This Thursday, November 4th, livewords welcomes poets Jill Battson, Alex Boyd and Ian Burgham!

Plus our 1-piece Open Mic Challenge:

Bring your best new poem and compete for cash and glory. Be warned: this is our last Open Mic. Ain’t never gonna happen like this again. Open Mic Sign-Up at 7:30

Black Swan, 154 Danforth – 2nd floor - map

Doors at 7:30

Readings from 8 p.m.

Hosted & Produced by Edward Nixon

Contact us: info@livewords.ca

RSVP on Facebook

Jill Battson is an internationally published poet and poetry activist who is currently   the Poet Laureate of Cobourg,  Ontario.  She was responsible for creating and   running the successful poetry reading series The Poets’ Refuge and has initiated and produced many poetry events including The Poetry Express – a BYOV at Toronto’s Fringe Festival; Liminal Sisters  – a language poetry event; The Festival of the Spoken Word  a five -day spoken word festival;  Fightin’ Words – poets in a boxing ring; The Poetburo Slams and the hyper-­‐successful  Word Up — a  series of interstitial poetry spots airing  on  MuchMusic and Bravo! which spawned a CD with Virgin Records and an anthology with Key Porter. She was the poetry editor for Insomniac Press from 1999 to 2001. Jill is widely published across North America and the UK. Her first book, Hard Candy, was received to great acclaim and nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. She has written several plays and solo works, including How I learned to live with obsession as well as Ecce Homo and Hard Candy – enhanced monologues for dance and voice. She has written the libretti for two short operas, Netsuke and Ashlike on the Cradle of the Wind, produced by Tapestry New Opera Works, and produced an electro acoustic sound art project, LinguaElastic, as part of the Canadian Music Centre’s New Music in New Places series. Dark Star Requiem, for which she wrote the libretto, premiered at Toronto’s Luminato Festival in June 2010. Jill’s third book of poems, Dark Star Requiem, was recently published by Folded & Gathered Press.

Alex Boyd lives in Toronto.  He writes poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and has had work published in magazines and newspapers such as Taddle Creek, Books in Canada, The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, The Antigonish Review and on websites such as Nthposition. He booked and hosted the I.V. lounge reading series in Toronto for five years, eventually co-editing IV Lounge Nights, an anthology to celebrate the series.  He edits the online poetry journal Northern Poetry Review, and his award-winning first book of poems Making Bones Walk was published in 2007.  More recently, he has co-edited several editions of Best Canadian Essays.

Ian Burgham’s The Grammar of Distance, was published in April of this year by Tightrope Books. This poetry collection followed two previous collections, A Confession of Birds, 2003 and The Stone Skippers, 2007. He won Queens University’s Well-versed Poetry Award in 2004 and was nominated for the Relit Award for The Stone Skippers in 2008. He has published both nationally and internationally (UK and Australia) and his work has appeared in many Canadian literary journals. Currently he is working on a fourth collection, A Weight of Bees, which will be launched in London, England and in Toronto in 2012.