Reading by Poet Lisa Robertson

Internationally celebrated poet Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto and lived for many years in Vancouver. She studied at SFU in the '80s, with the English Dept's George Bowering, Roy Miki, Rob Dunham and Robin Blaser, and Donna Zapf of FPA. She funded her studies working as a night cleaning person and with research jobs, including cataloguing for Special Collections the audio poetry archive in the Contemporary Literature Collection, working with the Wordsworth Collection, and contributing to Roy Miki's bp Nichol bibliography. Today she is a freelance poet, essayist, translator and teacher, and since 2004 has lived in the Gartempe River valley in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region of France, with frequent forays outwards for temporary positions at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, and this spring, École des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, and University of East Anglia. Recently she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by Emily Carr University. Her most recent books are 3 Summers and Cinema of the Present, from Coach House, and the essay collection Nilling, from Bookthug. This fall, Krupskaya (San Francisco) is publishing the poetry chapbook Starlings: A Refrain. Her archive is held in the Contemporary Literature Collection in Bennett Library's Special Collections and Rare Books.