Karen Clavelle is PhD. is a Winnipeg poet, writer, and editor, whose debut poetry collection, IOLAIRE (Turnstone), won the John Hirsch Most Promising Writer Award (2018). IOLAIRE weaves a heart-rending story around imagined letters and voices from the historical sinking of HMY IOLAIRE, Jan 1, 1919. IOLAIRE was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet’s Gerald Lampert Award for Most Promising Writer (2018), the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, and the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Karen is also the author of The Seasons (At Bay Press), the whimsical correspondence and rhymes of a renegade Mother Goose in The Mother Goose Letters (At Bay Press), BiRDSONG (Atelier78), and most recently, Songs to My Portuguese / Minhas Canções Para Portugal, tr. Lívia Penado Jacob. Karen’s work has been published in At Bay’s Fiction Annual (2018), Border Crossings, CV2, Prairie Fire, and academic journals. Her play, Crossword, was a finalist in the “Sarasvati Bake Offs” (2015). A champion of prairie writing, Karen is a founding member of the enigmatic and longtime, somnambulant pachyderm press. The life work of Winnipeg book artist Ann Stinner has evolved into solving a puzzle: In the face of 21st century technology, what can a book be? She perseveres in conducting experiments with combinations of processes, structures, and media. Her answer so far: Whatever its form and content, a book ought to have, at its core, a purposeful idea enclosed in an evocative visual statement that reaches out to its audience.
