Biography
Salima Tourkmani-MacDonald is a poet and performer of Algerian-Canadian ancestry, from Riverview, New Brunswick. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing from St. Thomas University, and a Master’s in English in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Her work has been published in The Dalhousie Review, and Echolocation Magazine, and her poem, "Obituary For a Love Affair With a Girl" was shortlisted in Eavesdrop Magazine's Queer Joy poetry contest. Salima's honours also include a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where she was mentored by Danez Smith. Her writing is rooted in lived experience, and hinges on themes of family and identity. She currently lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Micro-interview
Yes! The first book of poetry I ever bought was Danez Smith's Don't Call Us Dead. Two of my favourite poems of all time are in this book, "summer, somewhere" and "dream where every black person is standing by the ocean." To this day, Danez Smith is my favourite poet.
I started writing poetry in my grade 12 creative writing class. I remember my teacher crushing an orange with his bare hands on the first day. Then, he instructed us to write down all the sensory details we noticed — the squelching sound it made when he crushed it, the piercing smell of citrus, the texture of the broken peel — and turn it into a poem. This lesson taught me that poetry is all around us, if you look for it.
I knew I was a poet when I got my first acceptance letter from a small literary magazine.
To preserve the fleeting.
"1992" by Liz Howard. I love how the lack of punctuation mimics the scramble to write down every detail of a memory before it fades.
