Ottawa Night

Pearl Pirie is currently playing in many ponds, haiku, vispo and mechanically separated meat and fur poems. Her chapbook oath in the boathouse was published this month by above/ground press.

Amanda Earl's poetry is forthcoming in Rampike, The New Chief Tongue and Van Gogh's Ear. above/ground press published her second chapbook Eleanor in 2007. Her poetry has also been featured on Listenlight.net, Ditchpoetry.com and Unlikelystories.org and published by Vancouver's pooka press, Ottawa's Peter F. Yacht Club and in Calgary's Holy Beep! Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal.

LM Rochefort's poem "(W)hole" won the Honourable Mention for the 2007 Diana Brebner Prize and was recently published in Arc 59, Canada's National Poetry Magazine's winter issue. A writer and 'portfolio careerist' who divides her time between Ottawa and Val-des-Monts, Quebec, her poems have appeared in several local chapbooks and anthologies. A social animal, she is dangerous when cornered.

Janice Tokar's work appears in a chapbook featuring poems by members of the Pumping Irony Poetry Workshop. She has read at Tree, Sasquatch and the Muses reading series. One of her poems will be published by Bywords in their March on-line edition at bywords.ca.

Rhonda Douglas lives in Ottawa. Her work has been published in literary journals across Canada and overseas. In 2006, she won both the Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry and Arc Magazine’s Diana Brebner Award. Rhonda is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and is completing the Optional-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at UBC.

Jacqueline Lawrence is a diversity strategist by day. On Saturdays, she is one of the hosts/producers of CHUO 89.1 FM’s Black on Black. She is also the Program Director for 3 Dreads and A Baldhead’s Literary Series that has hosted readings with writers such as Colin Channer, Kwame Dawes, Lawrence Hill, and Lorna Goodison. In between these activities, she manages to follow her spirit to scribble poems. As a poet, Jacqueline received the Editor’s Choice Award from the National Library of Poetry for her submission to their River of Dreams anthology. Along with her writers’ collective “Write on the Edge”, they have published two chap books. In October 2006, Jacqueline released her fist solo chapbook, Surrender. She has enjoyed sharing selected pieces from her pending collection “invisible visibility: on being black, fat and a woman” with audiences in Ottawa, Toronto and Jamaica.

Sean Dowd has taught and played in Ottawa for more than half his life. He first attended Tree in 1981 at the invitation of writer and city councillor Clive Doucet. He has self published two chap books as Inflight Press, the first, Spring Loaded in 1994 and the second, Boomers on the Fly in 2006. In December 2007, Sean had a piece of "Future, Fantasy micro-fiction" published on-line by, "Serai Magazine" (sar ri), of Montreal. Please look it up...it is called, "Gitmo Begone" and it deals with Fidel Castro's last request, Hugo Chavez and Omar Khadr and how we all live as friends in the future.