Faculty
Poet Liz Howard honoured at Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading event
On Saturday, April 13th, 2024, poet Liz Howard was honoured at the annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading. She read from her work, and spoke alongside poet Selina Boan and professors Stephen Collis, Sophie McCall, and June Scudeler.
Poetry in Canada organizes and administers the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading, which occurs each April. Honorees receive a cash award and a celebration of their work. This year's event was made possible through a Communities and Artists Shifting Culture Grant from the City of Vancouver, and the generous support of Simon Fraser University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and SFU's Department of English.
Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading featuring Liz Howard
April 13, 2024
Doors 6:30 PM; Event: 7 PM
SFU Segal Building, 500 Granville St., Vancouver
A Governor General’s Award–winning poet and a member of the Order of Canada, Phyllis Webb was a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s, publishing ten celebrated collections of poetry and prose and co-founding the CBC Radio program Ideas (in 1965). When “words abandoned” her in the early 1990s and she was no longer able to write, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting.
As Stephen Scobie once wrote, the work of Phyllis Webb “has always been distinguished by the profundity of her insights, the depth of her emotional feeling, the delicacy and accuracy of her rhythms, the beauty and mysterious resonance of her images – and by her luminous intelligence.” It is this legacy that the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading seeks to honour, by selecting a poet who is distinguished by similar qualities.
In 2024, the second annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading honours poet Liz Howard. Howard’s work explores Anishinaabe ways of knowing, cosmology, ecology, and the liberatory potentials of language as art. Her first collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, was shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Trillium Poetry Prize. Howard received an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. She has completed creative writing and Indigenous arts residencies at the University of Toronto, the rare Charitable Research Reserve, University of Winnipeg, McGill University, University of Calgary, UBC Okanagan, Douglas College, Sheridan College, and for The Capilano Review, and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Concordia University. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in Northern Ontario of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage, she currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Howard’s work reaches towards essential things—meaning and the mind and history—plumbing at once cosmic outsides, and deeply personal psychic insides, the mysteries of the universe and of the self. It is her embracing of wonder and of not knowing, of having questions, but not answers, that makes this poetry so philosophically and emotionally powerful.
Photo 1 (left to right): Selina Boan, Stephen Collis, Liz Howard, June Scudeler, Sophie McCall
Photo 2 (left to right): Selina Boan, Liz Howard, June Scudeler
Photo 3: Sophie McCall at the podium; (left to right) Selina Boan, Liz Howard, June Scudeler
Photo 3: Our wonderful audience!