Poet Lorna Crozier

Since the 1980s, Lorna Crozier has been one of Canada’s most popular and influential poets. She will give a free public performance of her poetry on March 19 at 7 pm in Schurman Market Square, McDougall Hall, UPEI. She will also give two poetry writing workshops at UPEI on March 21. These events are presented by the UPEI Faculty of Arts and English Department.

Raised in her beloved Prairie landscape on a Saskatchewan farm and living on Vancouver Island since 1991, Crozier is renowned for her poems about nature, human interaction with the natural world, and devotion to one’s places and homes. She’s also known for her poem sequence “The Sex Life of Vegetables,” broadcast nationally on CBC Radio.

An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna is equally cherished for her poems about women’s lives, human relationships, and the interplay among nature, human history and myth, and spiritual elements infusing existence and experience. Her book titles embody her poetic expanse: The Garden Going on Without Us, The House the Spirit Builds, Humans and Other Beasts, What the Living Won’t Let Go, and Everything Arrives at the Light. Crozier’s poetry is also celebrated for her subversive wit and deep commitment to social justice. 

A professor of creative writing for 25 years at the University of Victoria, Crozier will lead two poetry workshops at UPEI on March 21: The Free-verse Line from 9:30 am–12 pm and The Prose Poem from 1–3:30 pm. The free-verse line workshop will briefly look at what came before free verse and explore the challenges and possibilities the free-verse line offers. The prose poem workshop will take a close look at how prose and poetry dance together to create a fairly new thing that can conflate essay, short fiction, dialogue, and lyric poem. For further information, email Dr. Richard Lemm at rlemm@upei.ca.