May 18: John Barton

2:00 at Swizzles (no cover)

Hooray, the celebrated, award-winning poet John Barton is coming to Dusty Owl on the 18th!

John Barton was born in Edmonton and raised in Calgary. He has published eight books of award-winning poetry and five chapbooks, including Designs from the Interior (Anansi, 1993), Sweet Ellipsis (ECW, 1998), Hypothesis (Anansi, 2001) and Asymmetries, (Frog Hollow, 2004). A bilingual edition of West of Darkness: Emily Carr, a self-portrait was published by BuschekBooks in 2006. His ninth collection, Hymn, is forthcoming from Brick in 2009. He is co-editor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, which was published by Arsenal Pulp in 2007. He has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, the Patricia Hackett Prize (University of Western Australia), an Ottawa Book Award, a 2003 CBC Literary Award, and a 2006 National Magazine Award.

He was educated at the Universities of Alberta, Calgary, Quebec, and Victoria, and at Columbia University in New York, studying poetry with Gary Geddes, Eli Mandel, Robin Skelton, and Joseph Brodsky. In 1986, he received a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario and in 1994, he studied book editing at the Banff Publishing Centre. Since 1980, his poems have appeared in over twenty-five anthologies and seventy-five magazines (often more than once) across Canada and in the United States, Australia, India, and the United Kingdom. He worked as a librarian and editor for five national museums in Ottawa from 1985 to 2003, where he also co-edited Arc: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine for thirteen years and Vernissage: The Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada for two years. He has been poetry editor for Winnipeg’s Signature Editions since 2005. He currently lives in Victoria where he is the editor of the internationally celebrated quarterly, The Malahat Review.

As always, we'll follow the featured reader with our ever-friendly and surprising open mike, and the Object of Desire competition will whet materialist appetites once more.

As usual, we'll be holding forth at Swizzles - 246B Queen (or 246A, or whatever you want to call it: the basement of the building on the corner of the parking lot at Queen and Kent! Follow the poets, and the green awning.) See you there!