AMELIASBURGH, Ont. – The Al Purdy A-frame Association is pleased to announce the writers-in-residence for the 2022-23 season at the A-frame in Prince Edward County.

Prior to the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic, five writers-in-residence had been announced for the 2020 season. In consultation with the writers, the residencies have been rescheduled for 2022. Seven new writers will join them, four in residence this year and three to open 2023.

The seven new writers are Ariel Gordon, Tanis MacDonald, Ronna Bloom, H.E. Casson, Matthew Hollett, Paul Elter and Garth Martens. The five whose residencies were deferred are Daniel Lockhart, Hannah Rahimi, Charmaine Cadeau, John Barton, and Felicity Williams, who is returning from a truncated visit in 2020.

“I’m very excited about all these writers,” said Jean Baird, president of the Al Purdy A-frame Association. “It’s a diverse and highly talented group – and we’re pleased to be able to schedule a full season.”

April 23-May 20

Daniel Lockhart is the author Devil in the Woods (Brick Books, 2019) and Breaking Right (Porcupine’s Quill, 2020). His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island, including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, the Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, and Belt. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong, where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.

May 22-June 10

Hannah Rahimi grew up in Toronto and now lives in Montreal. Her short fiction has been published in Cosmonaut’s Avenue, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, New England Review and Carve. She has been a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and the New England Review Award for Emerging Writers.

June 12-July 1

Charmaine Cadeau has published two collections of poetry, What You Used to Wear (Goose Lane Editions, 2004) and Placeholder (Brick Books, 2013). Her second collection won the Brockman-Campbell Award and the Re-Lit Award. Her artist’s scroll book, Skytale, (2018) is available through JackPine Press. Born in Ontario, she now lives and teaches in North Carolina, where she co-directs the Community Writing Center and edits Apogee Magazine.

July 3-August 5

John Barton’s 26 books, chapbooks, and anthologies include Polari, For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (Goose Lane Editions, 2014) and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007). A three-time recipient of the Archibald Lampman Award, he’s also won an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award, and a National Magazine Award. Between 1989 and 2018, John edited Arc Poetry Magazine, Vernissage: The Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada, and The Malahat Review. Barton lives in Victoria, BC.

August 14-August 26

Ariel Gordon and Tanis MacDonald will share a residency. Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the author of two collections of urban-nature poetry, both of which won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry – Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019), and TreeTalk (At Bay Press, 2020), a public poetry project where Ariel hangs poems in trees and asks passersby to add their thoughts, ideas, and secrets.

Tanis MacDonald is the author of seven books, the latest being Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022).  Her last book of poetry, Mobile (Book*hug Press, 2019) was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award in 2020. Originally from the prairies, she has made her home in southwestern Ontario for the past 15 years, on traditional territories of the Anishnaabe and Haudenosauneee peoples. She hosts the podcast Watershed Writers and is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

August 28-September 23

Ronna Bloom is the author of six poetry collections. Her most recent book, The More (Pedlar Press, 2017), was longlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. She has collaborated with filmmakers, architects, choreographers, and conservationists, and has had work exhibited in Canada, the UK, and Italy. Ronna is currently Poet in Community to the University of Toronto and developed the Poet in Residence program at Sinai Health. Her chapbook, Who is your mercy contact? will be published by Espresso-chapbooks in Spring 2022.

September 25-October 7

Felicity Williams is an active member of Toronto’s creative music community. She has toured North America, Europe, and Australia ,and has sung on several Juno award-winning and nominated albums. Felicity first encountered Purdy’s poetry at 17, when her mother gave her a copy of Naked with Summer in Your Mouth. She began writing songs based on the poems in that collection. In 2015, her ensemble was filmed at the A-frame for Brian D. Johnson’s documentary Al Purdy Was Here. Williams will complete a residency she began in 2020.

October 9-October 23

H.E. Casson (they/them) is a Toronto area poet, short fiction writer, and voice actor. Their works are often speculative, and themes include gender, sexuality, homelessness, disability, family, and the structures and playfulness of language. Casson is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee and their performance in Moonbase Theta, Out as Moddy Sarah was an Audio Verse Award finalist. They can be found at hecasson.com and as @hecasson on Twitter.

April 16-May 26, 2023

Matthew Hollett is a writer and photographer in St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). His work explores landscape and memory through photography, writing and walking. Album Rock (Boulder Books, 2018), his first book, is a work of creative nonfiction and poetry investigating a curious photograph taken in Newfoundland in the 1850s. He won the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize for “Tickling the Scar,” a poem about walking the Lachine Canal during the early days of the pandemic. His poetry collection Optic Nerve is forthcoming from Brick Books in 2023.

May 28-June 23, 2023

Paul Elter and his partner lived in remote cabins in the Yukon and raised three children with few modern conveniences. His work focuses on belonging and place, personal storytelling, travel, struggle and displacement, the outsider and what living in the space between historical past and contemporary present can mean. Elter currently lives in Chelsea, Quebec, and is a photographer at the National Gallery of Canada.  He was the winner of Yukon’s Advanced Artist Award in 2000. Most recent writings include Royal Photographic Society’s “Travel & the Mobile Darkroom, Silver, Salt & the Arctic Ocean” (2020) and “One and Many: Wet-Collodion and Woodburytype” (2021); and a recent lecture for the Colour Fever Symposium at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England, “Maxwell’s Disapointment- Sutton’s Accident” (2021).

June 25-July 21, 2023

Garth Martens is a member of Palabra Flamenco, an ensemble that combines traditional flamenco dance, guitar, and song with English-language poetry. His first book is Prologue for the Age of Consequence (Anansi, 2014), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry. He has also published a chapbook, Remediation (JackPine, 2018), with visual artist Chelsea Rushton. In 2011, he won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.