Writers-in-Residence

2020 Writers-in-Residence:

[In light of COVID-19 restrictions imposed by federal and provincial governments, and to eliminate risk for writers-in-residence, attending volunteers and the local community, the Al Purdy A-frame residency program was suspended in spring 2020. Limited residencies resumed in August. All 2020 writers will have residencies rescheduled in 2021 or 2022. In order to accommodate this rescheduling, no Call for Applications was conducted this year. Future developments will be announced on this site.]

Charmaine Cadeau (to be rescheduled)

Charmaine Cadeau has published two collections of poetry, What You Used To Wear and Placeholder. Her second collection won the Brockman-Campbell Award and the Re-Lit Award. Her artist's book, Skytale, is available through JackPine Press. She lives and teaches in North Carolina, where she codirects the Community Writing Center and edits Apogee Magazine.

Al Purdy Writer-in-Residence Charmaine Cadeau

Hannah Rahimi (to be rescheduled)

Hannah Rahimi 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.

Hannah Rahimi, 2020 Al Purdy A-frame Writer-in-Residence

John Barton (to be rescheduled)

John Barton’s twenty-six books, chapbooks, and anthologies include The Malahat at Fifty: Canada's Iconic Literary Journal (2017), Polari (2014), For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems (2012), and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets (2007). Since 1980, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies on four continents have published his poems, essays, and reviews. 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. We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos, his first book of prose with Palimpsest Press, and The Essential Douglas LePan, with Porcupine's Quill, were published in the spring of 2019. Signal Editions will publish his twelfth collection of poems, Lost Family, a book of sonnets, in 2020.

(Photo credit: John Preston)

John Barton, 2020 Al Purdy Writer-in-Residence

Felicity Williams (September 21 to October 18)

Felicity Williams is an active member of Toronto’s creative music community, regularly contributing voice to the performance and recording projects of others, including Bernice (Robin Dann), Bahamas (Afie Jurvanen), Alex Lukashevsky, Thomas Gill, The Weather Station, John Southworth, Jennifer Castle, Luke Kuplowsky, Ben Gunning, Sundar Viswanathan, Michael Davidson, and Amanda Tosoff. She has toured throughout North America, Europe and Australia, and has sung on a number of Juno award-winning and nominated albums. When she’s not on tour, you can probably find her at the Tranzac, Toronto’s premiere weirdo music institution, either making or listening to some interesting sounds.

Felicity first encountered Purdy’s poetry at the age of 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, one of which became the text of a piece that she turned in for a university assignment on sonata form. She continued composing with Purdy’s poems and in 2015 her ensemble was filmed by Nicholas de Pencier at the A-frame for Brian D. Johnson's documentary Al Purdy Was Here. Felicity is currently working on recording new material for this project, thanks to a grant from the Toronto Arts Council.

(Photo credit: Claire Harvey)

Felicity Williams, 2020 Al Purdy A-frame Writer-in-Residence

Madhur Anand (July 31 to August 15)

Madhur Anand is the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, a poetry collection published by McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada and nominated for a Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves published by Strange Light/Penguin Random House Canada, and several other literary works published in national and international literary magazines. She is a full professor of ecology and sustainability at The University of Guelph where was appointed the inaugural director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.

Madhur Anand, 2020 Al Purdy Writer-in-Residence

Sophie Edwards (August 28 to September 19)

sophie anne edwards is a writer, visual artist and curator of English and French descent who lives on Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island), northeastern Ontario. A geographer (PhD candidate, Queen’s U), she is interested in the spatial imaginary, geopoetics and the possibilities of interspecies collaboration. Her field- and installation-based practice focuses on the complexities of place, place-making and local ecosystems. She is a co-founder of 4elements Living Arts, acting as 4e’s founding artistic director from 2003-2018, during which time she designed and curated numerous community engaged projects, including the Connections Trail, which won an Ontario Lieutenant Governor award for cultural landscape heritage preservation, Bonnie Blink (land use history) and Elemental Festival (multidisciplinary site-specific work). Her writing, curatorial, and visual art work have been supported by the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. She has been published in a number of books (Geopoetics in Practice; British Women Travellers; Process: Landscape and Text), and journals including Empty Mirror, The Capilano Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, talking about strawberries all of the time, and h&.