AUDIENCE: For readers of Danez Smith, Tommy Pico, and Morgan Parker. For fans of M&S’s poetry Program.

DIVERSE M&S POETRY LIST: Acquired and edited by poetry editor DIONNE BRAND, the list showcases the brightest and most interesting poets in the country. The poets represent an array of experiences, identities, and points of view, and their works are hugely impactful and groundbreaking in terms of approach and style.

AWARD-WINNING POET: Shane Book’s previous collections have won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Archibald Lampman Award. He was also shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2015 and was a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in 2011.

WIDELY PUBLISHED: Shane Book’s writing has appeared in more than 20 collections, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry and in more than 70 periodicals in North America and the U.K. (According to the Ottawa Citizen)

SHANE BOOK grew up in Canada and Ghana. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MA in English and American Literature from New York University, an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His first volume of poetry, Ceiling of Sticks, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America “New Poet” Selection. Excerpts from Ceiling of Sticks received The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and a National Magazine Award. His second collection, Congotronic, won the Archibald Lampman Award, was a Kuhl House Poets Series Selection, and was a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Victoria.

Author Residence: Vancouver, BC

Praise for Shane Book and Congotronic:

“These are oral, oracular, and thoroughly original poems. Anyone who enters them will be transformed.”—Terrance Hayes, authorof Lighthead

“With an immediate and sustaining wit, and all fingers on the pulse of language, Shane Book seeks to blow the ghost out of the machine and the dust off of history.”—Michael Palmer, authorof Thread

“This poetry signals a breakthrough necessary, innovative and emotionally piercing.”—Judges’ Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize