Award-winning author Jan Zwicky will bring her literary skills from the Vancouver International Writers Festival to North Island College this Thursday when she reads from her newest poetry collection, Forge.
Gaspereau Press writes, “This new collection from Jan Zwicky is a set of variations that employs a restricted, echoic vocabulary to explore themes of spiritual catastrophe, transformation and erotic love.”
Zwicky is a widely-celebrated essayist on issues in music, poetry, philosophy, and the environment. She has published more than 10 books of poetry and philosophy, and this year has additionally released Forge, and a revised edition of her landmark philosophical meditation, Lyric Philosophy.
As a poet, musician and philosopher, Zwicky has won numerous awards for her work, including the Governor General’s Award for Songs for Relinquishing the Earth and the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Robinson’s Crossing. Her poetry has been translated into French, Spanish, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian.
“Jan Zwicky is a unique poet and philosopher,” writes Adam Dickinson from Canadian Literature. “This work has much to offer not just poets and philosophers, but anyone who has struggled with what it means to understand something in the terms of something else.”
Zwicky has taught creative writing at the University of New Brunswick, led numerous workshops, taught in the Writing Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and lectured widely in North America and Europe. She has also taught philosophy at a number of North American universities, most recently, the University of Victoria.
North Island College acknowledges the support of the Canada Council in presenting this free, public event. The reading will begin at 7 p.m. this Thursday in the Stan Hagen Theatre on the Comox Valley campus.
Copies of Forge will be available for purchase at the event.
For more information on Jan Zwicky’s reading or the Write Here Readers Series, call Beth Turner at 250-334-5000, ext. 4267.
— North Island College