Poet Laureate Stage Takeover

Speakers for this event

• A.F. Moritz

  A.F. Moritz

  A. F. Moritz has written more than twenty books of poetry, most recently, The Sparrow (2018), As Far As You Know (2020), and Great Silent Ballad (Forthcoming, Fall 2024). Moritz served as the sixth Poet Laureate of Toronto from March 2019 to May 2023. He also served for more than a decade as the Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at Victoria University at the University of Toronto, where he continues to supervise projects in Creative Writing. Moritz has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, inclusion in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. He is a three-time nominee for the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry (Rest on the Flight into Egypt, The Sentinel, and The New Measures). He was the winner of the ReLit Award for poetry in 2005 for Night Street Repairs. And his collection, The Sentinel, a Globe and Mail Top 100 of the Year, won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• George Elliot Clarke

  George Elliot Clarke

  The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke hails from Windsor, Nova Scotia, as of 1960 Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature, with two major tomes to his credit:  Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002) and Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (2012).  A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard.  He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer.  He is also a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.  His recognitions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Fellowship (US), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and International Fellow Poet of the Year, Encyclopedic Poetry School [2019] (China).  His acclaimed titles include Whylah Falls (1990, translated into Chinese), Beatrice Chancy (1999, translated into Italian), Execution Poems (2001), Blues and Bliss (selected poems, 2009), I & I (2008), Illicit Sonnets (U.K., 2013), Traverse (2015), Canticles II (MMXX) (2020), Canticles III (MMXXII) (2022), and J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence) (2021).  Clarke penned the libretto for James Rolfe’s triumphant, tragic opera, Beatrice Chancy (1998), plus two lyrics for Four the Moment’s 2022 Polaris Slaight Heritage Prize-winning album, We’re Still Standing (1987).

• Lillian Allen

  Lillian Allen