Titilope Sonuga is a Nigerian-Canadian poet, playwright and performer who has captured hearts across the globe. She is a leading voice in global literary communities, with work that dazzles from page to stage. Her poetry concert, Open, has shown to sold-out audiences in the UK, Canada, South Africa, and Nigeria. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Down to Earth (2011), Abscess (2014), and This Is How We Disappear (2019). Sonuga has released three spoken word albums, Mother Tongue (2011), Swim (2019) and Sis (2024).
A versatile creative force, Sonuga has scripted campaigns for Google, Intel, Samsung, UN Women, White Ribbon Alliance, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She was an ambassador for Intel's She Will Connect, a program dedicated to empowering women and girls through technological literacy across Africa. Sonuga has written three plays: The Six (an intergenerational exploration of womanhood), Naked (a one-woman play) and Ada the Country (a musical). Sankofa, Sonuga's libretto, which reimagines Igor Stravinski's Opera, L'histoire du Soldat, will premiere in Toronto, Canada, in the fall of 2024. Sonuga made history as the first poet to perform at a Nigerian presidential inauguration and was the 9th Poet Laureate of the City of Edmonton, where she currently resides.
I read lots of poetry in high school. Because of the kind of poetry we read, I thought that all poetry was inaccessible, difficult to decode, a language far out of my reach, until I encountered Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. It is a poem/play/epic that broke my world wide open and I fell in love with writing in a way that changed my life.
I have always written. Songs, stories, poems. My earliest memory of storytelling is as a young girl, maybe 8 years old. I didn't begin to consider myself a poet until years later, the first time I read something I had written out loud and saw and felt the way it was responded to. I was 20.
A poet's job is to give meaning to the world. To reflect the times. To remind us how we lived and loved. To make room for pain and suffering but also for hope and healing.
"I Am" is one of the first poems I wrote and read out loud. It is a poem that was born out of a desire to affirm the things I knew to be true about myself, in a world that tried to tell me otherwise. It is a celebration.
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Lauren Seal is a writer and former Poet Laureate of St. Albert, Alberta. She mentors the teen and young adult poets of SWYC, the Spoken Word Youth Choir, and performs in the adult incarnation of the group. Light Enough to Float--her debut novel-in-verse and winner of the Schneider Family Book Award Honor--is inspired by her own experiences with anorexia, anxiety, and hospitalization.
I didn't read a lot of poetry in high school, only what was assigned in class. However, I did fall deeply in love with one poem a very special english teacher gave me to analyze: "I Should Have Caught My Unicorn When I Was" by Daria Witt. I first read it while in the midst of a serious mental health crisis and this poem did exactly what poetry is meant to do -- made me feel seen and heard.
I started writing poetry when I was 14, but I didn't consider myself a poet until my mid-20s. Looking back on my poet journey, I can now see I was very wrong. I was as much a poet at 14 as I am now.
I believe poets have many different jobs. For me, I think a poet's job is to listen, observe, and record so that moments -- happy, beautiful, sad, angry, hopeful -- are remembered and available for others to both see themselves in and learn from.
I would memorize "How to Triumph Like a Girl" by Ada Limon. It's a beautiful, deceptively complex poem about the body, girlhood, and confidence.
Benjamin Hertwig is a National Magazine Award–winning writer, painter, and ceramicist, born and raised under big prairie skies and currently living on unceded Coast Salish territory, Vancouver. As a child, he liked sports publicly and books privately. Since graduating from high school, he has spent time as a soldier, a student, a bike courier, a treeplanter, an inner-city housing worker, and English instructor. His first book of poetry, Slow War, was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards, the Raymond Souster Award, and received the Stephan G. Stephansson Award. His writing has appeared with the New York Times, The Walrus, Ricepaper, and NPR, among others.
I most emphatically did not read poetry in high school. I wish that I had been interested in school at that time of my life, but I wasn't. I was very susceptible to a limiting conception of masculinity that included sports and militarism but not poetry. I now try and help my students, regardless of gender, think about the present and the future in a way that doesn't preclude new, and sometimes frightening, possibilities.
I started writing poetry after I came back from Afghanistan in 2006, though I didn't start a sustained writing practice until about 2014. Before writing Slow War I didn’t think of myself as a writer, but the affirmation I received from friends and from people who read the book helped me think of myself as one. I stumbled into writing during difficult times and was fortunate enough to know some excellent and kind people who eased me into the process and the profession gently and with a lot of graciousness. Poetry helped me to cover a lot of distance with fewer words than I could have with prose. I didn’t know how to create a larger literary structure, but poetry helped me find and follow a few bush trails of image and emotion.
I think good poetry is fundamentally moral, even as it's not didactic. It's moral in it's devotion to craft, structure, honesty, and language. A good poet expands our ability to engage with with fear, uncertainty, injustice, humor, the future, the past. A good poet helps us understand and treat our neighbours better and be more gentle with ourselves too. A good poet should be a good and generous neighbour.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's “i am graffiti.” It was one of the more popular choices for student recitation in the 2018 Vancouver Team Regional Competition, where I first heard it aloud, and the power and importance of the poem were seen on the faces of the various students who spoke. Simpson's words feel like the sort of lamentation that makes space for a better future.