.ca.
Refreshments will be available as well as a cash bar. All are welcome! We hope you’ll join us.
Heather Jessup: Heather Jessup teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Dalhousie University. She is the author of the novel The Lightning Field, and a book on truth, lies, and art called This Is Not a Hoax: Unsettling Truth in Canadian Culture. She is the co-curator of the national exhibition Make Believe: The Secret Library of M. Prud’homme – A Rare Collection of Fakes, which toured across Canada in 2019. Her work has been nominated for the Journey Prize, New American Voices, two Atlantic Book Awards and the Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia on the unceded territories of Mi’kma’ki.
Annick MacAskill: Annick MacAskill is a poet, editor, translator, and educator based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia, the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq. She is an Assistant Professor (limited term) of French in the Department of Languages and Cultures at Saint Mary’s University. MacAskill is the author of four full-length poetry collections, including Shadow Blight (Gaspereau Press, 2022), winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and Votive (Gaspereau Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in journals and
anthologies across Canada and abroad and in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology series.
Clare Goulet: Clare Goulet is a poet, essayist, editor, and instructor and the coordinator of the Writing Center at MSVU. Her interests include interdisciplinary writing, poetics, metaphor and the work of Jan Zwicky, especially applications of her notion of ‘lyric philosophy.’ Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Gaspereau Press, 2024) is her first collection of poems. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Grain, Room, Collateral, Poetry Canada Review, and The Dalhousie Review. She lives and teaches in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS.
Cory Lavender: Cory Lavender is a poet of African Nova Scotian and European descent living in the Kespukwitk district of Mi’kma’ki (Southwest Nova Scotia). His chapbooks are Lawson Roy’s Revelation (Gaspereau Press, 2018) and Ballad of Bernie “Bear” Roy (knife | fork | book, 2020). His work has appeared in journals such as Grain, Prairie Fire, Riddle Fence, and The Fiddlehead, and in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Press, 2020). His full-length collection of poems, Come One Thing Another, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2024.