Wordsfest: The Poetry of Memoir: Lorna Crozier & Madhur Anand

The Words Festival is pleased to “The Poetry of Memoir,” featuring Lorna Crozier & Madhur Anand. Our host for the event will be Vidya Natarajan.

At this year’s festival, we welcome two poets who bring their lyricism to reimagine the genre of memoir. Lorna Crozier offers a deeply affecting portrait of a long partnership and a clear-eyed account of the impact of a serious illness, writing as consolation, and the enduring significance of poetry. Madhur Anand brings an experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling that weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma using the imagined voices of the past and the vital author of the present.

LORNA CROZIER is the author of numerous books of poetry, including God of Shadows, The Wrong Cat, Small Mechanics and the Governor General’s Literary Award winning Inventing the Hawk. She has received the Canadian Authors Association Award, three Pat Lowther Memorial Awards and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honourary doctorates.

MADHUR ANAND is the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, and several other literary works published in national and international literary magazines. She is a full professor of ecology and sustainability at The University of Guelph, where she was appointed the inaugural director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.