Laurie D. Graham
Biography
Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 Territory, outside of amiskwacîwâskahikan/Edmonton, Alberta, and she is a new return resident of Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 Territory, where she is a poet, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her maternal family comes from east-central Alberta by way of Ukraine and Poland, and her paternal family comes from central Saskatchewan by way of Northern Ireland and Scotland. She has about a century of history in Canada.
Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Her second and third books, Settler Education and Fast Commute, were both nominated for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry. Her fourth book, Calling It Back to Me, is out now with McClelland & Stewart. Recent work can be read in The Literary Review of Canada, The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Sublime: Poems for Vanishing Ice.
Micro-interview
I got to know Maya Angelou in junior high school after reading her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and I remember both her story and later her verse having a strong effect on me. Her poem “Caged Bird” echoes her autobiography, and I recall liking the musicality of it. I studied music before I studied poetry, so Angelou’s work was a good gateway for me:
I’ve been writing poetry for a long time — since childhood — but it wasn't until I got a bit older that I started understanding the stuff I was writing as poetry. I only started thinking of myself as a writer of poetry in my early twenties. That’s when I started getting deliberate about writing.
More and more I think the poet’s “job” is to figure out how to live as an invested, attentive, conscientious, sensing being and to take notes while you’re doing that.
Give me any of the Lorna Crozier, the Dionne Brand, the Fred Wah, the Marilyn Dumont, the Allen Ginsberg, the Joy Harjo, the Dennis Lee...