Frontenac House News

Judges for Dektet 2010 Announced // Oct 10, 2008

Frontenac House is pleased to announce that poets bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, and Alice Major will be on the jury for DEKTET 2010. We are delighted with this selection of judges and feel they will fulfil Frontenac’s mandate to publish exceptional poetry from as varied and diverse a group of poets as we can find.

bill bissett is a Canadian poet famous for his anti-conventional style. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he later moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he launched blewointment magazine and blewointment press, in which he promoted the works of many young Canadian writers. Known for his unique orthography and for use of visual elements in his printed poetry, he also uses sound effects, chanting and barefoot dancing in his poetry readings.

In 2006, Nightwood Editions published radiant danse uv being (Jeff Pew & Stephen Roxborough, eds.), a poetic tribute to bissett with contributions from more than 80 writers, including Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, Steve McCaffrey, P.K. Page and Darren Wershler-Henry.

Bisset, with over 70 poetry books published, has remained at the cutting edge of poetics and performance works for almost 40 years. He now writes and paints out of studios in Vancouver and Toronto.

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, a seventh-generation Canadian of African-American and Mi’kmaq Amerindian heritage. His work largely explores and chronicles the experience and history of the Black Canadian community of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, creating a cultural geography he refers to as Africadia. Clarke has published in a variety of genres. Beatrice Chancy, a powerful opera about slavery in the Nova Scotia of the early 1800s, for which he wrote the libretto, was staged to great critical acclaim. His Execution Poems (2001) won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. In 2002 Clarke’s Whylah Falls was one of the selected books in CBC’s Canada Reads.

Clarke has been instrumental in promoting the work of Canadian writers of African descent. In 2002 he published Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature.

Clarke has won many achievement awards in his career. Earlier this year he was made an honorary Fellow of the Haliburton Literary Society, the oldest literary society in North America, at the University of King’s College, Halifax; and was also inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Alice Major is an Edmonton poet who has published eight collections of poetry and a novel for young adults. Some of the themes that occupy her work are the interplay between poetry and science, the texture and heritage of the modern city and the interconnection of mythic space with urban space. Her books have been widely reviewed and have won or been shortlisted for many literary awards.

Major grew up in Dumbarton, Scotland, a small town on the banks of the Clyde not far from Glasgow. Her family came to Canada when she was eight, and she grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a reporter on The Williams Lake Tribune in British Columbia.

Major has been a tireless supporter of the Canadian arts and writing community, and was founder of the celebrated Edmonton Poetry Festival. She is past president of the Writers Guild of Alberta and the League of Canadian Poets and a past chair of the Edmonton Arts Council. In June, 2005, she was named Edmonton’s first poet laureate, a position she held for two years, becoming an ambassador for the arts well beyond the writing and artistic community.