Poets This year, StoryFest will again be showcasing Canadian poets. John Asfour  John Asfour was blinded by a grenade when he was 13 years old during the Lebanese civil war in 1958. Loss of sight dominates his newly released book of poems, Blindfold. He has books published in French, English and Arabic. He was the first writer-in-residence at the Joy Kogawa house, a cultural centre kept as a reminder mistreatment of Japanese Canadians after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Asfour has won many notable, literary prizes such as: the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize & the Joseph Staford award. He has worked as a poet, a translator and professor of creative writing. Asfour organized two conferences on Arab immigrants in Quebec. He immigrated to Montreal in 1968. Catherine Chandler was born in New York and raised in Pennsylvania. She has worked as a translator; she is fluent in Spanish, French and English, and as a professor. She completed her graduate studies at McGill University in Arts in Culture and Values in Education. Chandler is the co-editor of Greenwood Centre for Living History’s Passages, a collection of poetry by the Greenwood poets. Her new collection of poetry Lines of Flight includes sonnets, a style she has won awards for. She is the winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Competition and a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She lives in St. Lazare. Gary Townsend  Gary Townsend has played the music scene in Ste. Anne de Bellevue for decades. He began performing spoken word poetry a couple of years ago at Twigs Cafe. Gary is known as a one-man band, using electronic as well asacoustic instruments, but his entourage knows him best as a sound man and anoriginal song-writer of conviction and humility: one of Montreal area's bestkept secrets.Click from Poets back to StoryFest page. |