Joe Rosenblatt / Gallery 101 reading

Joe RosenblattThe A B Series presents two readings by Governor General's Award winning poet JOE ROSENBLATT. The first takes place at Gallery 101 on Friday, November 13th at Gallery 101 in Ottawa and the second takes place in the gallery Art-image in Gatineau's Maison de la culture on Saturday, November 14th. Please see below for more detail on the November 14th event.

At both events, books by Joe Rosenblatt will be available for sale and signature along with a cash bar service.

Over the course of a literary career spanning more than four decades, Joe Rosenblatt has authored twenty books and his poems have appeared in over thirty anthologies of Canadian poetry. He has received major awards such as the Governor General's Award and the BC Book Award.

Joe Rosenblatt was born in Toronto in 1933. He dropped out of trade school as a young adult and worked at a series of low-paying jobs until he started working as a laborer for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1956. He became interested in writing through his association with the worker poet Milton Acorn in the early sixties and the metaphysical poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen. By 1966 he had his first book of poetry published and he also received a Canada Council grant which allowed him to leave his job as a freight handler of the old Canadian Pacific Railway and devote the next year to writing and travelling.

He has traveled widely giving readings of his poems in Europe, Canada and the United States. Several bilingual volumes of his poetry have been published in Italian with translations by the late Prof. Alfredo Rizzardi of the University of Bologna, and Ada Donati of Rome. As well Rosenblatt's poems have also been also translated into French, Dutch, Swedish and Spanish . His most recent poetry volume, Dog was published by Toronto publisher, Mansfield Press. It is a collaborative book of sonnets between Joe Rosenblatt and poet Catherine Owen, utilizing the images of homeless dogs of inner Havana, taken by photographer, Karen Moe, when she was in Havana in the late nineties. Thirteen of her photographic canine images are prominently featured in this volume. The sonnets are tied in with those images. Exile Editions of Toronto recently published The Lunatic Muse, a prose work on the relationship between madness and the muse using Canadian literary sources. For the past 27 years he has been living in a beach resort community of Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island with his wife Faye and their three cats.

The A B Series acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.